Even if we should believe that, experience tells us that whatever the US touches turns from shit into a clusterfuck. Just fucking don't.

The hotels I've heard of were reportedly hosting CIA and military personnel. The attacks done by drones, not missiles, that is, with limited collateral, seems to support the claims.

And here we thought PIzzagate was bad...

One of the best questions about the this clusterfuck that all of this is. Maybe Trump though he'd get some cheap PR out of it like when Obama did Osama in.

Khomeini was at home doing his regular routine. He could have chosen to get in the bunkers, but he did not do so. It would appear he wanted to be martyred. He was also old, accomplished, and possibly outdated. And by staying alive he would have probably had to live through Israel bombing his family members instead.

What is important for what follows is that Khomeini was a dove that refused to get nukes despite decades of obvious evidence confirming the fact that Iran does, in fact, need nukes. Now he's dead his fatwa about that does not need to be kept around, and it's very likely his replacement will be much more a hawk. So now it is just about certain that Iran will be starting their nuke program again, and finishing it, too.

The intersts of the people in most countries do not align with US interests for the simple fact that the interests of US is to loot them and own them, and to use them as proxies to do so to even more countries, and to use them as battle ground for their imperial wars.

Venezuela has oil, but does not think it's purpose should be to benefit foreign companies. Iran has oil, but also does not think it's purpose should be to benefit foreign companies. Saddam had started to sell his oil in euros, instead of dollars, and was being a bad example to Iran and Venezuela, who were thinking of doing the same. But selling freshly printed dollars for use in international trade is a huge pillar of the US economy, so Saddam had to be made into a different kind of example. Assad rejected the US plan for a pipeline to get sunni oil to the Med, and to add insult to injury, conjured up hist own plan for a pipeline of shia oil instead. Gaddafi wanted to create an African central bank with a pan-African currency, which would have preempted the colonial tool that IMF is there, weakening the main instrument the US uses to keep Africa from industrializing, stuck as a source of cheap natural resources. Gaddafi also got stuck in between the French political gears, having financed Sarkozy's election campaign, something not really unusual in the Francafrique neocolonial framework, but it hit the fan and that was not a good look.

It does indeed not take a lot to not be on the US shitlist. Just bend over and take it, and you might even get a towel to clean yourself up after the fact.

What exactly did Iran do to provoke the US? US intelligence has no doubt Iran canned their nuclear program already back in 2003. All Iran does is sit there minding it's own business. But they will not join the Borg, and insist on running their country on their own, so they must be destroyed.

Democracy or a suppressiver regime is no indication of sanctions. Pretty much every Gulf country is a fundamentalist suppressive regime much worse than Iran in every way, yet they are valued allies of the US. If the regime argument should want to be sincere, there's a lot of more important work to be done before getting to Iran there.

The moral of the story is, what is offered to us is by the war drums just a rethoric used to sell policy, as usual. But there is not a single idiot in the world who goes and spends trillions just to get rid of some pesky dictator. Enemies are make, and wars waged, because of hard real politics reasons, and most of the time, those reasons are either about getting even more trillions, or just about spending those trillions in your cronies weapons market. Caveat emptor.

The war was decided long before Berlin, it was decided in Stalingrad. That was where the punch hit the heaviest, and was stopped, and was turned around. In no way was it a walk in a park to get to Berlin from there, far from it, but that was where the tides got turned. A million soviets died in Stalingrad with barely any equipment, it's no secret the Soviet Union had not been ready for the war and needed every bit of assistance they could get, but they managed to hold ground until they got the war production in full swing behind the Urals and the tanks started rolling in.

It was still a full year and a half of bloody fighting with the retreating German forces after that, until US joined the party. By that time, the Russians were already half way to Berlin.

Why did the US forces allow the Soviets to take Berlin? Because taking the capital of the enemy is the single highest symbolic act of a war, and the honour of that goes to whoever has best claim to it. The very fact that US gave that to the Soviets bears witness to the fact that the US had no qualms about who did the heavy lifting.

And when you ask it, are you sure, I suppose it will give a similarily convincing argument in support of nukes...

I don't find Potsdam in no clash with Yalta concessoins. In fact, the declaration exactly left no room for the Japanese to save face for the Emperor, which is why it was not taken. Suppose they had taken it though, the bombs would have found another place to drop. The trigger finger was itching for a pull. You cant' just sit on a brand new toy like that.

Lend-Lease sure was important for the soviet war effort, but so was the soviets own effort. The US put many boots on the feet of soviet soldiers, and a lot of tnt in their shells, but the SU built the tanks that drove to Berlin, and they still did all the dying while the US looked on. Effective, well they won the war. A single german tank could take on four soviet ones and still win, but as Stalin put it, quantity has a quality of it's own. In the end what matters is your ability to use the resources you have to achieve the goals you have.

Do not think that i find the SU to be the bees knees, to the contrary. But one has to give credit where credit is due, otherwise you cannot learn from it.

If your country has a hostile adversary is exactly the greater evil I mentioned.

As to the world police, you cannot still believe this in 2026? Look around to what the US does, it goes around the world destroying one country after another, sometimes because they wanted to do something the US did not like, sometimes just for the heck of it. The world bully is more apt.

Yeah, that was kinda my point, that he was cherry picking, or possibly, didn't think this through, or didn't even know that there was more to it. For example I've met British people who have literally no idea what it means they had an Empire, and cannot figure out why you would invent such insane things to attack ol' Blighty... I don't know about the British school curricula in particular, but it's not very usual for a country to teach their dark side in schools, so that might be part of it. Maybe like the US, that has to tackle the problem of slavery, because black people are everywhere, but can ignore the problem of the founding of the nation, that is the native american genocide, because there's not much of them around to stare in your face.

It was a successful attempt. Before the coup the role of the monarch in Iran was similar to Great Britain, although the shah had started to change that. But in the coup the government was overthrown, democracy died, and Pahlavi took the reigns and started to persecute the people with a secret police, relying heavily on the US to stay in power. While in his return to the country after the coup he was mostly cheered, by the time of the revolution the country was overwhelmingly happy to get rid of him.

Importantly for the GB and US, the oil stayed theirs, and flowing. Also importantly for the US, the success of the coup laid the groundwork for the CIA to become one of the most important tools of US foreign policy. Since then, Chomsky has counted over 80 US coups in Latin America alone, but that's another story.

Well I suppose you can argue this on the technicality of my wording, but Operation Ajax was very much a real thing.

Japan was nuked because the US wanted to scare Stalin into concessions in Yalta, and it worked, I might add. SU did all the heavy lifting to win the war, yet the US got to pick the winnings. But there was no military need for the nukes, Japan was all but razed to the ground by regular bombing already. There was only two cities left to bomb, and this is where the nukes went. So Japan was ready to surrender and was only looking for a way to save face for the Emperor while doing it. The nukes took care of that problem for them, i guess.

Boots on the ground are not just for changing regimes, they are also for maintaining them. As witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the first can be easy, but the second not so much.

Korea was a success in that the US got their hands on half of it, and managed to keep it. Do remember that the US inherited from Japan the plan to divide up Korea with the Russians. So after the war the SU was still good and took their half, and the US took their half. To my knowledge history is hazy about where the idea for a reunification came from, but it seems the Russians were okay with it and the Chinese were not against it, so the North almost got hold of all of Korea before the US got in war gear. And the North Korean experience of being razed to the ground and losing 1/8 of the population yet surviving in the resulting Korean War is also where the still standing animosity between NK and the US comes from.

And as to the Phillippines, they sure are not known for smart leadership. But the dumbest thing one can do is to outsource their defence, because the cost of that is always losing your suzerainty, if not sovereignity. As is also witnessed by the foreign policy of every country that did so surprisingly lining up like clockwork with US foreign policy. One would expect independent countries to have their own opinions about things; surprisingly enough, only countries that take care of their own defence do. So it's a move one does only by having their hand forced, whether it's because they're not in a position to say no, or they have an even greater evil to worry about.

Venezuela was changing, they were in no means perfect, but ever since Chavez kicked out the US they had been getting better, and the people know by experience that their own imperfect government is still better than a US one. Now they're back to square one again, with the puppet government having to run the country for the advancement of US interest again.

As to the boots, I'm not aware of no boots on the ground ever having worked. Japan still has US boots on the ground, so does South Korea. In fact, one might argue they are still occupied. Interestingly it was Philippines, sometimes considered to be the 51st state, that sent the US army back home.

Also forgot to add. Ever since the Monroe Doctrine, everything south of US is a victim of the US Empire, not the Spanish one.