Iran’s Coming Leadership Crisis -Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has Cancer: Sohrab Ahmari
http://www.wsj.com/articles/sohrab-ahmari-irans-coming-leadership-crisis-1427064072
After him are men even less likely to comply with a nuclear deal.
Negotiators from Iran and the P5+1 powers led by the U.S. are racing against a March 31 deadline to conclude a nuclear deal in Lausanne, Switzerland. Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters on Saturday that negotiators had made “genuine progress” but that “important gaps remain.”
Yet what happens if the Iranian leadership that the U.S. and others are dealing with now is not in place to implement any agreement? Two recent developments suggest that the Islamic Republic may be heading toward one of its cyclical spasms of intense factional competition. The outcome could derail any deal, or leave the West committed to an agreement that is even less verifiable or useful than it might be today. There is scant evidence that the Obama administration is taking this into account.
The first warning was in September, with the news that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, age 75, had undergone treatment for prostate cancer. State-run media released rare photos of the most powerful man in Iran receiving visitors at a hospital. His illness will have put ambitious men in motion.
The second development was the election earlier this month of Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, a hard-line mullah, to head the Assembly of Experts, the clerical body that selects and nominally oversees the supreme leader. Mr. Yazdi triumphed over Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a founder of the Islamic Republic and Mr. Khamenei’s chief rival going back to the regime’s earliest days.
Mr. Rafsanjani led parliament throughout the 1980s and was Iran’s president for much of the 1990s. He is a patron of Iran’s current president, the supposedly moderate Hasan Rouhani. Mr. Rafsanjani’s ideology is often described as “pragmatic conservatism,” though during his presidency the regime carried out a campaign of bombings and assassinations against dissidents and Jewish targets abroad.
It’s well-known in Iran that Mr. Rafsanjani, now 80, still seeks the supreme leadership—and that his recent effort to climb back up the ladder was blocked by Mr. Khamenei. “Mr. Khamenei, who is one to hold grudges, didn’t want Rafsanjani to get the leadership of the assembly,” a former Iranian MP told me. “The whole effort was to prevent Rafsanjani.”
A succession struggle, if one develops, could result in dangerous instability and the empowerment of people who make the old rivals look moderate.
Ruhollah Khomeini, the ayatollah who led the 1979 revolution that toppled the shah, sought to ensure that succession in the new Islamic Republic would go smoothly. He held that supreme earthly authority must rest with a faqih, or scholar of law and ethics, who rules as a surrogate until Shiite Islam’s Hidden Imam reappears from a millennial state of occultation to herald the end of days.
Naturally, the first faqih was Khomeini. He created elected and unelected bodies, including the Assembly of Experts, to lend his theocracy a veneer of democratic legitimacy while checking any faction that might challenge his power. After Khomeini died in 1989, the Assembly of Experts selected Mr. Khamenei—president for most of the Islamic Republic’s first decade—as Iran’s next leader.
Mr. Khamenei at the time had the backing of Mr. Rafsanjani, a consummate wheeler-dealer who imagined that he could shape Mr. Khamenei’s leadership. That turned out to be a spectacular miscalculation. Mr. Khamenei struggled for a while but consolidated his grip on power, winning the backing of key constituencies. An important one was the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, the military force charged with preserving the regime at home and exporting the revolution abroad.
Iran’s elected president has sway over the direction of domestic policy and the execution of foreign policy, but the leader enjoys an absolute veto in all areas. The armed forces, judiciary and state-run media answer directly to the leader. Simply put, the Islamic Republic’s existence depends on the presence of a paramount leader. Mr. Khamenei fills that role, but no one is a sure thing to replace him.
Mr. Rafsanjani has the support of some elements among the clergy, the security establishment and business elite. But for many Iranians, the ultra-wealthy Mr. Rafsanjani embodies the corrupt, venal side of the Islamic Republic.
There has been occasional talk of Iran forming a leadership committee, but such a move would cut against the grain of a society accustomed for 2,500 years to obeying the authority of one man. Or the IRGC, which is estimated to control at least a third of Iran’s economy and is expanding its influence across the Arab world, might decide to take the reins directly and push the mullahs aside.
Take Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. The commander of the Guards’ Quds Force, who spearheaded Tehran’s efforts to preserve the Assad regime in Syria and is now leading Iraq’s Shiite militias against Islamic State, is increasingly in the public eye. Here he is photographed offering on-the-spot guidance to Shiite forces in Iraq; there he is seen praying in Syria. The Guards have toiled for decades in the shadows but now flaunt their power and prestige. These are not men given to compromise.
A nightmare scenario would arise if the more messianic, fanatical elements in the IRGC stage a coup after Mr. Khamenei’s death, capture the Assembly of Experts and appoint as leader someone like Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah Yazdi—a hard-liner’s hard-liner who has written that “the most advanced weapons must be produced inside our country even if our enemies don’t like it. There is no reason that they have the right to produce a special type of weapons, while other countries are deprived of it.”
Mr. Khamenei is still with us, but waiting in the wings are men and factions even less likely than the current leadership to live up to the terms of a deal. Will a nuclear agreement include a Mesbah Yazdi Exception Clause?
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