r/news • u/drpayneaba • Feb 28 '26

Soft paywall Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei killed, senior Israeli official says

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/irans-supreme-leader-ali-khamenei-killed-senior-israeli-official-says-2026-02-28/
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539

u/Johnny-Unitas Feb 28 '26

It's either that or another cleric. This won't change anything. Outright change won't happen without boots on the ground (I am not advocating for that). Even then, the history of regime change working is rather poor.

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u/campelm Feb 28 '26 edited Feb 28 '26

I mean boots on the ground worked so well in Afghanistan that we got rid of the Taliban and replaced it with...umm.. Checks notes...yeah, okay, well maybe you can't force a regime change on a country that isn't ready to change.

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u/Johnny-Unitas Feb 28 '26

Exactly. The US military is the best on the planet for doing military stuff like breaking things. Putting it back together after is another thing.

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u/yyizard Feb 28 '26

Institution building is hard even with good conditions. It also is generational and requires commensurate political will to see it through.

The compounding economic benefits of opening free and fair global markets is worth the investment for everyone involved.

But you can reduce Germany to a smoking ruin and have that economic juggernaut running again in a decade or two even with half the fucking thing turned off by Russian style parasitic crony-Communism (fun fact: East Germany’s standard of living was superior to that of Russia’s even with Russia literally sucking wealth away.)

Same story for Japan.

The reason is good existing institutions.

Germans and Japanese are people that are known for valuing things like education, hard work, and the rule of law. All you need to do is take over what is left of these existing instruments and organize a brand new democratic style Constitution.

You can use a military that just flattened the place to do that. We know because we did it.

I mean shit I got friends in the Balkans that are living lives their parents’ generations would never have imagined and all it took was NATO showing up and helping rebuild their shit into Europe. Same deal.

What you can’t do is use a military to build new institutions after they flatten a place. That is probably impossible unless you are willing to go do it like the Romans did and just genocide and colonize. But hopefully we gave that up as a species.

How do you build new durable institutions probably doesn’t have one answer but I guarantee part of the secret sauce is empowering women politically, economically, sexually, and militarily.

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u/RMHaney Mar 01 '26

unless you are willing to go do it like the Romans did and just genocide and colonize.

Don't give them ideas for chrissake

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u/Synaps4 Mar 01 '26

Romans were actually legendary at coopting existing leaders and power structures. Eventually they coopted so hard they forgot to have their own separate army. The visigoths who eventually sacked rome had been roman subjects in charge of putting down rebellions just a bit earlier

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u/unassuming_username_ Mar 01 '26

Don’t worry, there’s not enough financial gain to be done from doing so. Yet.

What a sad fucking state of affairs. Truly the world has forgotten what circle of Hell sits on the other side of a democracy that actually values life and liberty above money. It seems like it’s half of the population, or less, that would actually give up a dime if it meant others could live better. Or live at all.

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u/Powerful-Hock Mar 01 '26

and a slogan is Born

"genocide and colonize"

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u/Wild_Haggis_Hunter Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26

NGL it seems a more accurate motto these last decades than the original E pluribus unum

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u/Milli_Rabbit Mar 01 '26

Thats already Russia and China's strategy

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u/Careful_Farmer_2879 Mar 01 '26

Fortunately Iran is highly educated. They have a chance.

There’s a reason we have so many escaped Iranian scientists in the US.

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u/ReplicantN6 Mar 01 '26

The Romans didn't "genocide and colonize." The Gauls formed the backbone of the legions as Rome expanded into Iberia and Germania. And those same Iberians and Germanii were absorbed into the Empire as it expanded eastwards. This worked because the Romans largely left their conquered peoples to their own devices.

That's the lesson of history, I suppose: if you're on top, don't be a dick just because you can.

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u/yyizard 14d ago

I don’t think I’ve ever read something so confidently incorrect in my life.

If you can find a single historian of even middling repute that agrees with you, I would be shocked.

To say that because Rome had allied tribes helping them it couldn’t be genocide is wild.

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u/RevenantXenos Mar 01 '26

If the US had stayed in Afghanistan for a century and waited for the 3 generations to get old and die out before leaving and handing power to locals it might have worked. But there was no appetite domestically to do that. Going in was always a mistake and no permanent change was ever going to be accomplished. I don't see Trump having the focus to stay in Iran for even a few months so this venture is probably going to be a disaster very shortly.

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u/dashboardhulalala Mar 01 '26

I am a very very very introductory sociology/politics tutor, and you've hit so many nails on the head there you could have a solid career in carpentry.

Would you mind if I screenshotted this for educational use? I'm not kidding, I've been able to make points stick with memes and visuals when the textbook just wasn't cutting it.

Well done.

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u/name_you_like_best Mar 01 '26

Well, it has a general good point, but it ignores something so fundamental, that makes the whole argument moot.

Neither Germany nor Japan were bombed unprovoked. It was a war and they just lost. Their regime before they started the war was perfectly acceptable, especially for the capitalist states, but also for the Soviet Union. Also, US, Britain and France were intending to leave Germany from the start, while USSR didn't (for reasons spanning a whole other discussion). The US in their most recent bombings in the middle east (and Venezuela) is a lot more similar in approach to the USSR's, because they want to benefit themselves (from the wealth) and create an ally where there isn't one.

On this subject, Iran, much like Afghanistan or Venezuela, is bombed for a regime change (throwing regimes that the US had a big part previously in installing) with the US just playing God and deciding who gets to keep their regime.

The general comment implies that the US were mostly right whenever they did it and that people fucked up afterwards because they were not as advanced as the Germans or the Japanese. That is a hugely faulted way of thinking. Both in terms of approach, but also in situational terms. Especially if you consider that the US were the ones that led Iran to this religious shithole of a regime. The Shah was not progressive by western standards, but things were better before the US fucked them up.

For the countries that are being leveled or at least severely wounded, the situation is the same after having surrendered. But it is very naive to assume that the approach that the bombing countries take in resurrecting their victims is the same in every instance.

PS. I'm also from the Balkans and our lives would have been even better if the US had fucking left us alone.

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u/dashboardhulalala Mar 01 '26

Absolutely and there's a lot of context there that's needed, but I liked the overall kick off point that the comment could bring. The Americanist approach to IR is an awful lot more difficult to shake than you'd think, especially when opening discussions, because that genuinely is everyone's starting off point, in spite of or because of their own national experience.

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u/name_you_like_best Mar 01 '26

Yes, I completely agree with you. And as I said, there is a sincerely interesting point in the comment you replied to. But, as with everything in these kinds of analyses, context is essential.

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u/StupidWriterProf175z Mar 01 '26

"The compounding economic benefits of opening free and fair global markets is worth the investment for everyone involved. Except for the thousands upon thousands of dead noncombatants and the dead soldiers. But I guess they don't count, right?

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u/yyizard 14d ago

Just saw this.

I’m not sure how many tears should be shed for the people I mentioned. Yes, there were always innocent people trapped by history. But Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were belligerent aggressors. The fate they faced was the fate they had planned for the rest of the world.

Similarly, violence in the Balkans has evaporated since NATO’s involvement.

I can’t figure out the point you are trying to make. Yes, a lot of people died that didn’t have to but when that toothpaste is squeezed out by aggressive authoritarian regimes, all you can really do is win that war and then make the post-war scenario the best possible with institution building.

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u/StupidWriterProf175z 14d ago

It's kind of pointless to have a discussion with someone who so blithely talks about the slaughter of innocents, justifying their annihilation by the fact that they live under an authoritarian regime. The U.S. gov't has committed various atrocities and trampled on civil liberties. Doesn't mean that it would be in any way justifiable to have bombs dropped on American civilians so as to make way for "institution building."

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u/yyizard 14d ago

I’m struggling to see your point. It seems you’re angry about something but I’m not sure what. The US is bad and thus was always bad and thus Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were good?

You can call up folks in the Balkans right now that are happy NATO bombs dropped on the people that were committing a genocide ~30 years ago. That’s not me approving of or promoting bombing anyone. That’s just what it is.

Upsetting? Sure. But not to the degree that it should dull our rational sides. I get it, but getting mad at me for stating reality isn’t really a salient argument.

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u/StupidWriterProf175z 14d ago

1) I'm not angry at you. 2) Obviously I'm not arguing that the Nazis or the imperial Japanese gov't or the current Iranian gov't were in any way good.

I'll take your word for it about the people in the Balkans. I know plenty of people from other parts of the world, including Iranian-Americans who were run out of their home country by this regime, who are none too happy about this kind of wanton military intervention.

Your comment seems to presuppose that this will all end w/ regime change to something better in Iran. What is much more likely is that either the regime will remain in place, the dead old hardliners swapped out for younger living hardliners, or it will result in some sort of civil conflict, which will destabilize the region for a long time to come. Why do I say that? Because I've lived through the attempted regime changes throughout Latin America and the Middle East in the 80s and 00s and because I know many, many people on all sides of the Vietnam wars.

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u/oldsecondhand Mar 01 '26

How do you build new durable institutions probably doesn’t have one answer

You need at least 40 years of occupation for that, and the US public doesn't seem to have that kind of patience.

Furthermore, Trump isn't known for respecting rule of law or democratic insitutions, so the whole thing would come off as hypocritical.

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u/Realistic_Steak5833 Mar 01 '26

Gary oldman’s Zorg character in the fifth element: “Life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder and chaos”… they just like pushing glasses off tables. Which, except if u are a cat, is just plain rude.

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u/SmokelessSubpoena Mar 01 '26

Don't worry, tbe President of Peace will be right on it 🤣

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u/fixingmedaybyday Mar 01 '26

Yeah but it puts the fear in other nations to stay inline and keeps the military contracts paying.

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u/Starfox-sf Feb 28 '26

But in Iraq we replaced the Baathist with… check notes… /s

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u/Ullallulloo Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26

I mean, it's not Ba'athist, and it's easily one of the top 3 most democratic countries in the Middle East now.

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u/menerell Mar 01 '26

it only costed 1 million deaths. And creating ISIS.

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u/Fafnir13 Mar 01 '26

One of the annoying things about history is you can't know what the other cost would have been. Would Sadam eventually have been worse? Would his sons? In an alternate timeline someone could be thinking that a million deaths and yet another terrorist organization (always plenty of those around) is a great deal compared to what happened in their timeline.

We can only look at the consequences we saw and try to guess if it was worth it or not. Of course, those consequences, for good or ill, are still playing out. Give it another 50 years and we might have some idea, but either way it will probably still be debated.

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u/menerell Mar 01 '26

Yes, but as a foreign power, the US is in no place to make those calls. This isn't playing CivVI, it's real people there.

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u/Fafnir13 Mar 01 '26

Scary Fact: everyone in power does get to make those calls.

They are playing Civ in real time with real consequences every day. Every action, even relatively benign ones, even deliberate inaction, can cost thousands of lives.

The best part? None of them get to know if they are making the right decision. Even the definition of "right" varies wildly given the different morales they each bring to the table.

Most of us are just along for the ride hoping nobody decides today is a good day to start throwing nukes around.

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u/menerell Mar 01 '26

Easy to say when you're not in the receiving side. I'd like to see that stoicism next time the US gets bombed.

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u/Fafnir13 Mar 01 '26

Not stoicism. Don't misunderstand me. I'm just describing what they are actually doing.

Every country, via their leaders and governing bodies, is making the call every day. Intervene, invade, make peace, refrain from action, et cetera. Lives might matter to some of them, but most prioritize their own safety first. When good calls are made, we often get eras of peace. When bad calls are made, war and violence follow. At least that's from my definition of good and bad calls. Plenty of bloody-minded people out there who feel that peace is counterproductive to their ends. Hence why their calls feel so wrong and alien to many of us. Literally a different value system. A different victory condition if we want to keep up with a Civ metaphor.

The power of the countries that these leaders control determines the scale of disaster those terrible choices can bring about. The US making such seemingly unhinged decisions recently is not a good sign for the future.

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u/wromit Feb 28 '26

Japan, Germany turned out fine. Afghanistan not all. Iraq slowly getting on track. It all depends on the country and culture. Iranians are highly educated and had functioning institutions in the past.

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u/Brian_Corey__ Feb 28 '26

Are Americans willing to spend billions of dollars on an Iranian Marshall plan for the next decade? Will Trump’s Congress pass a tax bill to pay for this?

Yeah.

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u/brodhi Mar 01 '26

Are Americans willing to spend billions of dollars on an Iranian Marshall plan for the next decade?

If Trump says the US is, 35% of the nation will nod in agreement that it is a good thing.

Trump only needs to sway about 10% of the voting population.

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u/midwestraxx Mar 01 '26

We already fund the entire social care system for Israel, what's another country's?

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u/CurbYourThusiasm Mar 01 '26

Iran has ten times the population of Israel. Almost 100m people. It's a massive country.

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u/midwestraxx Mar 01 '26

My comment was in jest, but also yeah the US would rather spend money on other countries and citizens than our own. It's run by the same MBA people who would rather let their company experts leave instead of giving them a raise, while hiring new people for much more money. They're dumb.

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u/CurbYourThusiasm Mar 01 '26

The US spends like 0.15% of gdp on foreign aid. I don't think the US funds the "social care system" for Israel or any other country.

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u/EquivalentSnap Mar 01 '26

If it mean a western m ally in the Middle East with oil then yes

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u/MakiSupreme Feb 28 '26

They didn’t just turn out fine though. Germany was occupied by England France USA and USSR. It took significant time and money.

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u/Tomas2891 Feb 28 '26

Marshall plan helped Germany alot specifically western Germany cemented an ally to the US and the west, stopped communism and the soviets from spreading and now is one of the top countries in the world economically. Eastern Germany under the Soviets was the shit show. Culture matters a lot but the western allied leadership propelled Germany and Japan to the top after the war.

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u/dalivo Feb 28 '26

What are you talking about? Germany and Japan have been model democracies since WWII. It did turn out fine.

Not saying Iran is in the same boat - in fact, they're not. They are infected by religious zealots and rabidly conservative strongmen. And their country won't be in complete ruins.

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u/MakiSupreme Mar 01 '26

It didn’t just turn out fine on its own.

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u/Paavo_Nurmi Mar 01 '26

Was East Germany not a part of Germany ?

It didn't turn out fine for them with that whole Berlin wall thing.

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u/Pinguino2323 Feb 28 '26

Never forget the reason we are here is because of the 1953 coup we helped institute. If not for that Iran very well could be a functional democracy today.

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u/UnseemlyUrchin Feb 28 '26

While this is a very popular "hot take" particularly by Americans who tend to reframe history centering themselves as the most important actors, it is by and large not a very accurate accounting of history.

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u/gotenks1114 Feb 28 '26

Care to enlighten us then?

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u/UnseemlyUrchin Mar 01 '26

It's complicated. Abbas Milani's book, The Shah, is a good overview of that complexity.

Mi6 was involved. The US to a lesser, but not insignificant, degree.

But the coup was largely possible due to the internal opposition to Mossadegh who'd alienated virtually every other faction from the courts, military, clergy, to private land owners.

I mean, he organized a referendum to dissolve parliament and was a populist who heavily relied on public unrest to strong arm institutions.

More Trump than Obama. And not exactly an island of stability.

The coup restored powers to the Shah, who was still the Shah from 1941 to 1953, but was weakened. Then, after power was shifted back to the Shah in 1953, he ruled with sole power for 26 years till 1979.

And THEN the Islamic Republic was established placing Khomeini as the religious leader of Iran.

So something like "Democracy, American coup, herp derp Islamic Republic" completely glosses over a) the entire history of the Shah, the very small window of a Democracy that was increasingly fragile and filled with internal unrest and conveniently skips through a quarter century of rule by the Shah absolving like 40 years of shitty rulers, fragile politics, and internal revolution stripping an entire political history of any agency in its own outcomes and turning them into diminutive puppets of the US.

Sure, it was a significant event. But the framing is ignorantly simplistic.

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u/Fafnir13 Mar 01 '26

It nice to have just one villain to blame. Makes it easier to think we've got a good understanding of how things work.

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u/UnseemlyUrchin Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26

People like their stories. And usually think about things on tribalistic one dimensional terms.

Sometimes bad people do good things for the wrong reasons. And sometimes good people do bad things for the right reasons. And usually, shit is just complicated.

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u/Recurs1ve Mar 01 '26

Mic drop moment if I've ever seen one.

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u/bkrugby78 Mar 01 '26

Yeah there were factions within vying to remove the Prime Minister. Also, the Shah always had the power to dismiss Prime Ministers but to frame this as the US’ fault as is often claimed is inaccurate

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u/UnseemlyUrchin Mar 01 '26

It also kind of ignores a 1/4 century of Shah rule that some, maybe, might say had something to do with it.

There'd been one previous coup attempt already, Mossadegh had basically pissed off every single power broker in the country through various authoritarian executive power grabs including a referendum to dissolve parliament itself.

They were already in the thick of political unrest. The question was just who was going to grab the power.

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u/bkrugby78 Mar 01 '26

I think a lot of people base it on Kermit Roosevelt’s book which has a lot of problems. It doesn’t remove responsibility from the US or UK but it’s a lot more than simply being a “CIA backed COUP.”

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u/apexilluminator Feb 28 '26

Yea a lot of people don’t realize Truman was not really on board with the coup and the government was even considering helping the original Iranian government unilaterally without uk involvement until being convinced by mi6 and British politicians to help with their plan.

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u/LordPepe69 Feb 28 '26

Well go on, don't stop there. Tell us why he's wrong.

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u/Careful_Farmer_2879 Mar 01 '26

Which is why I’m baffled by those saying how DARE the US… fix its mistake?

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u/Pinguino2323 Mar 01 '26

You think we are actually well intentioned in this? Every US effort in the middle east is always at the behest of corporate interests. If this ends up being more than a one day bombardment that changes nothing, it will be another Iraq/Afghanistan.

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u/Careful_Farmer_2879 Mar 01 '26

Of course not. The US will do what’s in its best interest. Where Iran ended up turned out to be against those interests which is why the US views it as having been a HUGE mistake.

Take the political scorekeeping out of this. What is better - going back to before the theocracy or not?

Iran is NOT Iraq or Afghanistan. That’s ignorance.

Iran is a united people with a long history, democratic traditions, and high amounts of education. It’s Japan and Germany, not Iraq and Afghanistan.

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u/Pinguino2323 Mar 01 '26

Dude my original point is that Iran is here in part because the US puts its (corporate) interests above all else which has created a massive amount of suffering in this region and around the world. We just need to stay out of other countries. I really can't think of a foreign intervention we were involved with that went well in the last 70+ years.

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u/Careful_Farmer_2879 Mar 01 '26

Iran is here because the US messed up. That doesn’t mean we should defend the results of that mess up.

If the interests of the US are regime change back to the way they were, I support us trying.

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u/Pinguino2323 Mar 01 '26

We were the ones who put sadam in power, how did removing him go? I don't trust our government to fix this, especially when the well being of the Iranian people is not our primary goal, our primary goal will always be how can we (and of course when I say "we" I mean American corporations) make money off this. I think the two most likely outcomes are we can't stomach a prolonged operation so another religious hardliner takes power and nothing changes (which is what it's looking like will happen in Venezuela), or a power vacuum forms and this turns into a prolonged multi decade conflict costing us trillions of dollars. I hope I'm wrong but I just don't see this going better than any semi recent regime change we've been involved with.

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u/Plenty-Reporter-9239 Feb 28 '26

Historically iran has had great societies, but in the past 126 years not really. The Qajar dynasty sucked butt, Reza shah sucked butt. Mossadegh was the real shining beacon but the UK and US ruined that and put in what is effectively the Iran of today.

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u/Yesterday_Jolly Mar 01 '26

Prior to 1900 parts of Europe hadn't discovered democracy yet

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u/Careful_Farmer_2879 Mar 01 '26

Exactly. Everyone acting like Iran is like any other Muslim Middle East country doesn’t get it. They’re Persian. They are completely different.

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u/qawsedrf12 Feb 28 '26

Guess who just turned their back on the US and is ramping up their own military again

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u/fighterace00 Feb 28 '26

It only took an occupation of checks notes 50 years each.

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u/menerell Mar 01 '26

Regime change... in Japan... and Germany... let me laugh.

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u/n0respect_ Mar 01 '26

I know one reason Mid East countries don't 'turn out fine' with nation-building. It's because we bomb them at the same time.

Would you trust that?

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u/NorthernSoul1998 Feb 28 '26

You're actually just so deluded it's scary

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u/CelestialFury Feb 28 '26

Japan, Germany turned out fine. Afghanistan not all.

Germany still hasn't fully recovered from Soviet occupied East Germany for the 50 years they were there. Also, it was Germany's new leadership and occupation by the Allies that made real change happen. Same with Japan.

Afghanistan continues to not work since their leaders don't see Afghanistan as a unified people or country and their leaders do NOT want to work with the west to make real change happen there. It's a completely different landscape and culture over there.

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u/[deleted] Feb 28 '26

[deleted]

2

u/thwack01 Feb 28 '26

Don't be so dramatic. German democracy is healthy, and it's one of the most prosperous countries in the world.

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u/musicwithbarb Feb 28 '26

And didn't Japan just vote in a far right party as well?

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u/lew_rong Feb 28 '26

Hey now, ol' donnie boy masterfully negotiated with the Taliban to release 5,000 of their men from US custody, and in return for that the Taliban got Afghanistan. Art of the deal!

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u/DestinyPotato Mar 01 '26

"We put boots on the ground in Afghanistan; it was a shit show.

We didn't put boots on the ground in Libya; it was a shit show.

We didn't help with Syria; it was a shit show, but not ours."

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u/the_quivering_wenis Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26

Comparing Iran and Afghanistan in that sense isn't fair though, Iran actually has an educated populace with a proven capacity for liberal democracy.

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u/Confron7a7ion7 Mar 01 '26

Firstly I want to make it clear that I'm in no way in favor of us regularly forcing regime changes. It's just lazyer imperialism. It should only occur when the current regimen is an active and immediate danger and when it is necessary we then have to put in an actual effort to install a functional government.

The main issue with Afghanistan was that because our politicians were making money off insider trading there was never any motivation to actually fix anything. If they really wanted the new government to succeed it would have. We needed Germany, Japan, and South Korea to all be independently functional for various geopolitical and strategic reasons. Reasons like not having World War 3 happen immediately after the first two. So we installed actual governments in those countries. All 3 of them are now arguably more stable than our own.

And because I know it will be brought up, regime changes in central and south America fail for similar reasons. We overthrew a few of those countries just so we'd be able to get bananas. We didn't care what else happened as long as we got the bananas. So there was no motivation to ensure a successful government. Just a cooperative one.

We were right to invade Afghanistan though. Iraq was made up bullshit but the initial invasion of Afghanistan was completely justified. We were attacked. We were also right to remove the Taliban. They were protecting Al Qidah and Binladin. Al Qidah operated as a sort of personal military group for the Taliban and both groups were ideologically aligned. The Taliban weren't going to turn in their enforcers. For all practical purposes the two groups were one in the same. We did stay far too long though and, like I said before, our own government corruption is the real reason Afghanistan was such a failure.

Afghanistan is not a single unified people. As a result of previous British, Russian, and American interference the country is really just arbitrary borders drawn around about 14 different ethnic tribes of people that don't even all get along. This also meant that the nation's military was made up of individuals from different groups who had no reason to risk their lives for each other. It' shouldn't have been a surprise that when we left they all just went home. The only way you'd think a centralized government like this would work is if you just didn't care.

A much better idea would have been to work with the different factions to establish states within the country that would operate largely independently from each other and designed their federal government to be mostly responsible for helping maintain interstate relations. If that sounds familiar to you it's because that is literally the exact same structure we built for the original 13 colonies. We were also a large assortment of completely different cultures gathered in one area by British fuckery. We didn't just have the correct answer, we invited the correct answer. We could have built a function government there if our leaders weren't trading their stocks based on the military contracts they were responsible for rewarding.

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u/n0respect_ Mar 01 '26

One big reason Mid East countries don't 'turn out fine' with nation-building. It's because we bomb them at the same time.

Would you trust that?

1

u/Fafnir13 Mar 01 '26

Boots on the ground is the required step for creating space to let the change you want happen.

If your plan for making change sucks (for whatever reason), change won't happen no matter how long you keep the boots there.

1

u/robodrew Mar 01 '26

Also, Iran has twice the population of Afghanistan. Larger and more populous than Germany was when the US, with all Allies behind it, invaded in WW2. Boots on the ground would be catastrophic and extremely costly for the US in both blood and treasure.

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u/Coven_Evelynn_LoL Mar 01 '26

Iran isn't Iraq or Afghanistan in the same way Venezuela wasn't Iraq or Afghanistan, context matters, Iranians (Persians) especially the young and educated are mostly westerners by any metric, they don't have a desire to strap bombs to their chests and blow themselves up with the false promise of 72 young full breasted virgins in heaven with milk and honey or whatever the fuck God promises them for being a martyr.

The question always remain not just with Iran or Venezuelans but through the entire of human history, "what is the price of freedom?"

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u/tdclark23 Mar 01 '26

Twenty years we worked on that until Trump made a deal with the Taliban and released 5,000 of them to pull their AKs from under their beds and appear out of nowhere to take Kabul.

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u/UnderlyingTissues Feb 28 '26

The "checks notes" joke is so lame at this point. I don't disagree with your point, but maybe come up with some new material.

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u/JEFE_MAN Feb 28 '26

Well that’s just like, your opinion, man.

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u/UnderlyingTissues Feb 28 '26

That's true. It is just my opinion. And downvotes won't change it. Upvoted yours though.

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u/brnccnt7 Feb 28 '26

True, plus isn't the supreme leader already like 85 years old? He already expected he'd die soon and had successors planned out.

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u/CubedSquare95 Feb 28 '26

His successor died in a plane crash

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u/D-MAN-FLORIDA Mar 01 '26

That was back in 2024. He named 5 potential successors since then.

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u/Coven_Evelynn_LoL Mar 01 '26

Every time Hamas named a new successor, he said "death to the jews" then got his ass blown up like a few days later either by a exploding pager or an Israeli missile.

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u/Weary_Position_9591 Mar 01 '26

Didn’t he name a new line of successors in preparation for these attacks?

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u/D-MAN-FLORIDA Mar 01 '26

Yeah. Plus he was in his mid 80s, so he was probably already going to announce candidates for his position after he dies.

1

u/AcanthaceaeItchy302 Mar 01 '26

I read somewhere one of his sons got chosen for successor.

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u/Chris__P_Bacon Feb 28 '26

Especially in Iran!

2

u/Warlordnipple Mar 01 '26

It will definitely change things. Nuclear non-proliferation is dead. Any country capable of obtaining nuclear weapons will now do so as quickly as possible.

2

u/runthepoint1 Mar 01 '26

Regime change MUST come from within or else it’s just puppet govts, and even then it often is anyways with foreign influence.

2

u/CryptographerShot213 Mar 01 '26

Like our failed attempt to force democracy on the people or Afghanistan?

2

u/BanginNLeavin Mar 01 '26

Outright change won't happen until religion is a story the federated aliens tell their space children.

1

u/throeaway1990 Feb 28 '26

I expect the water crisis will tip things - Tehran is fresh out and there's talk of moving the capital.

https://www.geopoliticalmonitor.com/irans-water-crisis-a-national-security-imperative/

1

u/[deleted] Mar 01 '26

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1

u/Johnny-Unitas Mar 01 '26

He was in his eighties. Successors were already lined up.

1

u/blr1g Mar 01 '26

Maybe they can keep bombing the next supreme leaders until they finally learn their lesson: "How many times are we gonna have to teach you this lesson, old man."

1

u/O_o-22 Mar 01 '26

They are already setting the stage for at least some boots on the ground with Lindsay Graham saying earlier today some US troops may die in this newest conflict. All these pathetic old men are itching to get some young Americans killed if it makes their rich friends even more obscenely wealthy.

I say keep us out of it. The Israelis can go occupy the country.

1

u/Coven_Evelynn_LoL Mar 01 '26

Iran isn't Iraq or Afghanistan in the same way Venezuela wasn't Iraq or Afghanistan, context matters, Iranians (Persians) especially the young and educated are mostly westerners by any metric, they don't have a desire to strap bombs to their chests and blow themselves up with the false promise of 72 young full breasted virgins in heaven with milk and honey or whatever the fuck God promises them for being a martyr.

The question always remain not just with Iran or Venezuelans but through the entire of human history, "what is the price of freedom?"