Your narrative may sound convincing to the person who's unaware of Iran's fundamental policy of exporting it's "sectarian" revolution.
You're starting off with a (western- and zionist-concocted) misrepresentation of the 1979 Islamic Revolution right away, seeing how the latter's ideology happens to be pan-Islamic and not sect-based. Refer to the discourse and political practice of the Islamic Republic.
Iran wants to bring ALL Shiite communities under its control.
Exporting the Islamic Revolution does not mean bringing under control communities.
It means building Iran into a source of inspiration for Moslems worldwide, allowing them to emulate Iran's example by emancipating themselves from zio-American imperialist yoke and achieving self-determination. If they ask for help in this effort, then Islamic Iran will move to assist them.
Also this message of the Islamic Revolution is not merely directed at Shia Moslems, it is addressing followers of Islam regardless of confessional affiliation, and also oppressed peoples of non-Moslem faith. Which is why Iran has been extending support to countless Sunni Moslem movements and governments since the victory of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, as well as to non-Moslem groups and governments resisting against imperialist oppression.
It tried first with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, which led to the Iran-Iraq war.
The Sacred Defence was triggered by the Iraqi Ba'thist regime's openly declared goal of annexing oil-producing areas of southwestern Iran, hence why Iraq invaded Iran with several heavily armored divisions and not the other way around.
For your information, and although there's no basis to the allegation, endeavoring to "bring under one's control" a given neighboring community through non-military means does not constitute a valid casus belli in international law. Reality is that protests and other actions by Iraqis in the late 1970's, like several earlier events, were locally generated.
The Iran of 1979 and 1980 was still struggling to establish a revolutionary political system after the overthrow of the monarchy, the new polity had hardly taken shape, so Iran wasn't in a position to exert such amounts of influence abroad.
A contrario, Saddam's regime saw an opportunity in this temporary weakening of central state authority in Iran, as well as in the state of disarray Iranian armed forces naturally found themselves in (with top generals being jailed, a few of them executed and the rest fleeing the country; with the USA, upon which the Iranian military was strongly dependent prior to the Revolution, stopping its supply of spare parts). So Saddam jumped on the occasion to try and impose Iraqi control over the entirety of the Arvand (Shatt al-'Arab) river which marks the border between the two countries, and which had been the object of a long-standing dispute reaching as far back as 1936. Beyond this border issue, Saddam also sought to invade an annex Iranian land.
The Iraqi Ba'thist regime's structural appetence for attempted illegal land grabs was confirmed anew by Saddam's invasion of Kuwait a mere two years after the end of his war with Iran. It's to this effect that as soon as the shah was overthrown, Saddam set out to mobilizing "ethno"-liniguistic separatists in Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan province, whom Iraq was arming.
So no matter how it'll be spun, the guilty party in starting war was Ba'thist Iraq without a doubt.
It was Iran's attempt to bring Azerbaijan under its velayat el-faqhi empire that resulted in the Azerbaijanis turning hostile. Your Iranian Mullahs wanted and still want to establish another mullahcracy in Azerbaijan that is subservient to the Iranian Mullahs -
Problem with statements such as these is that they amount to empty slogans, with no actual facts to back them up.
Iran was the first country in the world to recognize the Republic of Azarbaijan as an independent state, and also the first country to dispatch assistance - including of military nature, to Baku in its struggle against Armenian separatists of Karabakh.
This very much reflects a brotherly stance, not denial of the other party's sovereignty.
just like they did in Lebanon via Hezbollah and in Iraq via the PMU.
HezbAllah was created to resist zionist occupation of Lebanon, and to deter future encroachment by the zionist entity upon that country. A mission brilliantly fulfilled. It's not Iran's fault that no other government has been willing to stand by Lebanon like Tehran has been doing.
The Iraqi PMU were set up following a fatwa by Iraq's own religious authority, ayatAllah al-uzma seyyed Sistani, to defeat the "I"SIS abomination which had taken over much of the country's territory. The PMU receive weapons from Iran because no other independent state is offering them any.
They would've done the same with Azerbaijan had it not been for the vigilance of the Azerbaijani government.
Again, an accusation with no substance.
So, my dear propagandists, don't try to depict Iran as the victim here. Azerbaijan cooperating with Israel is meant to deter Iran.
Yet, you failed to show a single example of supposed early Iranian mischief vis à vis the Baku republic. This is while I shared concretely what type of aggression the zionist regime has been carrying out against Iran out of Azarbaijani soil.
You started this feud with your velayat el-faqhi madness and now you complain? The Azerbaijanis don't want to be another of your settelite states. Quit trying to export your revolution to Azerbaijan and all will be good.
No such thing took place. It's empty talk, like the broken record-like threats of Aliyev's supporter with regards to Armenia's Syunik province.
Next, Iran is doing all it can to thwart Turkiye's rise. The fact that Erdogan is the most popular Muslim leader
Any evidence to support this claim? More than one Arab, by the way, will disagree.
annoys the Iranian mullahs who've tried for decades to position themselves as the leaders of the struggle against Western imperialism.
The Islamic Republic does not need to fabricate an image, seeing how it has de facto been spearheading the anti-imperial struggle not just in the Moslem world but at the global scale.
Iran's true goal is to spread Shiism by impressing Sunnis with their cowardly confrontation against the U.S. and Israel.
That confronting the USA and zionist regimes is a "cowardly" act, is news to me. Case in point, no other government could muster the bravery to engage into such a policy. But you qualifying such an undertaking as cowardice actually tends to shed light on your own political outlook.
What's more, Iran's strategy has nothing to do with spreading Shiaism. This is exactly the sort of sectarianist reading of geopolitical events which a lot of Iran's adversaries, in a perfect accusatory projection, baselessly try to slander Iran with. Like with any other country, there'll be a natural proximity between Iran and her confessional peers abroad, but that's very different from saying Iran's foreign policy is primarily grounded in this aspect, which is not the case.
But this failed after Iran was repeatedly exposed as a coward regime unwilling to face the Islam's enemies it claims to want to defeat. Soleimani's assassination revealed this fact to all who were in doubt.
Stopping short from initiating all out war when the enemy is many times more resourceful, is not cowardry: it is most elementary political intelligence. Unless you're called China, you can only defeat the empire through asymmetrical means.
Of course what the above quoted rhetorical subterfuge obfuscates, is why Washington would murder an Iranian general in the first place, rather than say, a Turkish or Saudi one? Obvious answer: because Iran as opposed to Turkey or Saudi Arabia, is an enemy to the USA regime, one which has stood its ground, resisted Washington's oppressive schemes and damaged its imperialist interests across West Asia and well beyond.
Also, the many hundreds of USA occupation troops eliminated in Iraq by Iranian-supported resistance formations (including through the use of Iran-supplied IED's and other weapons), or the 241 USA military personnel who perished in the 1983 attack on the USA Marines barracks in Beirut offer proof that Iran will not shy away from confronting the empire militarily where convenient and necessary. Name one other government in the region which dared as much.
If not for the vulnerability of Emirati and Saudis to Iran's ballistic missiles, the U.S. would have taken military action against Iran long ago.
I thought Iran is not interested in struggling against the zio-American empire? Why then would the latter want to take military action against Iran? At least try to be consistent in your rant.
As for Iran's military capability, there are many users knowledgeable of the topic around here. I invite you to open a thread arguing that Iran would stand no chance in the event of a military aggression by the USA, and learn something new in the process.
Even limited military action can topple the regime as demonstrated by the destruction of over 1500 sites in Iran during the 2019 foreign-engineered protests.
Destruction of 1500 sites? Not sure what you're referring to here, but what I do know is that no strategic installations were harmed in any of the recent foreign-engineered riots in Iran.