Pajamas Media is reporting that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dead:
A source close to Pajamas Media has learned that Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has apparently succumbed to the cancer that hospitalized him last month, as exclusively reported by Pajamas Media, at age 67. He has been Iran’s most powerful figure since replacing Ayatollah Khomeini in the role of Supreme Leader in 1989.
The jostling for power will now begin openly. As Michael Ledeen has been reporting, the maneuvering that’s been going on behind the scenes since Khamenei’s hospitalization last month has been intense:
As it happens, this is a particularly good moment to go after the mullahs, because they are deeply engaged in a war of all against all within Iran. I wrote in NRO two weeks ago that the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had been carted off to the hospital–a major event, of which the Intelligence Community was totally unaware–and his prognosis is very poor. That information has now trickled out, and I found it today in the Italian press and on an Iranian web site. The mullahs are maneuvering for position, and Ahmadi-Nezhad’s ever more frantic rhetoric bespeaks the intensity of the power struggle, which includes former president Rafsanjani, Khamenei’s son, and Ahmadi-Nezhad’s favorite nut ayatollah. We should propose another option to the Iranian people: freedom.
The succession (if, in fact, Khamenei is gone) now rests in the hands of the Assembly of Experts. Fortuitously, the December 15 election was something of a setback for radical clerics who backed the current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, although the winners are far from liberal reformers. Western media has sought to portray last month’s victors as “pragmatists” or, even more laughably, “moderate fundamentalists.” Let me assure you they are died in the wool America haters who will make sure that the new Supreme Leader they elect will continue most of the policies of his predecessor including the drive to build nuclear weapons and feed the violence in Iraq.
Who might that new Supreme Leader be? It will probably not be Ahmadinejad’s spiritual mentor Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi who finished far behind in the voting last month but still garnering enough support to squeak through. To put it clinically, this fellow is a nut case. He is a fanatical isolationist, eschewing all contact with the west. And he considers any non literal interpretation of the Koran heresy. He is known to many Iranians as “Professor Crocodile” because of a notorious cartoon that depicted him weeping false tears over the imprisoning of a reformist journalist. The combination of Yazdi and Ahmadinejad would have been a nightmare for the west to deal with.
What about former President Rafsanjani himself? This too is unlikely since he was just elected to the Assembly last month, although following the career of this guy, you come to realize that anything is possible.
Example: After his term of office for President ended in 1997, he ran for a seat in Parliament in the election of 2000. At that time, the Iranian people showed that they had tired of Rafsanjani’s massive corruption (Forbes Magazine named him one of the richest people in the world at one point) and he failed to get enough votes in the Tehran district to be seated.
Lo and behold, the powerful Guardian Council (who oversee all elections in Iran) ruled numerous ballots as “ruined” or “void” and guess who ended up being the beneficiary? It is unclear to this day whether he simply spread a little money around to get the Council to see its way clear to finding a way to seat him or, more ominously, whether he was able to threaten a sufficient number of Council members in order to get his way.
So it’s probably not wise to count him out of the contest to replace Khamenei despite his status as an Assembly newbie and the fact that one of the criteria for serving as Supreme Leader is to have an impeccable political and social record – something that everyone in the country knows Rafsanjani lacks. Still, his ambition knows no bounds and he is a very powerful, dangerous man.
But it is more likely that the Assembly will choose someone older and more religiously inclined. The best possible candidate from our point of view would be Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri. Perhaps the most respected Islamic scholar in Iran, he was at one time designated as Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor. But Montazeri denounced the Ayatollah publicly for being undemocratic and violating the Iranian Constitution. He also denounced Khamenei which led to his house arrest in 1997. He’s no liberal but he would almost certainly be someone that we could do business with. Alas, despite his standing as a scholar and a huge following among the people, his criticisms of the regime in the past will probably work against him.
If I were a betting man (and I am), I would place money on Ayatollah Mohammad Momen. He’s from the holy city of Qom, is considered a brilliant student of the Koran, and has some political clout in that he served on the Guardian Council. But he is still a longshot, although someone to watch in the future.
Khamenei’s legacy? It would have to be his shepherding the nuclear program to the brink of success. And for that, the world may have cause to curse his name in the coming years.
6:55 pm
Rick is right that the Assembly of Experts popularly elected consisting of 86 religious scholars who determine the succession of the Supreme Leader. The Second of the three Advisory “boards” is an Expediency Council or Council for the Discernment of Expediency, an advisory and implementation board representing all major government factions.
My understanding is that Rafsanjani has recently been made chairman of The Expediency Council.
The Third “Board” is of course the Guardians’ Council, which vets candidates for election and has become the Smoke-filled Room of Iranian politics.
My bet is on whomever Rafsanjani supports, as he is ascending in a levitation mode back to where he may be the Presidential candidate again in elections moved foreward recently to 2008 to coincide with parliamentary elections.
10:35 am
Hmm.. Google News only shows a couple of stories when I entered “Khamenei Dead” both of them from questionable sources.
I think I’ll wait on some more reliable news organizations to report this before I celebrate.
I do note that Jamil Hussein seems to have been found.
11:40 am
In their exuberance to heap scorn on the Administration, and any fellow citizen who voted for Bush in the first place, far too many on the left have become oblivious to the importance of the “information war,” which to our success in Iraq is every bit as crucial as anything taking place on the ground there, no matter how that success is defined.
Regardless of the horrors of war and how the atrocities being committed by all involved are being portrayed in the worldwide media, those we are fighting can only become more emboldened when they see Americans so bitterly divided over US policy.
Those who really support the troops would not be stating in their next breath that they are human fodder fighting a war for oil that is doomed to failure.
Chip
11:03 pm
As I have already pointed out several times before, this “war” was lost the moment that the decision was made to invade and occupy Iraq with only about one third of the troops necessary to properly do the job. General Shinseki stated in testimony before Congress that “several hundred thousand” troops would be needed to occupy Iraq. Rumsfeld (who retired as a Captain) and Wolfowitz (no service) publicly disagreed with Shinseki and Shinseki was forced into retirement. The more pliable General Schoomaker was installed to head the Army and the invasion proceeded with the much lighter force that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz wanted.
The decision to invade Iraq in the first place was a poor one, the decision to do so with far fewer forces than were predicted to be needed by the military professionals like Shinseki was abysmally stupid. That decision can be traced right back to Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, the civilians in charge of the DOD. Despite this fact we have Cheney hailing Rumsfeld as “the greatest SecDef ever” very recently.
On November 15, 2006, in testimony before Congress, USCENTCOM Commanding General John Abizaid said that General Shinseki’s estimate had proved correct. In other words, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were dead wrong.
Now Rumsfeld is out and Gates is in as SecDef. Gates is a CIA spook who basically doesn’t know that much about the military but is well connected with the Bush family. Whether or not Gates will be a good SecDef remains to be seen but it isn’t auspicious that he’ll have to have a lot of on the job training.
The invasion of Iraq has turned out be the mother of all FUBARs, and it is due to the fact that militarily ignorant ideologues were put in places of ultimate power over our military forces.
Don’t you find it at all coincidental that we have a President and Vice President who are both oil men and we have preemptively invaded the country with the second larges proven oil reserves in the world, second only to Saudi Arabia?
Remember the Powell doctrine? Overwhelming force, clear exit strategy. The Iraq invasion had and has neither.
Recall that Dick Cheney was SecDef at the time, he knew very well that Iraq was a tar pit and yet he did nothing to stop this invasion.
The US forces in Iraq are not making things any better and may well be making things worse. I, for one, do not wish to see any more American blood and treasure wasted in this futile and Pyrrhic effort to make over the Middle East in our own image.
The short answer is: I think this occupation was poorly conceived and incredibly stupidly managed and I’m not going to shut up about it.
5:18 pm
Michael Ledeen! Be careful of this guy. He is a notorious fabricator and back-ops agent. Vanity Fair reports him in the vicinity of the origins of the forged Niger documents that got us into the Iraq war. He is also linked to the Iran Contra scandal. Other reports have him spending a lot of time in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans where the intel was cooked to make the case for war in Iraq.
Ledeen is a rabid neocon who’s allegiance to Israel may be stronger than to the US. In one of his NRO articles he advocates destabilizing the Middle East as well as the United States. Plain and simple he is a Muslim hater.
Now he claims to have access to highly classified documents from the Iranian detentions in Iraq. Aren’t you the guy that rails on the msm when they publish classified information? He is definitely connected to the administration via his AEI affiliation, but that does not make him an honest broker.
With the neocons all roads lead to war….
7:00 pm
Regardless of the horrors of war and how the atrocities being committed by all involved are being portrayed in the worldwide media, those we are fighting can only become more emboldened when they see Americans so bitterly divided over US policy.
i wish you would stop blaming a failed war across the world on its critics at home.
Bush lost the war, not the left.
Bush lost the House and Seante as well.
Maybe you are backing a loser
4:29 pm
we live in iran but no body know’s that is he dead or no.may be it is a politic.who knows?