Ben,

This is really good information.

But you also need to go back even further than Operations Ajax and Boot, wherein the British and Americans orchestrated a military coup against a democratically elected government in 1953, which in turn led to the Shah of Iran being replaced in control.

Of course there was a backlash and so to deal with ‘dissidents’ the dreaded ‘Savak’, psychopaths trained by the CIA, were unleashed against the population in order to support a puppet regime which in turn engendered and empowered a theocratic response.

Maybe we also need to go back to the 1916 Balfour Doctrine and the Sykes-Picot agreement, wherein huge populations after the First World War were displaced by lines drawn on a map by Empires tottering after the carnage and cost of the war. All in the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire wherein Iran was forced to respond to these dictates without any voice at the table.

And you fail to mention the US proxy Iraq-Iran war foisted on the Iranian people from 1980 to 1988, wherein close to 500,000 to 1,000,000 Iranian soldiers and civilians lost their lives.

Rumsfeld provided the weapons, the poison and chemical gas to Saddam Hussein and hey, even sold substandard weapons to Iran in order to provide superior weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras…you remember the Iran-Contra affair, right?

You remember Arrow Air Flight 1285 — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Arrow_Air_Flight_1285

As a Canadian, it was heart wrenching to find that the US was unwilling to accept two Canadian Crash investigations and instead provided one of their own — in my opinion to protect the Iran-Contra scandal and President Reagan. What was aboard the planes to cause the explosion did not match the flight manifest.

So to provide context, think of the long term effects of the loss of all those US servicemen in the Vietnam war, some 58,000, and let us not forget the some 3,000,000 Vietnamese soldiers and civilians who also perished. Then you’ll come closer to helping the average US citizen to better understand Iran’s response to continual American incursions.

So wouldn’t you as an Iranian want to make sure that another US-sponsored war with Iraq not happen?

And let’s not forget the US destroyer Vincennes which shot down Iranian Air Flight 655 in 1988, with the loss of 290 passengers and crew.

That’s a lot of forgiving to be done by Iranians and by Soleimani in particular who fought in the Iran-Iraq war.

And for Christ’s sake, Soleimani was WORKING with the US State Dept. to overthrow the Taliban…check your history: Search Results

When the United States and Qasem Soleimani worked together

https://www.washingtonpost.com › politics › 2020/01/03 › when-united-state…

Bush’s unfortunate ‘Axis of Evil’ rhetoric killed any and all cooperation.

And, the last time anyone with a lick of sense checked into the nationalities of the 9–11 hijackers, they were all Sunni Muslims, the majority of whom were Saudis. What happened, were the US bombers given the wrong coordinates and hit Afghanistan in the same vein that, along with the faulty intelligence two years later (WMD), bombed Iraq?

And that’s not even getting into the fact that the Taliban were WILLING to extradite Osama bin Laden if the US followed international rules of extradition…you know, present the evidence.

For your erudition: Bush rejects Taliban offer to hand Bin Laden over | World

https://www.theguardian.com › world › oct › afghanistan.terrorism5

More recently, even worse, Soleimani’s Shia militias worked alongside the US to fight and defeat ISIS in Iraq and Syria. That’s right, in a sense, he was a convenient ally, and now just as easily discarded as the Kurds.

So, where does this leave us?

First, one must read of Project for the New American Century — SourceWatch

https://www.sourcewatch.org › index.php › Project_for_the_New_America…

Then one can question whether Trump needed an act of war in order to strut himself as a Commander in Chief and so distract Americans from his impending impeachment, or it’s all part of the same US Risk game, wherein a Shia majority sovereign country, with a population of some 80 million, is to be surrounded for geopolitical US interests or quite simply both.

IOW, destabilizing the middle east is an old paradigm of Imperial control, playing religions against each other, engaging in war profiteering at an obscene level and then creating and maintaining trans-generational grief, sorrow and anger, enough to perpetuate the very paranoia and mind control and perpetual warfare that Orwell tried to warn us about.

And Trump is just part of the same game.