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Pretty much everyone involved in a war effort is a legitimate target.

Provocation is cause, not requirement.

Diplomats, here as well as in the US, have no problem complaining when their noses are out of joint because the politicians upend their (diplomats') cozy little ordered world. Since so much of their dissatisfaction makes the news, I suppose the administration knows full well who is useful and...

Even if the US didn't lift a finger in direct combat, China would be short of oil for a lot longer than it currently has to look forward to. Something as big as a Chinese attack on Taiwan would put a lot more moving pieces on the table than just an air-sea scrap in the Taiwan Straits.

Neutrals - or those wishing to be so - should intern all foreign belligerents in the claimed territory and waters of the neutrals. If they can't or won't, the belligerent forces generally may be attacked.

Financing terrorists and other belligerent factions is provocation.

Total Exclusion Zone. The TEZ was a warning to everyone, not a promise that Argentinian forces elsewhere would be safe. (See the part about the British message to Argentina.) All the nonsense about whether Iranian armed forces may be attacked should just go away.

You can't be serious. Look at all the pages and pages of discussion about helping with regime change in Libya and then walking away from it.

Topple the regime enough times, and one of them probably will be.

Depends. Which of the culled were involved with all those prior failures of foreign policy?

Not really. Your frame implies a concern for the desires of the homeowner. The CoA I outlined is just another country deciding not to put up with any more shit.

"Break the country and let the people create a new government; repeat as needed until the would-be rulers get the idea" has always been a CoA. It just hasn't been used very much. This is, as is usually case, a war of attrition: people (leaders), military equipment and facilities...

Yes, just one. Pity they had to settle for one that is militarily powerful and competent and unafraid to act, instead of one that is much caressed in the halls of the UN for its moral posturing.

And for this one, they have Israel.

Clearly the US should be recruiting its plans staff from this web site. We know so much about what should have been done.

That is emphatically untrue, unless you move the goalposts to "certain things in the middle east".

Yes. "Regime change" without ground invasion is unlikely to work well unless someone in Iran can take up arms against the government and its personal guard (IRGC). If Iranians are largely disarmed and none of the IRGC defects and there are no other security forces with sufficient mass, that...

A short definition is that a regime is a system, not people. Widespread sloppy use of "the regime" to refer to the people running it has blurred the line.

SYEP GMT was five or six weeks, and no prior experience of any kind was required.

The plan may just be a repeat of Libya. Remove the pain point, and leave the locals to sort themselves out.