On March 17, 1992, white South Africans voted 68.7% to 31.3% to end over 40 years of apartheid in a national referendum. (Voters of all races were allowed to vote two years later in the general election that resulted in Nelson Mandela becoming president.)
Many Iranians are worried as the United States assembles its greatest military firepower in decades in the Middle East and the next round of talks in Geneva get closer. There is a belief that the talks on Thursday may give their country's theocracy its last chance to strike a deal with President Donald Trump. There is also a feeling of hopelessness in a country battered by decades of sanctions, heightened by Trump's 2018 decision to withdraw from Tehran's nuclear deal with world powers. Iranians also last month suffered through the bloodiest crackdown on dissent in the country's modern history, with security forces killing thousands of people and detaining tens of thousands more.
By JOSEPH KRAUSS and WILL WEISSERT Associated Press
As President Donald Trump floats "regime change" in Tehran, previous U.S. attempts to remake the Middle East by force in recent decades can offer stark warnings about the possibility of a deepening involvement in the Iran-Israeli conflict. Trump posted over the weekend: "If the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn't there be a Regime change???" The White House insists Trump, who spent years railing against "forever wars," isn't doing an about-face and that Iranian citizens could revolt against its government. But that's a delicate, perilous path that other U.S. administrations have been down before. And it's a long way from Trump's dismissal of "stupid, endless wars."
