The non-Iranian part is key. Millions of muslims around the world viewed the Iranian theocracy as the only power in the world fighting for Islam. They are devastated.
But inside Tehran (and in my neighborhood of D.C.) there have been celebrations https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/world/middleeast/iran-kha...
But I agree with the assessment. I'd definitely avoid large public events. Darn the world is becoming more and more chaotic and we are just waiting for China to put up the last piece to make it into 19th Europe.
You can bet that every anti-war demonstration in the West now will have as many Palestinian flags as flags of the Iranian Islamic Republic.
Stranger coalitions have been put together by politics...
They are devastated but they are were totally quiet on the unarmed thirty thousands+ protesters the islamist iranian regime killed in a matter of days a few weeks ago.
If people keep their mouth shut when a regime murders 30 000+ unarmed people and sends its guards into hospitals to finish the wounded and if those same people think that it's then normal to launch terror attack in the west, then maybe it's time for the west to wonder if there isn't a much bigger problem than just the iranian regime.
Personally the "won't hear, won't see, won't talk" about islamists going into hospitals to slaughter people by the thousands don't suit me.
And I'll call out the hypocrisy of those who said nothing about the evil doing of the islamist iranian regime and who now want to legitimize islamist terror attacks in the west.
> They are devastated but they are were totally quiet on the unarmed thirty thousands+ protesters the islamist iranian regime killed in a matter of days a few weeks ago.
One person's protestor is another's insurrectionist.
See also the folks on January 6: (now-pardoned) patriots trying to 'stop the steal', or crazies trying to overthrow the government?
It doesn't matter whether it suits you nor I. You calling them out has zero effect other than making you feel righteous. They don't hear you and even if they did they do not care a whit what you think.
They believe, with utter conviction, that martyrdom in service of Islam will be rewarded in the "hereafter". Their holy book tells them this explicitly. And there are millions of them.
Hence my comment.
To rephrase it… if The Middle East was the UK, Iran would be British. If the Middle East was the US. Iran would be California.
Did you mean England perhaps, not "British"?
https://youtu.be/NSbx_0mtk80?si=MJ_Bfvx8gVd1P1mm
They've waited a very long time for this moment!
And if that's the case, do you think that American stooge shall do worse than Khamenei who ordered his islamist guards to slaughter 30 000+ unarmed iranian protesters in a matter of days?
What can be worse than religious extremist sending their fanatics into hospitals to finish the wounded?
I'm in the EU and I see cars with iranian flags honking. Someone posted a video or iranians celebrating: not bearded men and veiled women (which is a sign of religious extremism: there are many muslims that do not have the islamist beard and many muslim women who aren't veiled) but regular people, celebrating.
I don't doubt that many bearded men and veiled women are very sad today.
But I side with the free iranians in exile who are celebrating what may be the end of four decades of sharia law ruling their country.
American seemed to have been fine with 30k people disappearing in Argentina:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War
While a smaller number, US seemed to have been fine with their then-friend Saddam Hussein gassing a whole bunch of Kurds:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_massacre
The US stooges and friends have done all sorts of bad (maybe even worse) things in the past.
US is full of people who've lost family members, friends, their own limbs, have PTSD and worse when they fought Al-Qaeda... and now their own politicians are shaking hands and taking photos with them.
Then another shooting spree will happen and the media will be asking "what radicalized him?"..
The US (and before them the UK) meddling in middle eastern politics has always seemed like kicking a wasp nest.
But this assassination is no guarantee of change for the better. Far from it.
I would hold back on any hopes until we see how the current government handles things. Intervention from other countries does not always lead to positive outcomes.
I can't think of any time when bombing the shit out of a country and killing their leader has actually worked.
All I can think of is examples of blowback.
People have already mentioned the post WW2 occupation of Germany and Japan.
There’s also the Roman occupation of Greece (and other Hellenistic territories), and even perhaps the Norman occupation of England. Not that either of these didn’t cause some strife and rebellion in both cases, but still there was a concerted effort to build up both territories.
Japan? Although their leader wasn't killed, but same logic. The more civilized a country is the easier it is to reform them into a good state, and Iran is a pretty civilized and structured nation, the dictatorship is the main issue.
Most people in Iran want a democracy and are capable of running it, you just have to let them. That isn't the case in most of these dictatorships that lacks such structure, but it is there in Iran.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirohito_surrender_broadcast
This happened just weeks ago in Venezuela, though in that case the removal was by abduction and foreign trial. (The U.S. struck Venezuela and abducted its President at the time, bringing him to trial in the United States. I've just now asked ChatGPT for a research report on his current status, you can read it here[1].)
This led to immediate and definitive regime change, the U.S. now has an excellent relationship with the new President of Venezuela.
[1] https://chatgpt.com/share/69a424b4-de38-800c-8699-cb95d25090...
>...This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country. We are hearing that many of their IRGC, Military, and other Security and Police Forces, no longer want to fight, and are looking for Immunity from us. As I said last night, “Now they can have Immunity, later they only get Death!” Hopefully, the IRGC and Police will peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves...
The merge peacefully or die thing may motivate them.
only time will tell. I give iran much better than average odds this is for the better. Though the average is really bad: bad results would not surprise me.
He should have answered for every single drop of blood on his hands.
My 21 year old cousin was captured during the Mahsa uprising, she was sent to Evin prison, tortured for months. After she was released, we brought her to Canada and she was hospitalized for over a year. She will never be able to live a normal life again.
Death was too merciful for Khamenei.
The US actually did something fairly similar in Iran; Trump had Soleimani blown up back in 2020. As we can see from the present situation, it failed to influence Iran in ways that the US thought were acceptable. It is rare for assassinations to have positive geopolitical ramifications.
Anyone know?
India only shifted to using Russian oil in 2022 [2] after Venezuelan [3] and Iranian [4] oil sanctions were enacted, which was when both began increasing engagement with China.
It's a similar story for South Korea [5] and Japan [6].
This helps reduce prices for ONG, as India is shifting back to Venezuelan crude which gives slack which South Korea and Japan can take advantage of, as India, Japan, and South Korea represent 3 of the 5 largest oil consumers globally.
[0] - https://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/ongc-awaits-instr...
[1] - https://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/reliance-venezuel...
[2] - https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65553920
[3] - https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/india-and-venezuela-gro...
[4] - https://www.brookings.edu/articles/trump-tightens-sanctions-...
[5] - https://eastasiaforum.org/2019/09/13/south-korean-oil-refine...
[6] - https://mei.edu/ar/publication/japan-and-middle-east-navigat...
"Last summer during the 12-day war with Israel, Khamenei had named three potential successors should he be killed. Reports earlier this month indicated that Khamenei had named four layers of succession for key government and military jobs, in an effort to ensure regime survival in the face of a US-Israeli attack."
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/28/strategic-opti...
The Arab spring wasn't that long ago, was it? We all saw how that turned out, but I suppose hope springs eternal.
> You bet Iranians are euphoric right now
I'm guessing the 50+ dead elementary school kids may put a damper on celebrations a bit.
To quote:
> For the transition from the Islamic Republic to a national, secular, and democratic government
An interesting point of comparison: (1) Malaysia isn't really secular (but they may claim it); (2) Singapore is fully secular; (3) Indonesia is secular (or "pan-religious"), but is still largely guided by Islamic relgious culture in their democractic systems.
> they're mostly secular as well
There's a US born professor Marandi who said in an interview a few weeks ago that the regime had put in place succession plans, including for himself.
I'm hopeful but skeptical that they will change for the better.
Let's not have illusions about it. There is no way to build a sustainable democracy in a country that never had such leanings and is not culturally/religiously predisposed to it, and can't be physically coerced into it with boots on the ground. Achievable goals are punishment, and neutering.
Shed no tears for the deaths of tyrants. They would happily see you and any other threat to their illegitimate power put six feet under.
Over a million people in the US died of COVID. It's impossible to know exactly how many of them would've lived if the pandemic started under a president with a saner response than recommending injecting disinfectant, but I'm willing to bet it's more than two.
Trump has murdered 2 innocent U.S. citizens so far, and was president when COVID started. Trump's response to COVID was part of why he lost the 2020 election.
Good drove into a law enforcement officer. That's what led to her being shot and killed. Her group was radicalized, following the vehicles of ICE agents around, in order to try to sabotage their law enforcement operations.
With Pretti, what appears to have happened is that the officer that disarmed him accidentally discharged the gun and the other officer assumed that the anti-ICE activist was the one firing the gun.
This was a tragic mistake, and the possibility of these kinds of mistakes is why everyone, even the anti-deportation group who is organizing these sabotage campaigns, says do not bring weapons when you're confronting the agents. That's what the instruction manual that these saboteurs were using explicitly stated: don't bring weapons, not even a switchblade, yet Pretti bought a weapon, and then committed a crime that led to a high-risk arrest where fatal mistakes could, and did, happen.
Pretti put himself in an extraordinarily dangerous situation, through the decisions he made.
Again, while armed, he joined a group that was literally stalking immigration enforcement officers to try to sabotage their law enforcement operations. In the midst of an altercation, and also while armed, he placed his hands on an officer, and then resisted arrest.
There are zero reasons to assume this regime's victims, except for known tyrants like Maduro and Khameini, to be guilty at all. The regime has zero credibility when it comes to human rights. So those fishermen were most likely innocent victims and not drug smugglers.
In addition to all this, don't assume that this US attacks on Iran were because of his love and benevolence for the Iranian civilians. If it were so, he wouldn't have provoked the Iranian regime to crackdown on the protestors and kill around 30K of them. That farce was unnecessary for the liberation of Iran. Instead, he used them to create an excuse to carry out an attack that they had already planned.
So, as much as I understand the Iranians' joy in seeing the end of Khameini, I strongly suspect that this is just the beginning of another authoritarian regime over there, controlled remotely by the US regime this time, just as we see in Venezuela. Expect everything from human rights violations to mass scale plunder of their natural resources. All that we see now are just ploys to establish a worldwide neocolonial order under a very racist and xenophobic regime operating from the US. Let me remind you of the meme that this orange dictator posted that shows Canada, Venezuela and Greenland as part of the US territory. I don't see this end well for any civilians on this planet, including US citizens.
Regardless, dictators deserve to be put into the ground no matter where they are.
I actually oppose the death penalty as a punishment for crimes, but for practical rather than principled reasons: I don't want innocent people (and there's always a chance of innocence) to be killed, and it's more expensive than life in prison anyway.
That said, for anything aside from a despotic world leader, I'm also against the death penalty.
Sentence them to live alone and anonymously in an uncomfortable cell in an unremarkable prison without visitation, communication, or news of the outside world.
When the sitting president of the United states repeatedly states he would like to have an illegal third term, that elections are fraudulent and must be under his control, continually takes actions testing the limits of what he can get away with in terms of authoritarian behaviour, and only backs down temporarily when he faces massive backlash, you can forgive people for being alarmed.
When is that? When he declares himself the supreme dictator of the US? Or when he nukes another nation because of his racism?
Look around and compare with the Nazis. There is already the demonization and dehumanization of a large demographic group. There are concentration camps and extralegal police forces around already. Just like in Nazi extermination camps, the people who disappear into these ICE facilities are near impossible to trace again. There are already fatalities in there from inhumane living conditions, very bad food, lack of medical care and occasional premeditated murders. Even among the civilians, they see differently abled people as a burden, just as the Nazis did. Just as in Nazi Germany, there is an expansion of military power at the expense of the civilians and flouting of international laws. And just as in Nazi Germany, smart people who can see the writing on the wall are already on a mass exodus.
If you still believe that you're in a democracy, you forgot what happened on Jan 6, 2021. Their ego is too fragile to accept anything except their victory. There is zero chance that the despots will risk getting impeached, trialed and punished by the Congress and face the severe consequences of absolutely horrendous stuff they've committed so far. Even if the public opinion is overwhelmingly hostile towards them, they'll just claim election fraud. They have started efforts for that on multiple fronts with truly bizzare incidents being reported.
And let's talk about the BIG massive elephant in the oval office (besides the obvious one). Trump is NOT the main character, even though I'm sure that he doesn't know that. Look at what their mouthpieces are saying, their dubious billionaire friends are doing and their unelected psycho-minions are pulling off. This isn't just a dictatorship. This is a multi-generational authoritarian regime with clear succession plans. You're all distracted by just the beginning of a long chain of misery. And the beginning isn't even the worst. This is one thing where this regime is unlike the Nazis or the Fascists. Those regimes were controlled by the figure head who formed it - making them vulnerable to decapitation. This one is acting more like a secret society that puts someone in the front to act as their symbolic figure head. Removing the figure head isn't going to end the regime.
You're waiting for an imaginary signal when every alarm around you is screaming at you. The time for 'if' is long gone. That ship sailed a while ago.
Sandra Bland et al.
ICE detainments
The excess 20k (as far as absolute numbers go) road fatalities in the US versus Iran.
And the excess I-have-no-idea-how-many-k who died under Trump's bungled COVID response (and who are going to die from Biden's bungled rail strike response)(and who died under Obama's failed healthcare half-measure)(and who died under Bush's bungled Katrina response and because of his pre-9/11 mismanagement).
Yes, yes, per-capita and all that. I'm not really making a rational argument here, just appealing to the truthiness of noticing that America has its own way of killing its citizens.
> because of his pre-9/11 mismanagement
I’m aware the scale of “murdered people on the street” is stark and so you are almost certainly talking about Iran but what ICE is doing (and the clear extrapolation) fits your comment IMHO.
And equating following Islamic faith with being supportive of Khomenei's regime is like saying all Christians support Trump's dictatorship.
Be better than this.
This planet uses international law.
[Accept all international laws]
[Accept only necessary international laws]
[Customize settings]So please go ahead and tell me, where does International Law prohibit a state that’s at war with another to assassinate its head of state?
And what is Congress - or any other part of the US government - going to do about the pedophile not following rules? Stop him? How? Every potential check and balance has either been defanged or is controlled by his supporters.
Time is a circle.
Badly? You seem a little obsessed. The few anti-regime Iranians (who live in Iran) I know do not want to get bombed into freedom & democracy. The Western hubris despite Iraq and Afghanistan is back in full force, I see.
I'm not saying that the diaspora doesn't care about the risks or have empathy for those that remain in Iran. I'm sure there are also many people who are deeply concerned. Just that being an emigre changes things.
Taking out both Maduro and Khomeini over the course of a few months without a single American or Israeli casualty is peak.
Decapitation airstrikes have been possible for decades. I suppose now we find out whether that was a good idea or not. Slightly surprised the Iran strike worked, if you remember the hunts for Saddam and Bin Laden.
We didn't have Project Maven 25 years ago, and our leadership in the early 2000s were committed to boots-on-the-ground nation-building due to the afterglow of the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia.
I also just saw state tv threatening people once more. They're so scared.
Remember Kian.
I'm not saying the Ayatollah wasn't a vile criminal, but it's always innocents on the ground who face the brunt of war.
I hope the citizens of Iran can have a peaceful transition and chart a better path for their country, but every single one of America's previous forced regime changes in the region (and across the world) has shown otherwise.
I'm not saying that Iranian loved Khamenei, but maybe they are not that happy that he is dead because of other reasons. Instability for instance.
Actually, they will probably assume the IRGC killed them to blame the West. I don't believe that, but the Iranians can't stand the regime.
Hope to hell that you or anyone you care about isn't on the receiving end of such sentiments.
At some point, you have to take the path that offers at least some hope for the future. To turn into something that has lost all hope - there is no fixing that.
Will you now redirect your outrage over innocent children to the incumbent Iranian government?
Will you continue entering threads to signal your outrage to the world?
Will you keep quiet, double down or practice the morals you claim to have?
If you try to shield your armed forces using children, and then accidentally kill them because you used them as a shield, you can't blame someone else.
Apart from the fact that Iran is a bad place to be right now it actually looks like a pleasant city to visit. Sounds like they have lots of fruit, warm weather and have some interesting history vis a vis the Mongols. Very middle eastern.
Look, maybe it was a school specifically for the children of army personnel, but that's a long shot. From the geolocation data, the school was right at their missile launch site.
They had choices.
Locate the school or the launch site elsewhere, for one.
Evacuate the school before they tried to launch munitions, for another.
This is on them.
This issue comes up with Cuba a lot. A lot of Cuban-Americans hate Castro. Why? Because they were the upper-middle class to wealthy under Batista.
This history becomes almost comically distorted. Senator Ted Cruz said that he hates communists because his father was tortured by... Batista [1].
So let me give you an example of the Iranian/Persian diaspora. In 2024 in particular we had a lot of protests against Israel's genocide in Gaza and American support for it. Many were on college campuses. One was on UCLA.
In April 2024, masked counterprotesters attacked the protesters and the police stood idly by and let it happen. The police later then used this violence as a reason to crack down on the protesters. So who were these counter-protesters? Persian diaspora [2].
Anyone celebrating this knows nothing about history and honestly nothing about Iran.
First, Khamenei isn't a singular autocrat like Basheer al-Asaad or Saddam Hussein. No decapitation strike is going to result in regime change. Did you notice the Iranian response change after Khamenei's death? No. Because there isn't one. The religious governmental institutions still exist. A temporary successor was appointed. The IRGC continues as is. Iran is a functioning state that will continue without its Supreme Leader.
Second, let's just say that the Iranian government does fall apart. That's going to be incredibly bad for Iranians as you'll either get a fail-state like Libya, Syria or Somalia (which is what Israel wants) or you'll simply get an American puppet.
Do you know who the American puppet in Syria is? Ahmed al-Sharaa, formerly an al-Qaeda leader. Do you think that's going to end well? Saddam Hussein was an American puppet. Until he wasn't. The former Shah. Augusto Pinochet. That's who you get when the US installs a puppet regime.
Maybe you think Iran will get a functioning democracy. They had one until the US overthrew it in 1953.
Do you really think the US cares about Iranians? Like at all? What exactly is being celebrated here?
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/I2AdbLDVb0Q
[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/us/ucla-student-protests-coun...
Iran is one of the oldest continuing political units in the world, clocking over 2500 years as an organized state.
I think you seriously underestimate the capabilities and know-how of the Iranians by expecting them to behave the same way as pre-state tribal polities like Somalia.
10 million Iranians live outside Iran. They want a normal country again.
Later today, I'm sure footage from LA, Toronto, London, Stockholm will be up.
Not perfect option, but still is an improvement even from your positiom.
Also, these countries were not formed by themselves, but rather through deals with France and/or Britain.
Iran, while also diverse, has a thousands of years long history. Persians still see themselves as continuation of Persian peoples from the empire times, etc.
So, it is not very correct to compare it one to one.
Iran has a much worse relationship with its minorities, where if you are of the wrong faith then you literally face state-sanctioned laws preventing you studying or working. In fact, things in Iraq became much worse for minorities after the overthrowal due to the adoption of Iranian cultural practices like Abrahamic elitism.
The cherry on top of all of this is that you probably don't realize that Persians in Iran only make up 60% of the country. You have Iranians who wholly reject Persian ancestry (Azeris, Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds...) but you don't even account for them, despite Iran having, what, three? entirely separate ethnic-based separatist insurgencies active across the country LOL
Baathism is literally pan-arabism! Arabism as in Arab. Do you really think that making pan-arabism movement under the sauce of Babylonian legacy is going to work on Kurds and others? Of course not. Same applies to Syria that had their own flavor of pan-arabist party that kept Asad in power. Only recently, after the summer 2025 war with Israel Islamic Republic tried to connect itself to its Persian past, but of course it is too late for that.
> Iran has a much worse relationship with its minorities, where if you are of the wrong faith then you literally face state-sanctioned laws preventing you studying or working.
I am not sure how the practices of the Islamic Republic related to the current mood of the Iranians that oppose it.
> In fact, things in Iraq became much worse for minorities after the overthrowal due to the adoption of Iranian cultural practices like Abrahamic elitism.
You mean that Islamic Republic exported its own flawed ideology on the neighboring states through funding of various non-state actors? Wow.
> The cherry on top of all of this is that you probably don't realize that Persians in Iran only make up 60% of the country. You have Iranians who wholly reject Persian ancestry (Azeris, Armenians, Assyrians, Kurds...) but you don't even account for them, despite Iran having, what, three? entirely separate ethnic-based separatist insurgencies active across the country LOL
I think you conflate anti-regime insurgency vs. anti-persian one.
What does the assassination of DICTATORS have to do with all of this? Dictatorship is less about citizenship and more about a form of slavery. Resisting the killing of a dictator in any way, regardless of who is trying to kill him or why, is treason to a nation.
No, Iran is not an Arab country! Arabic is a minority language in Iran, and Arabs are an ethnic minority there. Linguistically, culturally and even genetically, they aren't Arabs! Would you call Quebec an Anglo province?
You should consider conformation bias.
How can you compare Arab countries to Iran?
Are you suggesting Iranians should have protested harder, maybe tried more to "bring change from within"?
Local news publishes articles of Iranians in our countries being happy, political commenters indicating it can go both ways, and not much comments from politicians.
They don't want to risk their politics.
This is revisionist.
First, when has a bombing run been ‘unsuccessful’ in the modern era? The assassination wasn’t confirmed until after these statements had come out.
Second, these statements were released essentially as soon as these folks woke up.
The rest of the world should be forgiven for taking POTUS at his word when he said he was going to continue negotiations.
Of all the countries that currently make any steps towards nuclear armament, Iran has by far the widest coalition of opponents.
There is huge potential hidden in Iran; it has always had a huge influence over the region and possibly the whole world.
The swedish government was more like 'eh, they had it coming', which does not bode well for us in the long run.
It’s also self admittedly a genocidal state which has failed to bring anyone to justice for the genocide it committed.
The Canadian people need US help in bringing those responsible for genocide and terrorist financing to stand trial for their crimes.
The power of sovereignty rests with the people who have given their consent in free and fair elections to have their leaders removed.
(I'm not saying it's plausible, just want to explain the rationale.)
Read the list of human rights violations in Iran here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_Islamic_Re... and tell us something the prime minister of Denmark has done to deserve assassination.
I swear half the people on the internet are crazy. You all would be defending Hitler if he was killed today.
"Just because he was bad doesn't give us the right to kill him". You people should hear yourselves.
This is reflected in e.g. Aaron Y. Zelin separating his surveilling of islamic militancy respectively into a jihadology and a muqawamology web site.
It is common for people in the occident to project the ideas they have about sunni-salafists onto the islamic republic, even though it is absurd. Same goes for the view that Khamenei supposedly were the one trying to achieve nuclear weapons, while his office has been the main blocker for this and secular nuclear researchers and political analysts in Iran has been the main proponents.
A year ago Ali Larijani said that if Iran was attacked they'd have no choice but to build deterrence through nuclear weapons, a proposal the US and Israel apparently thought was jolly good and since have crashed diplomatic alternatives to by the crime of aggression, not once but twice. The second time they also removed Khamenei, to really rub it in that they'd prefer for their allies in the region to have yet another nuclear armed neighbour.
Years later, I understand it was a complete folly. Removing Saddam in itself was good but what it did the wider region was not good.
It costs us some time, money and lives to get to this point. But Saddam (a tyrant who killed his own kind in masses with gas and started wars with neighbors) staying in power would have been way worse for the wider region.
I’m challenging the causal chain. I don’t think anyone would agree that the crusades in the Middle Ages caused the current state of the Middle East.
There is no way you can prove one or the other side. We can’t do controlled experiments with other worlds.
So it’s all guesswork. That’s why I’m challenging. I think that things are much less causally connected as people want to believe.
plus you can't know how Iraq would be today without the invasions
In the first gulf war, Bush Sr. refused to occupy the country. He viewed it as too difficult and too expensive. In the second gulf war, Bush Jr. declared victory from the deck of an aircraft carrier, occupied the country, hunted and executed its leader, and then opened the U.S. treasury to deal with the aftermath. Thousands of Americans died. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's died. The occupation was long and difficult, but its end was still premature and left a power vacuum that ISIS raged into, causing even more destruction. Perhaps Iraqi's can say they're better off today than under Hussein, but a terrible cost was paid. Most of the blood was Iraqi, but most of the treasure was American.
The financial drain on the U.S. was extreme enough to expose the world's preeminent superpower as being unable to bring the occupation of a somewhat backwards and minor dictatorship to a successful conclusion. Iraq is not a big country, in either population or area, but it was still too much for the U.S. to control, even with willing allies. This failure made the world realize there were severe limits to what the U.S. can do. Sure, it might defeat the military of a middle or even major power, but occupy and control it? Fat chance!
In the days ahead, the U.S. military is going to bomb anything that moves and looks like it might shoot back, as well as a lot of infrastructure and probably a decent number of civilian targets by mistake (or design). Trump has framed this invasion as being directed towards eliminating Iran's nuclear program, so expect a lot of facilities in close proximity to civilians (and many of those civilians) to be vaporized.
If Trump is listening to his generals even slightly, he will not try to occupy the country. He'll declare victory and move on to whatever outrage is next to maintain his "Flood the zone" strategy and keep the Epstein heat from finally catching up with him. If that's all he does, this will be another war like Bush Sr.'s. Expensive, but not ruinously so. U.S. deaths will be in the hundreds and not the thousands. Iran will most likely fall into the hands of another mullah or descend into chaos, becoming a long-term security quagmire that will probably continue to bleed the U.S. for decades to come. Even if democracy does take root in Iran, it likely won't be a democracy that's friendly to the U.S..
If Trump isn't listening to his generals (who reportedly advised against the invasion to begin with), he might try to occupy Iran. Iran has double the population and four times the land area as Iraq. Unlike Bush Jr., Trump has not even tried to stitch together a coalition to share the costs. It's unlikely that many countries would be dumb enough to sign on now. There's no NATO article 5 pretext to drag in other NATO countries. There isn't even a falsified pretext like WMD's to quiet the howling in the UN. Israel isn't the kind of help the U.S. needs because the U.S. pays most of Israel's military bills to begin with. In short, if Iraq strained the U.S.'s finances close to the breaking point, Iran will ruin them completely. There's absolutely no way the U.S. can afford to occupy Iran.
Even if Trump cuts and runs, this war will ensure American's can't afford socialized medicine for another generation.
Thats the hope at least. Seems like a completely different situation though. It could just as easily end up an unstable mess like Libya
You and your children will be paying the bill for this war for the rest of your life.
Oil and defense companies will get richer.
Nothing will change in the middle east.
Iranian regime-allied forces were a big part of why Iraq was such a quagmire.
The balance of power in the Middle East is shifting from the Sunni~Shia schism that it once was.
Most of the remaining powers are willing to actually engage in diplomacy with Israel & prefer secular groups to Islamist groups.
There's still personality conflicts, such as the one growing between the heads of Saudi Arabia & the UAE, but the general trend seems to be very promising.
I believe this is the legacy of leaders like Saddam. They build a very messy future for their countries. Whenever such a leader is gone, somebody has to take over power. Dictators tend to concentrate as much power in their hands as possible. Forced removal of such a leader might accelerate and / or destabilize power transition. Which might end up in a very messy scenario.
Absolute power transition worked well with monarchy in the past, cause everybody knew who would be the next guy, there were rules and procedures. With dictatorship often times there are no rules. So power transition might turn into a complete chaos even with a natural death of a dictator.
I'd be careful of what I read and choose to believe.
But if you add up the Iraq-Iran war and all his domestic atrocities it’s not that far (and these are only direct casualties).
is the civilian population being gassed in Iraq now? how about a brutal repressive regime backed by a secret police that tortured and disappeared thousands? is Iraq really the same as it was under Saddam?!!?!?!?!?!??!?!
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/iraq-people-h...
https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/08/19/iraq-chilling-accounts-t...
There was a This American Life story about it which unfortunately I can't find.
I say that ISIS was worst than Saddam.
But I personally think that the reasons why you see violent insurgency after a regime change and foreign occupation is a little more universal to humans than specific to islam.
Parts of Iraq are much better off, like Kurdistan. Other parts were utterly devastated by our operations, insurgency, sectarian violence, ISIS, and so on. Some people had religious freedom and now live in areas under theocratic control.
As you said.. plenty of evidence where on the surface it seems good. But in reality it turns out to make the people in the region worse off.
And we see this across the board. A canonical one that remains prevalent: "If only people would've come out and voted for Kamala in 2024, we wouldn't be in this mess". But then if you follow the pattern, with the candidate she was and what she would've done, this would've secured an ultra-MAGA victory in 2028 (and likely already by 2026 midterms). One more extreme, more devious, more intelligent from the get-go than the current one. People like to cling to "but you don't know that for sure", which is true, but we do know that with about 90% certainty. Betting on 10% is an awful idea and is indeed what has gotten you to where you're at.
It's the single biggest reason for the huge power shift from the US to China. Almost anything that China does is based on long-term consequences. Pain today for gain over time. Of course there are counterexamples, but by and large this holds.
In this case, sure, many Iranians will be happy for a day - especially overseas. So that's what people focus on. People have entirely lost the ability to think realistically in years. Of course part of this is biological, we're monkeys. But there are many reasons to believe that this ability has greatly declined over the last 50 years, particularly in the West and especially in the US.
Going to take a night off from worrying about forever wars and celebrate the end of the Ayatollah and Ali Khamenei.
That said, fuck Khamenei.
Considering how Israel had to raze entire cities to beat 'Hamas' or the US dropping nukes in WW2 instead of bombing the Japanese Emperor. This is decent as far as wars go.
1) Israel didn't "have" to raze anything, they chose to.
2) "Beat Hamas" is an excuse for Israel to do what it wants, which is to raze entire cities.
> I prefer assassinations of leaders in wars over deaths of soldiers and especially civilians.
My guess: All of those leaders are responsible for more innocent civilian deaths in each conflict than Khamenei's entire reign.
To me, I am very conflicted about the assassination of Khamenei. Yeah, he did a bunch of bad stuff and was very destabilising in the region, but I need to draw the line at assassination. It was unnecessary. It is a slippery slope.
Trouble is, higher-ups are easily replaceable, and the rank-and-file True Believers may be even more willing to follow orders in the name of a dead tyrant than a living one.
Or not. Sic semper tyrannis. Best wishes to the people of Iran.
They didn't, they just had to stop funding them, as Hamas has been funded by Israel.
But "the Jews .. uhm, I mean Israel .. had it coming and they did it to themselves" is always a favorite, isn't it?
The assumption in Israel was that it was beneficial to have Hamas retain something to lose, and not starve them dry outright. Of course that didn't pan out well, given what Hamas did in October 7th.
But saying Hamas was funded by Israel is an outright lie, and the irony it comes from the same people who blame Israel for not letting supplies into Gaza during war. So no matter if Israel does or does not, it's always to blame simply by being.
Israel did in fact do that. In fact there were several months of Israel not allowing any food or supplies whatsoever into Gaza. That was about a year ago. (It's possible Israel may have been supplying rival groups unfriendly to Hamas with food/supplies/weapons in secret, but all regular humanitarian aid was shut off.)
> In an interview with Politico in 2023, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that "In the last 15 years, Israel did everything to downgrade the Palestinian Authority and to boost Hamas." He continued saying "Gaza was on the brink of collapse because they had no resources, they had no money, and the PA refused to give Hamas any money. Bibi saved them. Bibi made a deal with Qatar and they started to move millions and millions of dollars to Gaza."
The truth of the world, as much as we may hate it, is that at least at the state level might makes right.
Europe even still trades with Israel when what they have done is Gaza has been declared a genocide by everyone. At the same time Russia can't even take part in the Olympics or the Eurovision song contest.
The west has no moral ground to stand on and hopefully people in the west will start to see that.
Not that it's ok for the US, or anyone else to do it.
> Iran is not like other countries in the region. Despite its shortcomings, it's a cohesive society.
But the ultimate loser of the power struggle is clear: the Iranian populace at large, as all of the viable factions are quite committed to consolidating their power by repressing the population. The most likely situation, I think, looks a lot like Libya.
This is not at all how Irani society is structured.
The rest of your comments generalizations are weak and ill-supported as well, at best they only apply to a subset of Arab countries in the Middle East.
BTW I don't actually think even the reformists will "accept Western ideas".
For Israel, absolutely. Improving the victim countries is not the aim.
I feel like I've lost the touch of which direction our future is going now, the worlds geopolitics is fluctuation too much. Maybe I should remind myself that feelings also gets amplified by constant stream of news and social media. I am certain 1990s, 2000s and early 2010s was worse times.
Next Greenland and then Canada.
Their opposition to Israel is not from a humanitarian and moral standpoint, it's purely religious. They have no shame admitting this. You just have to listen to one of the 5 state TV channels in Farsi. I even think Palestinians would fare better if not for these extremists on either side!
All that said, the supreme leader is the one who commands the murder of innocents in the streets, so he had it coming. Good riddance and he died like the rat that he was. But as to what happens next? No one knows. Also I personally don't think US is doing this because they want Iran's oil. I believe they want to put pressure on China to not get Iran's cheap (under sanctions) oil. That seems more plausible to me.
*typo edit
Unless the military and other armed groups back the civilians, whoever they end up backing will rule.
https://bsky.app/profile/msjamshidi.bsky.social/post/3mfwmdx...
I'm convinced that with current technology (namely, drones) any half competent state actor can easily assassinate any world leader, and I wonder if the recent US actions aren't going to make the practice commonplace, with dramatic destabilization risks. (For instance think about Air Force One being shot down during landing by an FPV drone controlled over LTE from somewhere in South America by a Cuban intelligence officer).
Traditionally even people like the US president, who is technically commander in chief, kings etc. with formal military ranks but who are not real battlefield decision makers etc., have been regarded as civilians.
(I would not rely on immunity from a nation that left collaborators on the tarmac in afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam?)
The same is true for all the instability in the Middle East, entirely manufactured by the West.
Action-reaction, cause-effect: You never know how a story will end. And after the 1979 revolution, the CIA and British MI6 provided the ayatollahs with lists of communists to exterminate, which they did. Imperialism always prefers to deal with theocracies rather than communists. https://www.declassifieduk.org/how-britain-helped-irans-isla...
That glosses over a huge amount of details. Calling it democratic is a huge stretch.
> They had elected a prime minister
The election of 1952 were rigged (seemingly by both sides) and not free at all. The vote was even stopped early and almost half the seats left empty.
Mosaddegh was also already in power (being appointed by the Shah) before these “democratic” elections and his reforms were already underway.
I also liked the idea that oh look Iran was this liberal country and whatnot but unfortunately it's just not true.
Communist regimes are also a form of theocracy (proof can be found in the writings of any communist leader). It's just that, unlike other theocratic regimes, other countries have to deal with millions of starving refugees (because the communist faith requires banning food production or something like that, I don't know much about their religion).
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/02/28/iran-khamenei-ayatollah...
Assassination doesn’t remove the system or rewrite the balance of power, nor does it reconstitute civil society.
If he decided to stay for ideological reasons, they would not have been there.
My guess is that they might have misinterpreted the US's demands as starting positions while the US considered them to be final. Who would expect a country that can produce ballistic missiles to willingly give it up? It was a non-starter from the beginning.
Tell that to the soldiers in the famously almost universally ineffective militaries of almost all the countries in the Arab world.
For what it's worth, I agree with you about Sinwar dying while fighting.
Trump is for rent. Shutting down a competitor is 25M, "full service" is apparently ~100M. I'm not privy to what invading an oil nation costs, but I reckon it's akin to a hand job, so a nice golden wristwatch should probably do it?
> Earlier, Trump addressed reports that Khamenei was killed in airstrikes today, saying, “We feel that that is a correct story.”
This doesn't sound like Trump's typical bluster, and it's even weirder that Trump didn't immediately go on TV to brag. I'm not saying this is fake news, but I'll wait for confirmation.
Also, it's never "morally okay" to kill anyone, ever; the fact that the US still has the death penalty shows how little they understand about morals and logic.
Russia is not a threat to the US per MAD doctrine. If Iran had nukes, you might believe that they could actually be mad enough to use them and because Russia has nukes, no one would try this with Putin.
> Also, it's never "morally okay" to kill anyone, ever; the fact that the US still has the death penalty shows how little they understand about morals and logic.
Never, ever? Even self-defence? Or what would you do if you were living in a hunter-gatherer society that did not have the capability to imprison someone for life and you had a murdering psycho in your tribe? Expel him so he can come back and kill more people? Logic?
It's cool we have all those new users on HN who are helping us understand the world.
Powerless people? Into the meat grinder!
We absolutely should. It's a key principle of international law that brutal regimes should not be disturbed, until an opportunity for a regime change brokered by international lawyers presents itself in a century or two. Moral legitimacy comes from international law, and international law only.
lol. "Some of you will lose your lives. But that's a price I'm willing to pay"
Link?
No one's a perfect shot: the misses aren't waste, because some misses should be expected.
You have built yourself a safe little cocoon, protected from the messy imperfect reality of the world, where sometimes you have to make compromises and you don't always get what you want.
And if a choice between 2 people that have been thoroughly vetted by elites is your definition of democracy, you have a sad sad view of what's possible.
Bring the popcorn with you. No need for salt cause everyone got that in spades on both sides.
You died fighting Imperialists and I will always respect that
This does not seem to me like very strong evidence? Trump just says whatever, and "a source briefed on [the attacks]" just means at least one person in USG thinks Khamenei was in whatever house they blew up. Am I missing some other confirmation?
The Israeli-supplied Azeri military has already demonstrated its effectiveness when it curb stomped the unprepared and internally betrayed Armenian military and militias. Baku will eventually decide to intervene in the northern territories. If I had to guess, a "special military operation" into northern Iran is the most likely follow-up scenario goaded into and supplied of course by Israel/US. The goal will be to foment a civil war and begin the dismemberment process of Iran.
A little personal conspiracy theory I have is that after the last Israel/US intervention (when they mysteriously liquidated the only high-ranking and influential internal opposition of the Khamenei clan left) is that some sort of deal was worked out behind the scenes with the clan to get rid of the wizard-in-chief kinda like how Maduro was sold out. It is much easier to go to war with a country when it responds with only symbolic attacks and secretly promises to fight with one hand behind its back - provided cash and security flows for those at the top of course.
Anyone who argues that this minion of Satan should've been legally protected is either evil or directly manipulated by evil.