"“Few may remember that after the Sept. 11 attacks, General Suleimani worked indirectly with the United States to oust the Taliban in Afghanistan and that Iran was the lone Muslim-majority nation to express popular sympathy for the United States.
Despite this and Iranian diplomatic assistance in creating a post-Taliban government, President George W. Bush declared Iran part of an ‘axis of evil.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/03/...RrXYtf2Qm21_1EwupBO9UyVVR_9VKobolmKmTcBrAqhcA
https://theweek.com/articles/887283/america-guilty-everything-accuse-iran-doing
"Yet even the worst of Soleimani's record pales in comparison with the most blood-drenched American warmongers. If Soleimani deserves condemnation for arming Iraqi insurgents, then George W. Bush and Dick Cheney deserve 10 times as much for starting the war in the first place. It was a pointless, illegal war of aggression sold on lies that obliterated Iraqi society and killed
perhaps half a million people, almost all of them innocent civilians. (Our own Soleimani, General David Petraeus, was connected to the operation of Iraqi
torture dungeons and paramilitary death squads during the fight against the insurgency.)"
"As writer
Derek Davison explains, Soleimani was no ordinary general. He was more like a cross between the American vice president and the secretary of state — one of the two or three most famous and powerful people in Iran behind Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Soleimani commanded the Quds Force, a Special Forces-type operation supporting Iranian allies in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and many other countries. American hardliners hate him mainly for supporting Hezbollah and Hamas, and for arming insurgents who fought the American occupation of Iraq.
Incidentally, as recently as September 2015, Trump plainly had no idea whatsoever who Soleimani was. Indeed, as Mehdi Hasan writes at The Intercept, when Hugh Hewitt asked him about the Quds Force, he thought Hewitt had said "Kurds."
"Chauvinist American commentators always presume America has the best intentions, and that the American military is composed of saintly warrior-poets. The reality is that the lumbering American colossus has unleashed a Thirty Years' War-level of violent chaos all around Iran for no good reason at all.
We are ruled by a president who recently reversed the demotion of a guy turned in by his own fellow soldiers for war crimes — namely, gleefully murdering helpless prisoners, old men, and little girls for sport."
it seems to me that Iran is astoundingly similar to America in terms of government structure (mixed constitutional republic), but since Iranians are not white Christians and they don't want to give their oil to western corporations, the regime is labelled a 'terrorist regime' and othered into an enemy. This labelling then forms a pretext for American empire building activities in the region for decades to come. George W Bush was viewed as a huckster and a joke by smug and assured liberals that let him get away with everything and bought his bullshit on war after war, but his administration implemented the most effective long-term conservative geopolitical strategy ever, and the Trump administration's activities are the logical extension of the historical cycle that began under Bush Jr.