It’s no guarantee, but it is a good opportunity. I’m half-Persian, and certainly not as closely connected as others, but it’s hard to see this as a bad thing. There’s a possibility I can go visit my family in Iran as a result of this. I haven’t had a good chance for that in like 4 years

It's less a revolution and more a matter of catching the tide of shifting world powers — and seizing a rare shot at building something other than the last failed experiment. New Iran, new experiment. You bet Iranians are euphoric right now. Some of the country's brightest intellectuals and political minds are sitting in Evin prison, and if all goes well, they're about to walk out and help shape what comes next. My dad is worried about the power vacuum, and he's right to be. His biggest concern is the border states and the narrative that ISIS is being funneled into the country to destroy any chance of organized transition. I desperately hope he's wrong. And I don't think he'll ever fully heal — few who lived through the first revolution will.

Yeah I'm not sure why people think that the Iranian government never considered any sort of continuity for what happens when their 86 year old ruler dies. It's not like they're ants that are all helpless without their sole supreme leader.

It's not a given - e.g. AFAIK most turks in Germany support Erdogan

They're not brain-damaged. They know that!

It depends on how well the regime brainwashed its people over the last 50 years. The majority of Iranians haven't any experience of anything else - I think around 55% are under 40 years old.

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.

Well, in any case, it is a guarantee that Iran will be less of a danger for other nations if the regime falls, and that people inside of the country will suffer - because either pro-Western or any other government is bound to be a lot weaker, and there will be a lot more violence and economic disruption, eventually economic degradation. It should avenge the emigrants, and provide sufficient punishment for those in Iran for enabling this regime in the first place.

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.

It’s a good start

That why they are going beyond that and going after the IRGC

Another Ayatollah is being ushered in. This is no news. Khameni is old and without the missile, he would be dead soon. This sttike is just bonus to galvanize support for Ayatollah. So in a way Trump prolong the regime. And consequence from this: every other middle east countries now starting their nuke program. Good luck.

But in the case of an actual dictator who murdered thousands of protestors it is reasonable, right, just, and civilized.

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.

Well, there are other things you can look at. For one, Khamenei was dictator of a regime that abducts women and recently murdered 10s of thousands of protesters in the streets. I'd reckon most, including Iranians, would not judge the killing of such an individual immoral, unjust or uncivilized.

They threw the justice and civility when they murdered people on the street. That ship has sailed and the party who's responsible for this escalation is the government.

Not just Americans.

The entire continent of europe would be celebrating.

Perhaps, but there would be tens/hundreds of millions of people like me who didn't vote for Trump and don't like him, but would be absolutely enraged beyond perhaps anything in this country's history if another country blew up the White House and he was killed.

Exactly. This is just western media trying to project some morality to what was an internationally illegal act ... (and perhaps some in the media hoping against hope this publicity would please the dear, glorious leaders of Israel and the US to end the war).

That's very moving! I can't say many international developments have filled me with optimism the past couple years. I want so badly for this to pan out for Iranians.

All I see is cameras panning around buildings, no humans in sight, and audio of cheering people. Not saying it's fake, but in the age of AI faking such a video is child's play.

Too low signal-to-noise ratio for me to acknowledge any of this. We'll see how it will pan out for the Iranian people in due time.

There were allegedly 7 US personnel injured during the Maduro raid.

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.

Murdering heads of state and their families is cool as Judge, Jury, and Executioner if no soldiers are hurt in the process, is that where we are now?

You mean the ones who cannot comment because their authoritarian theocratic regime blocked protest and the internet? I hope that changes for them

I think this is a good point, there is evidence (even with strict censorship controls in place) that people inside the country are celebrating https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/28/world/middleeast/iran-kha...

There are similar scenes in all Iranian cities. Literally the first morning video we could see Saturday morning before the internet shutdown, were ladies on their balcony jumping of joy that they had struck Khamenei's neighbourhood.

> Because the next ruler will be an American stooge.

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.

Henry Kissinger is looking up and smiling.

So what, you'd take living under an American stooge's rule over a religious fanatic's any day.

This has nothing comparable with "other revolutions" in the middle east, it's quite the opposite in fact: a non-islamist population held under the tyranny of islamist leaders.

What's wrong about it? This is the goal - like in Syria: neuter the country by bringing in a pro-American government that will ensure country will stay weak and irrelevant, in exchange for letting it terrorise locals as they please.

At least a sane stooge.

The son of a Shah that was deposed by mass protests by well-educated students and intellectuals during the Islamic Revolution, who are now in their 60s.

Time is a circle.

Not really, expats help shape the narrative and bring external help to make their views the reality.

Yes.

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.

At some point you have to decide: if my country is held back by a brutal dictatorial regime where civilians can't hope to topple it, is there anything else to do other than get external help?

No, obviously.

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.

Nobody is happy about killing civilians. But Khamenei did more than that every day he was alive. Personally I feel there is some amount of immediate civilian casualty that is worth putting a stop to continuous suffering.

"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."

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.

I think the point being made is that there's wider fallout than just what's directly affected. If you go to Syria and ask Syrians how they feel about the affects on the wider region they might not so readily agree. Or even ask Iraqis in the border region who lived through ISIS rule.

Iraqi path to democracy isn't really that different from everyone else's.

People tend to forget that various extant democracies, including European ones, mostly didn't precipitate out of thin air by everyone deciding to just be nice to one another. Many now-democratic countries had to fight a war of independence or a civil war, often with involvement of third parties, to get there.

France took about 80 years of violent upheavals from 1789 to 1871 to actually become a democratic republic for good. Germany was even worse. Unification of Italy was a long bloody mess. Poland barely survived the 20th century. Even Swiss direct democracy is an aftermath of a civil war, though in their case, it was a small one.

Democracy isn't an application that people just install and it starts working. It usually takes decades for it to take roots, as people have to slowly abandon the idea that it is just easier to massacre their opponents.

Even the US came to be after a war of independence with a major external factor on their side (the French) and only ended slavery through a nasty civil war.

Iraq isn't really an outlier in that context and Iran wouldn't probably be either.

> a tyrant who killed his own kind in masses with gas and started wars with neighbors

The US sent Saddam the Bell helicopters to gas the Kurds. US military aid increased after that happened.

The war with a neighbor was with Iran - the country the US just attacked, and which the US encouraged Iraq to fight. That's why Rumsfwld was over there shaking Saddam's hand.

So what about libya, syria, yemen, afghanistan, even venezuela

plus you can't know how Iraq would be today without the invasions

And you frequently fly over to Iraq and explain that to the people there right? They nod in agreement with you. “We had to bomb and occupy your country and kill your citizens just like Saddam did remember? Now you’re better off after our failed occupation left your country. We’ll bomb you anytime; sure it costs us money is and the reason neither of our countries have healthcare but who needs healthcare when you have bombs and propaganda. You’re welcome.”

I agree. The military component was a resounding success. The "de-Baathification" was a disaster and gets lumped into the decapitation of Sadaam's regime.

We'll never know the counterfactual, but it seems likely that the banning from public life everyone with ties to the current government was a large contributor to the collapse of the country and rise of the terrorist groups.

Always convenient to drop bombs and say “it would have been worse”. With absolutely no proof of that. It’s the stupidest American talking point and I despise other Americans who use that propaganda.

It's not guaranteed to be the same outcome in Iran, we're just rolling the dice again and hoping it is.

Iraq is a fantastic lesson to heed today.

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.

That's oversimplifying.

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.

That, combined with extreme short-termism and unbridled optimism. All three probably having a similar root cause.

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.

One would think on HN there would be sophisticated grasp of complex systems than Reddit or what have you, so either there are just as many politically dogmatic/biased people in tech, or political threads are dominated by non-tech users, or what?

Iraq right now is in roughly the same position as it was when Saddam Hussein was there but in the meantime a few million people died and the country went through a pretty traumatic period.

You seem to forget that Irak instability was a big part of the reason why we got to deal with ISIS in the first place.

I say that ISIS was worst than Saddam.

When Saddam Hussein was removed, the result was that basically all Iraqi Christians who hadn't fled were murdered. There are probably as many Iraqi Christians in the EU as there are in Iraq now.

No one misses Saddam.

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.

Prophets are more dangerous when they're dead. At 86 he would either die from old age or fighting "imperialistic, evil" Israel/US.

>I'd love to know what the military's chatbots thought about this idea.

What a mad world we're hurtling ourselves into.

Supposedly he had a very deep bunker under his house but he came up for meetings.

So the real problem for Iran is that mossad seem to know exactly when he was vulnerable i.e. there are spies within the inner circles of the IRGC

Edit: Or some very effective high tech surveillance, but that's also not good news to put it mildly

He was assasinated during a meeting with many other high ranking members of the regime. I doubt they decided on collective suicide.

> intentional martyrdom

He didn’t play 4D chess. I’d bet on pure hubris.

Why would you assume that someone with decades of experience could not be an effective leader?

I have a friend that left Iran just before the Shah was overthrown. Over the years he has gone back multiple times to visit family and friends etc.

He told me years ago that the majority in Iran were not aligned with the new regime, it was a minority of the population that were.

>But inside Tehran...

where both celebrations and sorrow

Any celebrations are an indicator but are far from the entire picture.

Wouldn't there be celebrations in the US if Trump died? What conclusions would you draw from that?

I mean Pakistan is a nation founded on the idea that Muslims cannot live with non Muslims. /R/Pakistan is currently talking about this. What do you expect?

> But inside Tehran

This is done by diaspora lead by US, they started destroying public resources first and created public unrest on top of falling Rial due to sanctions, this lead the govt take matters in to their hands. Cunning US indeed, always playing cheap tricks.

We cannot continue like this where one religion gets to get mad whenever they do not achieve utter dominance.

Both can be true at the same time.

No, I am telling you about people's sentiments. You are not required to do anything with the information.

This is not about Muslim idealogy at all, it is US want to play god on who to have nukes or not. Similar to Libiya WMD.

> Muslim idealogy

If you can't differentiate muslims from islamists you can probably keep your comments for yourself...

I’m quite sympathetic to the general assertion that the U.S. launches unprovoked attacks on random countries that didn’t attack the U.S. Iraq being the most egregious example.

But Iran is perhaps the least sympathetic actor on that front. Iran has been attacking the U.S. and its proxies for no reason for decades: https://www.britannica.com/event/1983-Beirut-barracks-bombin....

Tehran is a thousand miles away from Tel Aviv. Iran has no rational self-interest in whatever is going on between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Iran got itself involved in that conflict because it inexplicably chose to involve itself in that conflict.

Well, no they were trying to get Epstein out of his bunker... I mean free the oil from the people, err no, the people from the regime.

Someone start playing fortunate son.

People are what they are.

You can take the information I have provided into consideration when you build your internal worldview or you can ignore it.

There is no call to action here. It's just data.

Sunni Muslims generally oppose Shias in Muslim-internal matters, and vice versa. But they both generally support the other in matters against non-Muslims.

> China to put up the last piece to make it into 19th Europe.

Could you elaborate for us non-historians?

Sunni Muslims will be upset too, because Israel was involved.

Why do you bring up China here? Trump has done more harm to the west in 10 years than China in the last century

I am Sunni and I condemn the attack.

Having said that, I also condemn Iranian regime killing (reportedly) 30000 protesters. So he probably had it coming.

I'm more concerned about what happens to US now, because I think the attack indicates a complete failure and collapse of the legislative branch of the US government.

This is not completely true. The Iranian regime gained some credibility in the Sunni world by strongly supporting the Palestinian cause.

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...

Only people who live on social media believe these extreme views to be true. Most muslims hardly even know the difference or care.

Well if you take religious interpretations to do the extreme they hate all 'non believers'. I am assuming that even the Sunni Muslim countries' average population might not be that happy with the bullying (their perception)

Every single one of them?

There are many Sunnis who view their leadership as "traitors to the cause" and respected Iranian defiance especially against Israel.

It's far from black and white.

You seem to have misread my comment.

None of the people I know and have spoken to are capable of or even thinking of violent retaliation.

I am extrapolating from their sentiments that someone out there will be moved to violence.

> The Middle East was the UK, Iran would be British.

Did you mean England perhaps, not "British"?

Jordan political system is much older than Iran, as well as the Saudis and others. Iran theocracy is a new phenomena in the Middle East, ushering the implementation era of political Islam, later continued by ISIS, Hamas and the milder Qatar and current Turkey

Another good analogy would be, said theocracy is (was?) like a very bad piece of legacy code, impossible to refactor, until the entire feature gets thrown in the trash.

I was with you until you said California. You think that Californians are understand Southern or Midwestern culture?

I don't think doctrinal reformation is possible with Islam.

The Qur'an is totally prescriptive. It contains direct legal commands, judicial rules and explicit government principles which are all binding and considered as direct divine speech.

I think Westernisation and an increase in the number of "casual" muslims is and will continue to be the moderating effect.

Think of what is happening in Europe (as the clearest example) with the influx of Muslim immigrants who raise increasingly more assimilated children as the blueprint.

For those of us who haven't read it, could you explain why it's salient on this topic?

> Considering how Israel had to raze entire cities to beat 'Hamas'

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.

To me, this argument doesn't hold water. Think about some counterexamples: (1) Netanyahu and Gaza. Surely, 100K+ civilians died as a result of that war. (2) Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Vietnam. A staggering number of civilians died in that war. (3) GW Bush in Afghanistan and Iraq/2.

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.

To the extent that they're actually effective, I agree.

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.

> Considering how Israel had to raze entire cities to beat 'Hamas'

They didn't, they just had to stop funding them, as Hamas has been funded by Israel.

Well not right, but effective in the short term. In the longer term I assume this kind of policy is destabilizing and bad for everyone

Said another way, if you don’t kill your enemy before he kills you, you die. Human nature hasn’t changed. I think it just gets forgotten.

Try again

EU needs the US so much and every time I see this comment, I remember why. Too many idealists running the EU

What are you talking about? Russia has effectively been blocked from the west while when the United States invaded Iraq nothing happened. Europe trades with the US like nothing ever happened while Russia will never return to what it was before without at minimum Putin being gone.

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.

    > Iran is not like other countries in the region. Despite its shortcomings, it's a cohesive society.

This is a weird comment. I would also describe Jordan, Oman, UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia as cohesive societies.

From my reading I get the feeling it has more in common with Spain and Portugal before the fall of the dictatorships.

Indeed, I'vve already read about an opposition government being organized.

It’s Ayatollah Rubio.

Even as we speak Israeli missiles are target at him.

Maybe .. the revolutionary guard is fed up though with ineffective empire rule? Like to be rubbed in the dirt face first repeatetly as inheritor of the mighty persian empire sucks bad enough, to reconsider the way things are run? Sorry, but whatever israel & the us are doing, seems to work way better than - whatever has happened the last decades in iran?

We have such short memories don't we

So its okay in case of bibi?

That's not how I am reading this. Here, the reaction seems mostly that Europe doesn't want to touch this mess. Which is weird, as Iran was clearly on our list of bad countries and Israel can do nothing wrong.

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.

Not even Russia really wants Iran to have nuclear weapons and a rocket technology that can hit targets 3000 km+ distant, though they obviously wouldn't attack Iran over that problem. The Middle East is notoriously hard to predict and governments change, while the nuclear capability endures.

Of all the countries that currently make any steps towards nuclear armament, Iran has by far the widest coalition of opponents.

Having a brutal dictatorial regime that finances international terrorists on your doorstep does that to you.

Surely they will be sanctioning Israel like they sanctioned russia for attacking ukraine? After all aren't Canada and europe self proclaimed beacons of light?

Norway, Finland and Spain protested the attack on the basis of international law.

The swedish government was more like 'eh, they had it coming', which does not bode well for us in the long run.

Also weirdly they only came out in support once they saw that the operation was largely successful. It's almost like they prefer to ride on the coattails the same as they always have.

They don't want to risk their politics.

Yeah, because killing murderous dictators is helpful, and it doesn't matter that much who does it. In Europe, states aren't sacred – it is the freedom of people, and when people are freed, Europeans are happy even if it includes breaking the sovereignty of some terror state. I'm not saying I like Trump, but when he kills evil dictators, I can't complain. (There was 10k+ protesters killed in Iran recently)

There is huge potential hidden in Iran; it has always had a huge influence over the region and possibly the whole world.

Agreed. Canada fired the attorney general rather than prosecute those who financed momar ghaddfi. If Trump takes carney to stand trial I support it.

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.

Iran is not a sovereign state, the legitimate powers of government derive from the consent of the governed, without consent it’s not a sovereign state.

The power of sovereignty rests with the people who have given their consent in free and fair elections to have their leaders removed.

Refusal to hand over Greenland.

(I'm not saying it's plausible, just want to explain the rationale.)

Do you think that he was killed because of human right violations? I do not think so. The current US administration does not seem very concerned with those.

You realize that international law exists, right? Or are we now OK with devolving into a world where assassinating heads of state and cabinet members is applauded?