Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei finally broke his silence on the Saudi-led coalition's Operation Decisive Storm against the Houthis in Yemen. In his latest speech, Khamenei has levied sharp criticisms against the operation and focused primarily on Saudi Arabia emphasizing that Riyadh would not emerge victorious from the war in Yemen, and condemning the military intervention saying "This is a crime and genocide that can be prosecuted in international courts". He also compared the Saudi-led military campaign on the Houthis to the Israeli wars on Gaza. The Iranian leader also touched upon the framework deal involving Tehran's nuclear program.
Aside from the contents of Khamenei's second public speech in a two months period, the most important matter is the timing of the speech and the targets of his criticism. The recent news about Khamenei's health have revived debate and questions on who will replace him in a peaceful transition if he dies or is deemed unable to carry out his duties and official responsibilities. In addition to the questions being raised about his potential successor, Khamenei gave his speech before conservative clergymen who have always been divided over Iran's nuclear negotiations with the West, where the United States' influence and leadership of the nuclear talks led to a number of bilateral meetings between Iranians and Americans. Most of the clergymen considered this involvement as a "deviation" from the approach being pursued by Iran's regime since its establishment in 1979 and from the approach of the country's former supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini against "the Great Satan", which urged them to consider the consequences of this departure on the viability of Iran's current regime.
The Ayatollah Succession Question
The succession of the current supreme leader of the Iranian "Islamic Revolution" has sparked wide debates in Iran, among the figures linked to the regime in particular. This dilemma casts shadow on the Iranian regime's future and its viability under the present special circumstances. Some observers say that the succession of Khomeini is governed by what seems to be a clear mechanism that previously facilitated easy transition after the death of Khomeini in 1989. Building on this argument, they develop scenarios that may hold true. But the problem lies not in the possible scenario nor in the person who will be chosen as the heir who will assume the most important office in the Iranian regime. It lies in what is going on behind the scenes of the transition, which the regime will try to carry out as soon as possible in an attempt to thwart any power struggle inside the regime itself between those who are considered eligible for the highest position in Iran.
The attempt would be also aimed at to avoid the debate over succession that was sparked when Khamenei himself took over in 1989. He was instrumental in a compound plot against then-deputy supreme leader, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who was sacked by Khomeini in 1988, for his criticism of the killing of human rights activists by pro-government forces, and then was placed under house arrest until he died in his sleep in 2009 in his house in Qom city. In addition, as top clerics in Qom agreed then that Khamenei was not eligible to be the supreme leader, he paid very few visits to the city so as to minimize criticism.
Significance of the recent Assembly of Experts elections
In March, Iran’s Assembly of Experts, the clerics who appoint and can dismiss the country’s supreme leader, picked an ultraconservative as their new chairman in a surprise appointment. Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, 83, was a deputy speaker of parliament after the 1979 Islamic revolution and headed the judiciary for a decade until 1999. He gained 47 of the 73 votes cast at a closed-door meeting in Tehran. Yazdi was among five contenders whose names had been linked to the position by Iranian media in recent weeks but he was not the most talked about.
His election represents a heavy defeat for the former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a relative moderate who previously held the position between 2007 and 2011, and who received 24 votes. Rafsanjani is Iran's former centrist president and current head of the Expediency Discernment Council. He was criticized for supporting the opposition who announced that the results of 2009 presidential elections, in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won a second term, were rigged. Yazdi takes up a position vacant since October 2014, when Ayatollah Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani died from a heart attack.
A campaign against Rafsanjani led to his removal from the Assembly of Experts. In March 2015, his son Mehdi was sentenced to 15 years in jail after being convicted of national security offences and embezzlement. In September 2012, Rafsanjani's daughter, Faezeh, was convicted of spreading propaganda against the regime. She was sentenced to six months in jail. This proves that there is a concord among the regime's hardliners to get rid of Rafsanjani's power and reduce his influence in any future political process since he played an important role in the choice of Ali Khamenei as Supreme Leader and was rewarded for this in 1989 by being elected as president.
Intriguingly, the organization of former Islamic Consultative Assembly members, in an open letter addressed to Rafsanjani in 2009, then head of the Assembly of Experts, challenged Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic's supreme leader's powers. The letter was addressed in light of the repercussions of suppressing the protests that rallied against the elections results. The unprecedented letter demanded a legal probe on the basis of Article 111 of the Constitution which stipulates that whenever the supreme leader becomes incapable of fulfilling his constitutional duties, or it becomes known that he did not possess some of the qualifications initially, he will be dismissed. According to articles 5 and 109, the essential qualifications and conditions for the supreme leader include justice and piety, as required for the leadership of the Islamic Ummah; right political and social perspicacity, prudence, courage, administrative facilities and adequate capability for leadership.
Accordingly, the election of Yazdi, an ultraconservative figure, was urgent and came with several indications. First and most importantly, it could mean that the issue of 'possible scenarios' has already been resolved and that a decision was already made in coordination with Khamenei himself and the other regime bodies, namely Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps, and that the current arrangement for selecting a successor to Khamenei will remain in place. This would enable the regime to make two vital steps. The first of which is to prevent any reformist figure, who may seek to introduce changes or make decisions that would ultimately undermine the powers and gains of the influential figures of the regime, from reaching power, as their influence is based far and foremost to their ties with the revolutionary regime they protect.
Secondly and equally important is the elimination of any chance for opposition figures in Qom City that may deem themselves more eligible to assume Iran's highest office or interfere in the process of selecting Khomeini's successor. In either case, the door will be open for domestic struggle in Iran that will inevitably undermine the jurisprudential foundations of the religious authority of the Iranian regime and even the eventual collapse of this regime.
The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps' (IRGC) stance
The very name of the "Army of the Guardians of the Islamic Revolution" reveals its ties to the Islamic revolutionary authority of the regime and its incessant efforts to keep a hardliner figure at the top of the hierarchy to ensure the continuity of the status quo in the country.
This view is further enhanced by the fact that the IRGC enjoys wide influence inside and outside Iran, and seeks to preserve its gains that made it central to the decision-making process in Tehran, and by the fact that that international pressures on Tehran, the sanctions imposed by the U.S. in particular, have played into IRGC's favor. The IRGC has the upper hand in Iran's foreign relations, more specifically in the oil and gas dealings where it invented new mechanisms and ways to avoid the sanctions and provide Iran with negotiation cards for its expansion into Middle East countries. Most importantly, IRGC directly supervises Iran's nuclear program that made the West, led by the U.S., to recognize Tehran's role as an influential party to any regional settlements. This benefited IRGC from the nuclear talks despite the fact that the IRGC does not want to reach a real and final settlement to the nuclear issue because any settlement will inevitably reduce their role in favor of Iran's legitimate economic institutions.
Therefore, the issue of succession and the selection of an ultraconservative figure that would preserves the interests of the majority of IRGC commanders means that it is ready to foil any attempt to depart from the conventional scenario of succession and choose a moderate figure to assume this office.
Hashemi Shahroudi as a Potential Successor
Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi is a "marja taqlid", which means the highest rank of Shia cleric and a "source of emulation" for followers. He was named Acting Chairman of the Assembly of Experts after the death of Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani, before the recent elections which Yazdi won. One of the closest figures to Khamenei, Shahroudi has been cited as a possible successor to the Supreme Leader. Away from the fact that he was born in Najaf, Iraq, where he studied at the hawza, the city's seminary of theological school, Shahroudi is expected to play a more-than-expected role in the power struggle between the hawza of Najaf and the hawza of Qom. During the time he spent in Iraq as a high-ranking religious authority, he was known by his Arabic name Mahmoud Hashemi, and had followers in both Iraq and Iran. That is why his possible ascension to the position of Supreme Leader would alleviate the struggle between Najaf and Qom and silence voices in Najaf that claim the right to leading the Shia Imamate as he belongs to the Najaf seminary.
But the question that begs itself: How responsive would the other religious authorities (marja) be to his leadership? These high-ranking clerics are controlled by other rules of selecting a supreme leader including the numbers of followers. However, this issue may possibly be solved by Khamenei who is not yet willing to appoint a deputy supreme leader who may possible oust him as part of an agreement with the powerful circles around him, including the hardline clerics or IRGC commanders.
Khamenei even introduced his son Sayyed Mojtaba as another likely contender but his attempt was faced with sharp criticism, from opposition clerics, in particular, for a dynastic transition despite Khamenei's frequent visits to Qom to mobilize the support of loyal religious authorities. Mojtaba, who holds a powerful role in his father's office, has strong economic ties with IRGC, which was among the reasons why he went out of sight for some time.
The succession issue and U.S.-Iranian relations
Since the Iranian Revolution, which enabled the Islamist revolutionaries to seize power in 1979, U.S. remained the arch enemy that Iran always demonized according to Khomeini's derogatory epithet. The slogans "Down with American" and "the U.S is the great Satan" are seen everywhere in Iran where the revolutionary regime was founded on this enmity to the U.S. and Istekbar-e Jahani (Global Arrogance). The regime continued to pursue this approach even during the nuclear talks and used the sanctions against Iran to justify its own problems and gain its followers' sympathy despite the fact that this regime provided Washington with a number of services during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. In addition, as U.S. began to withdraw its troops from Iraq in 2007, Iran had the opportunity to fill the vacuum there and consequently have total control of Iraq's decision-making.
Therefore, the Iranian regime would emerge as the sole beneficiary from the current nuclear talks. That is, if the these negotiations succeed and a final accord is signed and put to vote at the UN Security Council and consequently the international sanctions including U.S. sanctions are lifted, then the Iranian regime will appear to have succeeded with its policies and emerge as the most eligible to continue to rule Iran.
However, even in case the negotiations fail, the Iranian regime will use the failure at home to sell the argument that the U.S. and the West were not serious about reaching an agreement that would ensure Iran's right to peaceful use of nuclear energy, and to harden the tone of its nationalist approach that will be well-received in Tehran where a religious hardline tone will be needed.
Overall, the Iranians are the sole beneficiary from the current developments. The U.S. attempts to appeal to Iran to keep it engaged in the nuclear talks included omitting Iran and Hezbollah from the terror threat list on the basis that both are partners to the war on terrorism. Moreover, the U.S. has overlooked the renewal of Iran sanctions in favor of the continuity of nuclear talks. These gains gave the Iranian regime a break to catch its breath, invest in the reformist front and further expand into the region so as to have more opportunities to maneuver during any talks with any parties to the regional issues.
Having said that, the Iranian regime believes that the shifts in U.S. stances could lead to a state of uncertainty due to U.S. commitment to the negotiations, as expressed in the framework agreement that could mean that U.S. would overlook Iran's efforts to consolidate its influence in the region. This is particularly so because of what Tehran considers as "attempts by Washington" to reassure its traditional Middle East allies at the expense of Iran. U.S. has indeed backed the Saudi-led coalition's campaign against the Houthis in Yemen, and its secretary of defense, Ashton Carter, recently threatened that the U.S. would "shut down, set back and destroy the Iranian nuclear program" at the foothills of the mountains using the military's most powerful ground-penetrating and bunker-busting bomb.
But the reality says that what the U.S. is really doing is trying to strike a balanced stance pending a final nuclear agreement with Iran. Until then, the U.S. has to adopt reassurance measures to prevent any setback in its relations with the Arabs, the Gulf countries in particular.
