Welcome to war. This was why the Qatar attack was so destabilizing.

Iran's position is that any organization that is in any shape or form aligned with the US and West is a target.

And being an anti-war westerner won't help you. People are forgetting that the Iranian government detests Israel and the entirety of the West.

The core principals of the revolution which is the IRGC's entire ideological basis is reversing westoxification (Gharbzadegi) and returning to the norms of the Imam Husayn (Velayat-e Faghih).

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leereeves 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Judging from their behavior against their own people and their Islamic neighbors, it seems like the IRGC's hatred isn't limited to the West.

	▲	alephnerd 14 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The whole point of the Islamic Revolution was to export it. Khomeinei preached that Shia and Sunni is an arbitrary divide and that the ummah needed to be unified and guided by clerics (who just so happened to be Shia) and to purge decadent Western culture back to an idealized norm of the Imam Husayn. In action, it meant funding insurgencies and revolutionary corps out of a mix of idealism and raw power projection, and those organs used to protect the revolution ended up taking over the entire state and economy for their own economic benefit. Imagine if the Red Guard and the Gang of Four weren't purged in China in 1976 and the footsoldiers of the Red Guard became actual leaders - that is what Iran is today. And like China under Mao during the Cultural Revolution, it alienated all of it's neighbors. Westerners who dislike Israel or even the US think Iran would ally with them, but the entire regime views Westerners irrespective of political leaning with disdain. An undercurrent of the Iranian revolution was also Iranian nationalism and the view that Iran is a civilization state, and that the west and westerners are culture-less, decadent, loose, and immoral and that the entirety of western culture needs to be burnt to the ground (Gharbzadegi).