Chapter 1: What led to the death of Ayatollah Khamenei?
After decades in power and after his regime murdered tens of thousands of its own citizens, Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed in the initial strikes of Operation Epic Fury. The Ayatollah's death has prompted both exuberance and concern about who or what might fill the power vacuum.
In this episode, we speak with the senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies about Khomeini's dark legacy and how his death has already begun to change Iran. I'm Daily Wire executive editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe. This is a weekend edition of One Wire.
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Chapter 2: How is the Iranian public reacting to Khamenei's death?
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Chapter 3: What is Khamenei's legacy in Iran?
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Joining us now is Benham bin Taliblu, the senior director of the Iran program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Benham, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on.
Pleasure. Always good to be back with you guys. Thank you.
So Ayatollah Khomeini ruled for 36 years in Iran. He was a power player, actually, since the Islamic Revolution in 79. So he's been there from the beginning.
Chapter 4: What were the defining characteristics of Khamenei's regime?
What is the reaction on the ground there to his death?
Well, largely the reaction is felicitation and jubilation. You know, Iran just went through its biggest nationwide anti-regime uprising in the month of January with 30,000 to 40,000 killed just in a matter of days. That was coterminous with one of the nation's largest Internet blackouts. And among one of the many chance that we've heard was death to Khamenei.
And the Iranian population is quite literally no longer filtering itself when it comes to its views, values and intentions here. They rightly hold the supreme leader supremely accountable for the state that their country has been in.
Now, for people who aren't familiar with Khomeini, how did he come into power 36 years ago?
Well, it was quite a bit of musical chairs at the top. Khamenei occupied the position of supreme leader, or more aptly put, guardianship of the jurisprudent. And that religious title is a manufactured title that Iranian officials said only senior clergy, only ayatollahs, basically the equivalent of a religious PhD could have. But religiously, Khamenei has a religious version of an eme.
He's a hojat al-Islam, so he was kind of promoted overnight and pushed forward in the elite infighting after the death of the founding father of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini. I know that the Ks can get confusing. I'm a first-generation Iranian-American myself, speak fluent Persian, but at the same time, Khamenei and Khomeini can be sometimes confusing.
I've made this slip up before, but trust me, we know who they are here. After the death of Khomeini, Khamenei was pushed forward by some of Iran's political elite, thinking that he would be a pliant cleric.
But in his three and a half decades in power, Khamenei had really consolidated the security services and brought in the military to politics, to society, and to the economy, and relied on them for his three and a half decades of terror.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you specifically about that, his very strict, rigid regime and his method of rule. There was a fundamentalist Islamic aspect to it, of course. What are some of the defining characteristics of his reign?
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Chapter 5: How did Khamenei's policies affect women in Iran?
So Khamenei's reign at home was a reign that did not budge, did not offer representative government, and really continued to push for the institutionalization of their own perverse brand of Twelver Shi'ism.
One follow-up to that, particularly the treatment of women under his regime. There's been a lot of reports about the specific laws, marriage laws, as it applies to women, women in the workforce, etc. What was it like for women under his reign?
Well, unfortunately, in the 47 years of the Islamic Republic, one of the biggest social losers have been women, which is why one of the first and earliest protests against the Islamic Republic, which was about the hijab issue, was led by women just months after this regime was established in 1979.
So it's not a shocker that as things go on and the Islamic Republic continues to really tout this brand of Islamism, that not just women but really all strands of society begin to push back. But there's no doubt that one of the most –
Biggest losers of 47 years of an Islamic Republic across two similarly hardline and fundamentalist supreme leaders who have been instituting that version of Islamism have been women. So there are certain academic fields that women are prohibited from. There's certainly an underrepresentation in the job market, even though they can be overrepresented when it comes to advanced degrees.
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Chapter 6: What do we know about Khomeini as a person?
There's institutional discrimination at the judiciary and through the legal process of the Islamic Republic. And unfortunately, by institutionalizing Islamic law, it has done horrible things when it comes to, you know, the age of marriage, for example, or a woman's right to divorce.
Now, what do we know about Khomeini as a person? I know there have been some almost flattering puff pieces and obituaries in some of the Western media, but what do we know about what he was actually like?
Well, fortunately, I never met him, but based on having spent many years of my life having to read every speech, every comment, every essay that this individual has written, you can tell that this individual has a fairly consistent worldview and a worldview that actually hardens or crystallizes the more they reach power.
The old saying about power, which is that with power comes corruption, with absolute power comes absolute corruption. You really did begin to see that in the first few years of the tenure of Khamenei's supreme leadership. As a person, they say, however, Khamenei was a bit more timid. You could even say when it comes to crises, for example, every time there's a major protest, he retreats.
This is something that some of his closest advisors and former family members who have been outspoken since the 2009 Green Revolution have said and have put at the service of Persian diaspora media. But Khamenei is many things to many people. He's a hardline anti-American theocrat. He is a failed poet. He is someone who carries the burdens of.
and prejudices of coming from a very, very poor family that was discriminated against both for wealth as well as for going in to the institution of the clergy to begin with. And he always really envisioned, I mean the failed poet thing in a sincere way, because he always envisioned himself as some kind of master literary figure. But in reality, the hard, brutal truth was that He was not.
He was, in essence, really just a mid-level theocrat put in charge of a major national security state. And when you have all these pretensions and presumptions about power, but you don't have the capability to follow that through, the country will end up looking like Iran does look like today, which is a country of amazing potential. But that really has been driven into the ground.
So despite what some people have reported in obituaries about his personal inclinations that he likes to read Victor Hugo. It's his track record that matters. You know, people are actually very complex. Terrorists can have families too. I'm not interested in how Khamenei treated his cousins or his brothers. I'm interested in what he did with the place where my ancestral family comes from.
Right. Now, who exactly will fill the power vacuum in the long term remains to be seen, of course. But even just with the fact that Khomeini is now out of the picture, how might that change things in the country now?
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Chapter 7: Who is likely to fill the power vacuum left by Khamenei?
as we have rumors that Khamenei's son is supposed to succeed him as supreme leader, as we have, you know, reports that there is this interim leadership council of the president of another cleric named Rafi and the head of the judiciary named Eje, as those three are, quote unquote, leading the country in a temporary leadership council.
In reality, the power structure that matters is the Supreme National Security Council, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Ali Larijani.
Now, even if those individuals were wiped out, presumably there are Iranians who are still loyal to the old regime. Do we know what percentage of the population falls in that category?
Well, unfortunately, given their cohesion, large swaths of the security services are loyal, as well as hardline political, military, and religious elites, as well as, you could assume, some but not all of their family members and network of friends and veterans.
Beyond that, in a country of about 91.5, 92 million, a back-of-the-envelope assessment, all anecdotal, not really empirical, is at max 20, 15 percent, which can still be a sizable number in a country that is that big. And the minority strategy of rule is the strategy that Ali Khamenei had inherited and perfected.
Well, as we've seen, that approach can last for decades. Let's hope those days are done. Benham, thank you so much for coming on. We really appreciate your expertise.
Always a pleasure. Thank you.
That was Benham Ben-Taliblu of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. And this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.
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