Who elected the Supreme Leader of Iran? (Actual answer: the previous Supreme Leader of Iran.)

The US is proving to be a rather bad actor. Drones. NSA Spying. Indefinite detention.

Should the rest of the world place economic sanctions on the US?

This is stereotypical "point spread" moral relativism. The standards with which American citizens hold their government to should of course be quite high, but by no means should we take failure to meet those standards to be in remotely the same league as the sorts of activities the Iranian regime undertakes.

How many countries has Iran invaded in the past 20 years? How many civilian dead in foreign countries can be laid at the feet of the Iranian military?

Please recall that the US backed Saddam against Iran once upon a time.

The point is not how much has it done, but how much it would have done if it had the power. If Iran and the US had swapped places there would have been far more death and destruction across the world, all in the name of religious supremacy.

I can't say I like what the US is doing with drone strikes and repeated, unwinnable wars, but don't think for a minute that Iran would be a beneficient world hegemon. The world would be an awful place to live.

> If Iran and the US had swapped places there would have been far more death and destruction across the world...religious supremacy.

That's a supposition for which you have no support. The fact is that non-religious States have murdered far more civilians in the past 100 years than any religion has.

That's not a defense of religion. It's a simple statement of historical fact.

History is relevant. Always.

Iran is the primary sponsor of Hezbollah, a terror organization which targets civilians as a matter of policy and has participated in wars in Israel, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, and Syria. Right now they are backing the Assad regime, for example.

That's aside from all this other stuff, of course: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_and_state_terrorism

And the fact that the Iranian way of dealing with peaceful demonstrations in its own country is to use truncheons and snipers.

And the cozy relations between Iran and North Korea, especially in regards to nuclear weapons and missile development.

The Iranians may be, overall, nice people, but their regime is one of the worst on the globe.

> Iran is the primary sponsor of Hezbollah

The US's history of death squads in Central America is no different. I see no moral difference between the Iranian government and the US government.

Government, no matter whose government, is a brute. At the moment, the US is the biggest brute on the planet targeting smaller brutes. Like all governments, it also appears to be targeting its own citizens.

Let's clean up our backyard before we go bitching about the junked cars in other yards.

"Elected" implies choice. Both sides have more than their fair share of those that coasted in because of ineffective opposition.

You mean, like George W Bush? Or O'Bomber?