Sure. There's always going to be pockets of dissent in any society.
The amount of people against him are not "pockets of dissent". They're pretty much the mainstream.
Like I said in my post, he was a divisive figure. But hundreds of thousands of people don't gather to mourn because they're scared.
A. There weren't "hundreds of thousands" gathered to mourn. There weren't tens of thousands. There were thousands.
B. There's little to no evidence they were gathered to "mourn". It was a VERY carefully scripted ceremony (the words of the BBC, not mine).
They may be brainwashed by propaganda, but he was a very popular figure. Killing him will have greater repercussions than other lesser-known figures.
Really? I'm shocked that killing a general will have greater repercussions than killing a private, or a LT. Your insight is very well heeded, because I'm not sure anyone would have known that.
The Iranian government has already vowed to retaliate, restarted their nuclear program, and prompted the Iraqi government to end all US presence in the region.
The Iranian government has already
been "retaliating". This is nothing new. This is something very old. In 1953, they nationalized their oil fields, which started this whole mess, so the CIA and MI6 (inappropriately) led a coup, which was step 2 of the mess. The rest is history, but Iran drew first blood almost 70 years ago (I'm negating the hundreds of years before that of holy war waged by Muslims against, well, everybody). Iran vowing "death to America" is not exactly a new thing. Killing this general did exactly zero to foster hate against America in the Iranian government.
They never ended their nuclear program. There's no way to "restart" something that never ended.
The Iraqi government did not end all US presence in the region. The Iraqi government doesn't have the authority to do that. The most they could do is end the agreement with the US for presence in Iraq, not "the region"; and, they didn't do that. They voted to begin to think about the possibility of a plan that might maybe sorta one day work to end US presence in Iraq. That's a wholly different thing.
That means in 8-12 months we could be dealing with a nuclear Iran without troops in Iraq and diminished influence in the Middle East. We can discuss the merits of assassinating him in the first place, but even if completely justified, will it have been worth it?
A nuclear Iran has been an inevitability since the Obama administration. The completely unenforceable agreement between Mr. Obama (not the United States, just Obama himself, because Obama never took it to the Senate so it never was an enforceable agreement) and Iran actually allowed for the Iranian government to build nuclear bombs, just not today. They winked back and said, "suuuuuure we won't".
So, was a drastic change in policy "worth it"? The question is certainly not that simplistic. We know what this general was doing with the Qud Force - was NOT doing anything to stop them "worth it"? Hundreds of American soldiers' husbands, wives, sons, and daughters may think it was worth retaliating for
their loved ones' deaths the way this general's daughter wants retaliation for her daddy's death. The fact is, more people are going to die - but more people were going to die anyway, thanks to this general. Only God knows if the end number is going to be higher now, or would have been higher with him alive and killing us.
"Worth it" implies that there's a potential any war-related death is "worth it". In my opinion, no war-related death is worth it. They probably shouldn't have started it. We probably shouldn't have helped oust Mossadeq. Ayatollah Khomeini probably shouldn't have kidnapped our diplomatic people and held them for well over a year, and we shouldn't have had Jimmah Carter as a feckless CIC who did essentially zero about it. We definitely shouldn't have "accidentally" shot down a passenger plane over the Gulf. They definitely shouldn't be funding and arming Hezbollah. We shouldn't have given them weapons thinking they were going to fight Hezbollah.
All of this because they wanted to nationalize oil fields funded and agreed to with the UK. Was their oil money "worth it"? Probably not. Doing the wrong thing rarely is, and it leads to other people having to do the wrong thing either in retaliation or in self-preservation/self-defense. The only thing "worth it" at this point is for all sides to lay down their arms and leave each other alone.
That ain't happening - on either side.
