The logical fallacy of hasty generalization – or the mistake of drawing a conclusion from insufficient evidence – is a potent propagandistic tool wielded by the U.S. political and media establishment in their efforts to sell aggression to the American public, and the apparent push for war with Iran is a case in point. They’ll put out footage of Iranian street protests (or, in one case, a massive Bahraini demonstration passed off as an Iranian protest) or feature testimony from a handful of political dissidents in order to demonstrate that the entire country is yearning for "regime change"; all the people need, supposedly, is a little nudge from our military in order to get the ball rolling. This approach is not unlike what I observed when studying foreign media coverage of the Occupy protests several years ago; one got the impression that Americans were on the brink of a revolution (of course, the apparent objective in this case wasn’t to drum up support for a military intervention in the US, but to simply demonstrate that the emperor has no clothes).
The problem with this way of thinking can be illustrated as follows. Suppose that no more than 1% of the Iranian population were dissatisfied with the political establishment, and only 1% of that aggrieved segment called into some program on Voice of America (a US government-funded news network broadcasting to Farsi speakers around the world). In this hypothetical scenario, there would still be over 8,000 people prepared to air their grievances. Imagine just a fraction of these people calling in one by one to complain about the "regime". Would their collective testimony not give some people the impression that most of the country is prepared to overturn the political system? Yet this would be a fallacious conclusion to draw, given that it involves extrapolating from a tiny portion of the population to the whole country.