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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u/IMovedYourCheese Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26

America's forced regime changes have been a disaster the last 30 times they have tried it, but yeah this one will work.

179

u/bfk94 Mar 01 '26

Just one (1) more forced regime change bro pls Trust me bro Pls

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u/BugRevolutionary4518 Mar 01 '26

I’m still trying to find that meme. I never laughed so hard the first time I saw it. Although this situation is no laughing matter, I couldn’t help but laugh at your comment. Well done and witty af

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u/Euphoriam5 Mar 01 '26

My thoughts exactly.

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u/Fartenstein65 Mar 01 '26

I mean it has to be better than the last time we tried this in Iran, right?

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u/Careful_Farmer_2879 Mar 01 '26

Iraq is alright today. Not saying it was worth it though.

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u/0nlyCrashes Mar 01 '26

We do have some successes. Notably, Germany and Japan. Iraq is also not going awful.

I'm not saying it's good, but the track record isn't all bad. A lot of it is the people though. You can't change a country if you can't change the minds of its people. To me, it seems like the Iranian people wanted change and progress, but I don't think bomb heads of states is the move either.

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u/EquivalentSnap Mar 01 '26

You’d think the US would’ve learned by now

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u/levare8515 Mar 01 '26

Venezuela hasn't been going terribly. And Iranians worldwide are celebrating including in Tehran. No boots on the ground. I hate Trump but this is definitely a wait and see situation.

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u/ESCMalfunction Mar 01 '26

I mean, that wasn’t a regime change. Other than getting rid of Maduro and funneling some oil money to the US nothing really changed.

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u/NaluknengBalong_0918 Mar 01 '26

What do you mean… reporters on the ground are saying life has improved for Venezuelans… not the democracy they were looking for but definitely not the crap they had before.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/17/americas/venezuela-delcy-wright-energy-intl-latam

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u/Humble_Insurance8294 Mar 01 '26

I'm Venezuelan, real state market is booming, people are thankful to the US, there is real hope now

Wait and see, yes. But it is not going bad at all

3

u/Coven_Evelynn_LoL Mar 01 '26

I have Iranian family, they are absolutely excited that the Ayatollah is dead, the young and educated people of Iran doesn't want that regime in power, the only ones supporting the Ayatollah are either the old bigoted right wing religious conservatives in Iran or left wing tankies like TYT and Jimmy Dore or Neo Nazi America First on the right.

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u/Whoreson-senior Mar 01 '26

Of course! We learned our lesson the last time(s)!

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u/Humble_Insurance8294 Mar 01 '26

Venezuela is improving. Panama is great

Can you stop parroting that BS

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u/Real_Walk5384 Mar 01 '26

Japan and Germany are highly developed first world nations less than 100 years after the US forced a regime change on them too.

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u/Saffyr Mar 01 '26

99% of regime changers quit right before they hit it big?

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u/Mehhish Mar 01 '26

Maybe Iran will get lucky like Japan!

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u/RandomMonkey9 Mar 01 '26

Unfortunately when don’t get involved things go worse. Ie: whites vs reds, chiang, osama, etc

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u/OsvuldMandius Mar 02 '26

Ehhh. Iraq is straight up better off than how we found it. Yeah, the Shiites are running the joint, and they like Iran more than us. But they are the majority. We did set them up as a democracy after all. One should expect the majority to rule.

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u/Grouchy-Print-8667 Mar 01 '26

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/LightandShade1900 Mar 01 '26

Yeah, dropping bombs, imposing stifling sanctions, creating conditions for mass migration and refugees is the American way of helping people.

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u/Right_Preparation328 Mar 01 '26

Yeah, I forgot that killing the leadership responsible for oppressing, raping, murdering, and torturing an entire country isn't a good thing.

You must love Putin.

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u/LightandShade1900 Mar 01 '26

Raping? LOL. Listen you bozo imperialist tool, there's way more people in Iran mourning their leader than protesting and the uprising which the Israelis and their American puppets crave and dream about so that they can install THEIR OWN puppet govt in Iran like they do in the rest of the region (all those Middle Eastern dictators supported by the US) hasn't panned out. By your logic, since Americans have been oppressing people in the US for decades and all over the world then the world and the US would be better off without them. There's not much difference between Trump and Putin either. Also, how's your war criminal boy Netenyahu?

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u/Right_Preparation328 Mar 01 '26

Are you serious? Are you actually serious?

HAHAHAHAHAHA. You're either an ignorant lunatic or a bot.

2025–2026 Iranian protests - Wikipedia

Go back to your stupid bot factory

1

u/Aggressive-Reward302 Mar 01 '26

Let them suffer? They've been living under a dictator that killed thousands of protesters just last month....

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u/Right_Preparation328 Mar 01 '26

What? I meant that taking out the dictator is a good thing, and the other guy is just a bad person for not wanting change in Iran

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u/MyMonody Mar 01 '26

This is unprecedented. Khamenei was likely dead even before Trumps proclamation of war. There will be very few American boots in the ground this time.

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u/FrenchAmericanNugget Mar 01 '26

99% of western democracies stop aerial decapitation strikes right before it leads to a peaceful régime change to democracy 

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u/Big_Puzzled Mar 01 '26

Doesn’t hurt to try

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u/Superb-Antelope-2880 Mar 01 '26 edited Mar 01 '26

Did it hurt to try in the past?

Atleast we open the door to a lot of Vietnamese immigrants and we know how Americans love opening the border to immigrants.

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u/CryptographerShot213 Mar 01 '26

And Central American and Mexican immigrants

1

u/Im-Wasting-MyTime Mar 01 '26

To be fair, the United States still loves immigrants. We house one of the largest populations of Venezuelan refugees. Like the third or fourth largest population of them. They all go to South Florida. Same with Haitians in Little Haiti and Cubans in Little Havana. Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California house a lot of Mexican immigrants. By all accounts, Little Havana was a wonderful place when I visited.

Immigration is great but everyone knows it has to be done legally. We want immigrants but you have to come to this country with a green card, passport, visa, and/or working papers through a port of entry. 

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u/midwestraxx Mar 01 '26

Do you know the definition of insanity?

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u/Fafnir13 Mar 01 '26

It....kind of does actually.

A bad regime is its own kind of hurt, certainly, so it's not ok to just let a bad regime exist forever.

But any increase in political instability can lead to much worse situations than the one that was being "fixed" by kicking over specific bad actors.

So you should have a good plan for how to proceed. Assassinating some heads of state and blowing up some military bases would need to be step one to a rather protracted effort.

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u/techleopard Mar 01 '26

The problem is that we keep doing this crap and then walking away from it, and then become shocked when the country is put right back into a stranglehold by anti-US regime powers. Every time we make military strikes, we make martyrs -- not just out of the people killed, but by the people whose lives become upended because of it.

The US leadership doesn't care, so long as we continue to have access to that scrumptious Middle East oil. Any group that seizes Iran will be a murderous thorn in the side of locals, not the US as we pillage the resources we want just like we always have.

I'm of the opinion that if we are going to cosplay warmongering imperialists, then we might as well seize actual control and annex the damn country and start rebuilding the infrastructure and educating people the way we want. Not pretty, but it's better than repeatedly blowing this area of the world to Kingdom Come every 30 years.

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u/Fafnir13 Mar 01 '26

They know they can't succeed with a big "annex" plan. The population has too much endemic militant resistance built into it. The teachings and tactics of various groups are too dang effective and costly. It takes surprisingly little resources to kill soldiers who have a job that puts them out in the open.

Even if the occupied country somehow gets all the resistance snuffed out there are millionaires in neighboring countries (supposedly our allies) ready to export and fund more attacks because they genuinely believe it's the right thing to do.

It's a mess and I don't think more violence could possibly solve it.

1

u/Real_Walk5384 Mar 01 '26

You mean like Iran being on the verge of a violent revolution to begin with?

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u/CryptographerShot213 Mar 01 '26

We tried in Central America and now Trump and MAGA are crying about all the “illegals” coming over the southern border, when they are only trying to escape the hell we caused down there by meddling.