A post I just made in a private forum:
So who’s running Iran right now? Some kind of transitional council which includes the elected president (in charge of civil administration, but with no say over strategic or military matters), head of the judiciary (a mullah and former intelligence minister), a representative of the mullahs (who have their own political process responsible for e.g. selecting the next supreme leader)… and Ali Larijani, who is described not only as a representative of the security forces, but who is said to have masterminded the January crackdown and massacre, and who has held many elite positions in the Iranian system. He was at one time the chief nuclear negotiator, and he’s currently the head of their NSC, for example.
So this is probably apparatus of the Iranian deep state, laid bare by the killing of Khamenei and so many other officials. I’ve never read it, but I think Tom Clancy has a novel in which a terrorist attack destroys the Capitol and wipes out most of the American leadership including Congress, leaving his protagonist to be suddenly elevated to the presidency. Something like this has happened for real to Iran.
Their priority right now has to be, to stabilize the situation and reassert their authority. Larijani seems to be the one who’s actually running things, but I doubt that they will elevate him to supreme leader, he’s too useful as the strategic brain.
In a way what’s more interesting is whether there will be a reshuffle in the hierarchy of charismatic authority among all the different leaderships in Iran. Khamenei was a comrade of Khomeini himself, he belonged to the revolutionary generation that resisted and then overthrew the Shah, and so while he lived, he was able to give the office of supreme leader the charismatic pre-eminence that it is also supposed to have institutionally.
But after his death, I can’t think of anyone who has the same aura. The supreme leader is supposed to be selected by an assembly of ayatollahs, but Khamenei’s opinion (or alleged opinion) on who his successor should be, should also count for something. I’m actually wondering if this ex intelligence minister has a chance, because he was a student of Mesbah-Yazdi, a senior ayatollah who was both “ultra-conservative” and also an academic philosopher, and who always had a faction pushing him for the position of supreme leader. He died a few years ago, but I wonder if the ex intelligence minister has sufficient religious qualifications, that the Mesbah-Yazdi faction could propose him for supreme leader…
But like I said, whoever gets in, I can’t see them having the same aura as Khomeini or Khamenei, and this may imply a demotion in the supreme leader’s power - ironically, something that reformist mullahs have wanted for years (there has been plenty of religious opposition among Shiites to the unique system that Khomeini created, which elevated one ayatollah to absolute ruler, just like the shah). There’s also a tactical value to having a weak interim spiritual leader for a while - right now American and Israeli planes are swarming overhead, and it would weaken the system to have a series of supreme leaders installed and then assassinated. Better to leave the realpolitik guy, Larijani, in charge - the Americans probably don’t want to kill him just yet, they will want to hear what he has to say, and whether they can arrive at a Venezuela-style deal.
So Larijani will continue as the de-facto interim leader, juggling diplomacy, internal politics and security, defiant rhetoric, and modulating any counteroffensive. If he can outlast this attack without losing authority, then he can save the Islamist system, and Iran will once again gain some time to rebuild. The situation would be analogous to Iraq in the late 1990s.
The situation also reminds me a bit of Iran in the immediate aftermath of the Shah’s abdication. Just as the supreme leader had a president who was just a civil administrator, the shah had a prime minister (Mohammed Bakhtiar), and after the shah’s final abdication, Bakhtiar was briefly in charge, freed all the political prisoners, and let Khomeini into the country. Khomeini appointed his own rival prime minister (Mehdi Bazargan), and the Bazargan government soon replaced the Bakhtiar government as the one that was actually running things. Bakhtiar went into exile and was assassinated years later in France, while Bazargan (who had been a liberal opposition leader) couldn’t control Khomeini’s Islamist zealots, and eventually retired from politics to become an academic.
After that Islamist politics was fully in charge, there was a new hierarchy with Khomeini on top as supreme leader, then a president, then a prime minister. Iraq invaded Iran, trying to annex its Arab province (Khuzestan), Bazargan’s successor was assassinated, and Khamenei entered the scene as the president, a position he held throughout the war and until Khomeini’s death in 1989, at which point he was elevated to the new supreme leader.
As we know, the son of the last shah has proposed to return to Iran as a figurehead for a secular democratic transition. It would be an ironic unwinding of 1979’s Pahlavi-to-Khomeini exchange, but I really don’t know if he has the support. The British originally installed the Pahlavis, the Americans restored them to power after the Mossadegh interlude, and now a Pahlavi once again has some support among the Iranian diaspora. But don’t forget, Iran has a very pluralistic political scene. Whenever there was an election, large numbers of people stood as candidates, it’s just that most of them were then vetoed by the mullahs. It may well be that Iran’s politics will be dominated by people not known to us outsiders, but already well-known to Iranians.
