Mojtaba Khamenei Heralds the End of the Islamic Republic

Against the wishes of both Ayatollah Khomeini and his successor Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Mojtaba Khamenei has been elected by the Assembly of Experts as the new supreme leader. He is widely reported to be comatose or dead; even if these reports prove to be true, his rise to power signals the transformation of a revolutionary regime to a hereditary monarchy. More on the significance of Mojtaba Khamenei’s appointment can be found here: “Middle Israel: Mojtaba Khamenei’s appointment shows Iran’s revolution is dead – opinion,” by Amotz Asa-El, Jerusalem Post, March 13, 2026:

The end was swift. With Hitler dead, Germany overrun, and its army dismembered, the Third Reich’s theoretical president, Admiral Karl Donitz, ordered the military’s chief of operations, Gen. Alfred Jodl, to sign the surrender instrument that ended World War Two’s European part.

With its president-for-20-days having proceeded from this act to the Nuremberg Trial’s defendants’ box, Germany’s regime-change process was formally underway.

Now, anyone who cares for freedom hopes that this is what will happen in Iran in the aftermath of the attacks it is sustaining at this writing. Alas, chances of such a scenario unfolding in Tehran are nil.

Germany’s surrender followed a massive ground invasion of some 4.5 million troops who pincered it from its east and west. The current attack on Iran, by contrast, does not, and in all likelihood will not, involve a ground invasion at all.

That is why there will be no foreign occupation of Tehran that would remove its leaders and install others in their place. The ayatollahs know this, and that is what they meant to say when they picked their slain leader’s successor this week.

Their choice was an inversion of Gen Donitz: not an admiral whose sole task would be to deliver the previous order’s surrender, but a turbaned cleric whose installation is designed to announce the previous order’s defiance, audacity, and persistence.

Well, despite this political survival, morally the Khomeini Revolution is dead, as the appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei attests.

The Khomeini Revolution’s most potent engine was its popular support. Yes, the mullahs never had the guts to hold a truly free and fair election that would measure and thus challenge their popularity. Even so, in the revolution’s early years, a critical mass of Iranians sincerely hated the shah and liked his successors.

The ayatollahs’ social strategy was transparent and efficient. The previous regime’s elite were attacked, frontally and violently, most notably with the executions of the military’s top brass and senior government officials. The moneyed elite was chased abroad, and the middle class was intimidated but tolerated. At the same time, the rural masses were nurtured as the regime’s naturally conservative backbone.

This structure lasted for about a generation, and then began to crack. Its decline has been evident for years, as noted here already last decade (“The truth about Iran’s unrest,” 6 January 2018)

As had happened with the communist idea long before the downfall of the Soviet Union, too many Iranians had ceased to believe in the Khomeinist idea, and in the leadership that represented it. Like the declining USSR’s mandarins, the ayatollahs also choked the economy, created their own privileged elite, stifled social mobility, and destroyed the environment.

Like the USSR’s roughly 10 million Communist Party members, the roughly 100,000 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards controlled and bilked the economy, at the people’s expense. In Iran, this stranglehold made the people struggle with hyperinflation, eat meat hardly once a week, and watch the regime’s cronies thrive while millions of university graduates were unemployed.

Even so, the ayatollahs sent their destitute country into imperialistic adventures from Yemen to Lebanon, much like the declining USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan. It was an economic alchemy that was financially absurd, even before one considers this project’s political recklessness….

The Islamic Republic has seen its economy steadily decline, and the percentage of people living in poverty steadily rise; now the poverty rate is above 50%. At the same time as this economic degringolade, the rulers have insisted on spending enormous sums on Iran’s nuclear program, which is estimated to have cost the state more than $100 billion; most of that program has gone up in literal smoke, thanks to repeated attacks by Israel and the United States on nuclear facilities during the Twelve-Day War last June, and again from February 28 to the present. Those attacks on Natanz, Fordow, Isfahan, and a secret site just discovered by Israel, will continue until there is nothing left. Furthermore, the Islamic Republic has spent tens of billions of dollars on aid — both money and weapons — for Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza, the Houthis in Yemen, and for Bashar Assad during the Syrian civil War. Now the IDF has badly battered both Hezbollah and Hamas, the Houthis are just hanging on in Yemen, and Bashar Assad lost the civil war and had to flee to Moscow.

According to the expressed wishes of Ayatollah Khomeini, no subsequent ruler of Iran should be the descendant of a previous ruler. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made explicit his own wish that his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, not be allowed to succeed him, for that would turn Iran into a kind of monarchy, the very thing that the revolutionaries of 1979 vowed to oppose. Besides, Mojtaba Khamenei lacks the necessary qualifications: unlike both his father and the founder of the Islamic Republic, he is not himself an ayatollah, or was not one until quite recently. Ali Khamenei greatly expanded the nuclear program that had been started during the ten years of Ayatollah Khomeini’s rule, and deepened Iran’s support for Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, when the dream of an Iranian-led “Shi’a axis” that would surround and strangle the hated Jewish state first took root. Weapons and money for Iran’s proxies has proven to be a terrible investment; Israel has badly degraded the military of every one of the actors Iran supported — Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the Syrian government of Bashir Assad — at a total cost of tens of billions of dollars.

And now, after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and Basij militia massacred 36,500 unarmed and largely peaceful protesters in mid-January, the state’s moral bankruptcy is clear. Eighty-five percent of Iranians inside Iran, according to opinion polls conducted surreptitiously, oppose the regime. All of the four to five million people in the Iranian diaspora ardently hope for the Islamic Republic to collapse. Every missile and every drone attack on its Gulf Arab neighbors have caused the Gulf Arab states to view Iran’s regime as an implacable enemy that cannot be assuaged but must be destroyed. And so one now sees in Gulf Arab states a strange spectacle: people on the streets, and posts on social media, filled with praise for America and Israel, as the two best air forces in the world take apart Iran’s military threat to the region, and to the world. The immediate threat from Iran is its ballistic missile program, but tomorrow, once the ballistic missiles and, especially, the missile launchers, have been destroyed, the main threat will certainly be the nuclear weapons program, as Iran hopes its new underground sites, including that at Pickaxe Mountain, are buried deep enough to avoid total destruction even by the biggest bunker-buster bombs in the American armory.