Lower than two weeks into the American and Israeli bombardment of Iran, the struggle is each successful and a failure. Militarily, the marketing campaign has successfully degraded the Islamic Republic’s warmaking capacities. However politically, to this point, it has solely strengthened the regime’s cohesion.
President Trump might have hoped the elimination of the Islamic Republic’s longtime supreme chief, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would produce an Iranian Delcy Rodríguez—a practical insider who would capitulate to American stress—however it has as a substitute spawned a budding Iranian Kim Jong Un. Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, will succeed his father, making the Islamic Republic a hereditary dictatorship poised to double down on ideology and repression.
Mojtaba inherits one of the vital tough jobs on the earth. Reportedly injured and in hiding, he’ll lead a authorities that’s concurrently preventing full-blown wars in opposition to america and Israel and in opposition to a lot of its personal inhabitants. He survived the missile strike that killed his father, spouse, and mom solely as a result of he was in an adjoining room. The assault that almost killed him catapulted him to energy, because the Islamic Republic, preventing for its personal survival, closed ranks round a son dedicated to his father’s revolutionary rules—selecting continuity over competence and familiarity over sudden change.
Mojtaba’s predicament just isn’t solely bodily. The revolution’s founding ideology provides him treasured little legitimacy for the position he’s about to imagine. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the chief of the 1979 revolution that deposed a hereditary monarchy to determine a theocracy, known as hereditary succession a “sinister, evil system of presidency” that “has no place in Islam.” Just like the pigs in Animal Farm, the Islamic Republic’s leaders have turn out to be a dynastic ruling class presiding over a system of privilege and repression much more egregious than the one they overthrew.
Mojtaba’s identify is acquainted to the Iranian public, however his face and voice are usually not. He has been talked about as a possible successor for greater than a decade, however the one video of him on-line is a brief, grainy clip about seminary issues. A supply in Tehran who has recognized him for greater than 4 a long time described him to me as “extra radical” however “a lot much less succesful” than his father.
The elder Khamenei was a real revolutionary. He spent years in jail below the shah and rose to energy on the power of his oratory. His son grew up a princeling in his father’s shadow, present process not one of the hardship that solid the daddy’s authority. Those that know Mojtaba effectively say he’s a poor speaker and has the stunted interpersonal expertise of a dictator’s son. “When folks hear his maiden speech as chief,” my supply informed me, “they’ll see his lack of presence.”
The second-oldest of Khamenei’s 4 sons, all of whom grew to become clerics, Mojtaba was reportedly a weak scholar. Whereas his father was a voracious reader, together with of Western novels, Mojtaba has primarily learn Islamic texts and the poetry of Hafez. His abroad journey has been restricted to Saudi Arabia, on pilgrimage, and the UK, for medical remedy. Opposite to authorities propaganda, the identical supply stated, he doesn’t converse English. His father was not a heat presence, however Mojtaba is taken into account dry even by comparability.
Onerous males populate Mojtaba’s interior circle. They embody figures reminiscent of Hossein Taeb, the dreaded former head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ intelligence arm; Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former IRGC commander and the present speaker of Parliament; and Hossein Fadaei, the late Ali Khamenei’s major inner enforcer. These figures have collectively spent greater than a century within the service of repression. Their coarsened appearances replicate George Orwell’s statement that by age 50, each man has the face that he deserves.
Taeb and the youthful Khamenei return to the Nineteen Eighties, when Mojtaba served within the Iran-Iraq Conflict and Taeb was his commander. Though the clergy and the IRGC are generally understood as separate pillars of the Islamic Republic, Taeb, as each a cleric and an IRGC officer, serves as a bridge between the 2 energy facilities. Some of the feared and loathed males in Iran, he’s thought to have helped engineer Mojtaba’s succession via his affect over the Meeting of Consultants, the physique of aged clerics liable for selecting the supreme chief.
Siamak Namazi, a U.S. citizen, is a businessman and an Iran analyst who was held hostage for practically eight years by the IRGC intelligence company when it was below Taeb’s command. Namazi described Taeb to me as “probably the most hard-line of the hard-line” and “one of the vital evil figures within the Islamic Republic.” The regime has lengthy taken twin and international nationals hostage to make use of as instruments of international coverage or monetary extortion. Namazi believes that Taeb, with Mojtaba’s blessing, is behind many of those incidents and that the observe is unlikely to finish so long as each males stay alive and in energy.
Whereas the nation is in disaster mode, Mojtaba might want to depend on Ali Larijani for home and foreign-policy experience. Larjani is likely one of the few remaining regime loyalists with senior expertise in each the home and the worldwide realms. In a current state-television interview, filmed in what seems to be a bunker, a relaxed Larijani stated that Iran had been “raped” by outdoors powers, and he tried to rally not simply the regime’s base however the broader public behind the crucial to fend off international designs. Trump’s phrases—the U.S. president had stated that he would select Iran’s subsequent chief, and that he didn’t know whether or not Iran’s map would look the identical on the finish of the struggle—have proved invaluable propaganda instruments for the Islamic Republic.
For the foreseeable future, Mojtaba will try and rule from hiding as he tries to elude Israeli assassination. His focus might be not governing the nation however staying alive. Whether or not Mojtaba has the endurance for this life is an open query. His father was solid by years of revolutionary hardship—jail, persecution, life underground—earlier than coming to energy and reportedly amassing a struggle chest exceeding $100 billion, constructed partially from properties confiscated from spiritual minorities who fled persecution.
Mojtaba has skipped the hardship portion of that arc completely. A Bloomberg report means that he has, through middlemen, already amassed a private abroad fortune exceeding $150 million—the entitlements of a privileged scion, not the spoils of a revolutionary. Because the social theorist Eric Hoffer as soon as noticed, “Each nice trigger begins as a motion, turns into a enterprise, and finally degenerates right into a racket.”
One in every of Iran’s most distinguished Twentieth-century secular intellectuals, Ahmad Kasravi, noticed that Iran “owed the clergy one authorities,” simply in order that the folks might really witness the clerics’ incompetence. That debt has been settled in full by 5 a long time of theocratic brutality and financial decay. In a darkish twist of historical past, Kasravi was assassinated in 1946 by a radical Islamist named Mojtaba Navab Safavi, who sought to determine an Islamic state in Iran. Safavi was executed by the shah a decade later, when Ali Khamenei was a youngster. Khamenei as soon as declared that Safavi “first kindled the hearth of revolutionary Islam in my coronary heart.” It was in his honor that Khamenei named his second-born son.
Trump has little curiosity on this historical past. He desires a deal and an exit. However can he afford to finish a pricey and chaotic struggle by leaving Iran within the arms of a Khamenei who’s simply as radical, and 30 years youthful, than the person he killed?
In Tehran, the one males who at present have the legitimacy to finish the struggle are actually doubly dedicated to the character of the Islamic Republic. Foremost amongst them is the brand new supreme chief, who in the most effective of instances possessed neither the worldview nor the temperament to fulfill Trump’s public demand for unconditional give up. “They’ve simply killed his household,” the supply in Tehran stated. “He’s bloodthirsty now.”
