Last month, the event that over a million Iranian-Americans had been waiting on for a lifetime finally occurred. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran, was killed in a targeted airstrike on his compound by a joint US-Israel military operation.

For many, the news couldn’t have happened fast enough. Khamenei held an iron grip on the country, ruling with essentially unchecked power for almost forty years. Thanks to his regime’s policy of crushing any attempts at free speech or political dissent, Iran has one of the largest diaspora populations in the world, with over a million Iranians fleeing persecution to seek refuge in the United States over the past two decades. For Iranians, some of whom haven’t been able to see their homeland or their families since at least the ‘80s, the Ayatollah’s death is a sigh of relief.

For some, it was even an active cause for celebration. Thousands of people gathered in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York cheering, dancing, and thanking Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for saving their country.

To be happy about the death of the man responsible for your family’s displacement is one thing. But to cheer at what may likely come next requires major memory loss about what happened last time.

The United States toppling the dictatorial leadership of a Middle Eastern nation is nothing new. We’ve already done it multiple times this century; first in 2001 with the removal of the Afghan Taliban, then in 2003 with Saddam Hussein, and finally in 2011 with Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi and Syrian leader Bashar al Assad. All of these regimes were widely unpopular, responsible for mass human rights violations, and known for their brutal repression of any political opposition. All of them were removed through US military action, whether it be through on the ground conflict like in Iraq or Afghanistan or bombing campaigns in Libya. They all had large diaspora populations living abroad that supported the US escalating the conflicts, with over 70 percent of Iraqis, 80 percent of Afghans, and 70 percent of Libyans in favor of the American military initiating regime change. So, if we’ve seen what the previous situation looks like, what happens after the US takes out a regime, with the full support of its foreign population?

The answer is total and catastrophic failure. These leaders stayed in power for so long because they still had a powerful group of diehards ready to kill- and die- for them. Almost forty thousand Iraqis, eighty five thousand Afghans, and one hundred thousand Syrians died fighting on behalf of their dictatorial strongman, along with the hundreds of thousands of civilians caught in the bloodshed. Additionally, because their domestic opposition was so weak after decades of essentially unopposed rule, their removal created a major power vacuum. At multiple points throughout the Iraqi, Syrian, and Afghan wars, Al Qaeda and ISIS controlled a majority of the country, a fate universally acknowledged as worse than the previous leadership. In Libya, the removal of Gaddafi caused a power vacuum so great that the country has had essentially no functional government since the past 2010s. To patch up the situation, the US often has to hemorrhage money. We’ve spent 3.6 billion dollars in humanitarian aid, let alone military aid, in Iraq since 2014. 18 billion dollars to Syria. Two trillion to Afghanistan. And the Taliban still ended up coming back to power twenty years later. As a whole, the general consensus in US and Middle Eastern political circles is that trying to play world police doesn’t work. Too much blood has been spilled and too much money has been lost to replace focused brutality with anarchy.