Iran After the Death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei

0:00Bray and Lairr on WNIC. Now more Iran coverage earlier. We talked to the White House Foreign Policy Reporter covering the Washington Angle. Now we've got the New Yorkers, Iran, and World Affairs expert, Robin Reich. He's the author of books, including the last great revolution, turmoil, and transformation in Iran. Robin, we always learn when you come on with us. Welcome back to WNIC. Hi, Brian. It's such a difficult time right now. Yes. And I see your latest article is called, What Ayatollah Ali Hamine meant to Iran and what comes next. Let's take each of those separately. I see you had breakfast with Hamine way back in 1987 before he came to power as the Supreme Leader. And you found him naively arrogant about theocratic rule. You wrote naively arrogant about theocratic rule.

1:02Why did you use those words? Well, I met him when he was president of Iran, a position he held for eight years in the 1980s before the death of the Revolutionary Leader Ayatollah Hamine. It was his only trip to the United States or in fact to the West. He spoke at the United Nations and I had a working breakfast with him. I thought he, because of his lack of travel or education or contact with the West, that he was kind of petulant and furious about the past U.S. interventions in Iran. And a little bit, quite a bit naive, about how to deal, how to close the gap. And remember, this is at a time that Iran was at war, at war, an eight year war with Iraq. And Iran was fighting back, but it was at the time the U.S. was providing intelligence

2:02to Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq, for him to use chemical weapons against Iranians. So this was one of the probably the toughest time in U.S.-Iran relations before the current war. And it was really interesting to meet the first Revolutionary Leader to come out to the outside world after the 1979 Revolution. So it was a really interesting moment. We know that the protests since December and that the Humane regime was willing to kill thousands of protesters in the streets, all the reports say thousands. What is the protest movement about? What mix of economic grievances and freedoms for women and others from the authoritarian theocracy? Well, the protests began in 2009 over a fraudulent election, at least that's what many Iranians believed. And millions took to the streets across the country. And the protests ran on sporadically for about six months.

3:07Since then, since 2017, particularly, there have been protests over issues such as price hike, sober gasoline, which we may be seeing ourselves. And the hardships of daily life, we saw in 2022, the protests moving over personal freedom in the women life, freedom movement. So there have been many triggers for protests in Iran. One of the difficult things at the moment is that the regime arrested tens of thousands of people since the current protests began in December. And when the United States is calling for regime change, many of those who might be out in the streets protesting and demanding something different are in jail. So now let's go on to what comes next. Horror article asks, can the regime survive without homine? Can you describe this three-person committee, people appointed by him, I believe, prior

4:10to his death, and how you see their goals or their hold on power? Well, there was always a system in place that there would be a three-person council to run until a new Supreme Leader was picked. The mechanism for that selection is in the hands of 88 senior clerics who were popularly elected, who then make the decision who select the Supreme Leader. It's kind of comparable to the College of Cardinals in picking a pulp. And so until that selection, the President of Iran, the head of the judiciary, and a senior cleric, who is a member of that assembly of experts, are running the show. Now how they're running the show is hard to see given the military conflict and the fact that so many of the leaders, military and apparently political, have been taken out.

5:10So I think this is a tenuous moment for the regime. It's a tenuous moment for the protesters and for the Iranian public and trying to understand. I think there are a number of options. One is that there's a new Supreme Leader who doesn't have quite the credibility or the leverage that I told how many had, but the system stays in place. The second is that the revolutionary guards who have enormous political sway, whose veterans have seats in parliament, and who have their tentacles in the economy, whether it's telecommunications or construction. And the third option is that there is some kind of regime change. The problem is that no one knows how that regime change happens in a country of 92 million people. There are a lot of young Nelson Mandela's, but there is no African National Congress, which

6:15was the group that Nelson Mandela led that had an infrastructure, organization, leadership and so forth. So there's no obvious alternative in Iran. Well how divided is the Iranian public? I think what most of our listeners have heard is one of the clips of President Trump saying it's on you now, Iranian people. We overthrew Hamine killed him, but now you have to rise up and take back your country. But this is a 90 million people country. It's a lot bigger than in Venezuela or even Iraq. Plus, there is the revolutionary guard and other security forces. How much is the Iranian public divided over even that as a goal? I have seen there have been pro-regime demonstrations in the streets, as well as other Iranians dancing in the streets at the death of Hamine. You know, you're right, Brian, as always, there's a bifurcated response.

7:16There were people in the first night dancing in the streets and hawking their horns and celebrating. There were also millions who turned out to mourn the Supreme Leader. And so this is where there is a division between the anti and pro-regime factions, but even among the public, they don't have the kind of unity that would lead us easily or quickly to a new regime. As I said, many are in jail, and there's no obvious leadership alternative. The reformers who at one point appeared to be kind of the hopeful alternative to the hardline faction in Iran have been marginalized. Some of them, including the leader of the takeover of the U.S. Embassy, are now in jail.

8:16Many of the reformers were arrested at the end of the protests. So as you rightly point out, the military still has the tools to repress. The real question is, what will the military, particularly revolutionary guards do? Will there be the kind of defections that led to the demise of the monarchy in 1979? And we have not seen any signs of that yet. We may in the days to come, but Iran has over 600,000 people, men largely, under arms, in the military, conventional, as well as the revolutionary guards, the police, all kinds of levels of security forces. And it can rally more than a million if it calls up reservists and paramilitary forces. And so here's a clip of Trump from his Saturday morning video that isn't getting as much

9:18play as the one in which he urged the Iranian people to rise up, but listen to what he urges and puts on the table here. To the members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, the armed forces, and all of the police, I say tonight that you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity, or in the alternative face certain death. That makes it sound like there would be a big surge of U.S. troops and they're going to try to kill every one of those hundreds of thousands of armed security forces who don't give up their weapons and to fact, that can't be what he's planning. Well, I mean, my initial reaction on hearing that was dream on, and who's giving them immunity? Is this the current regime or the new Supreme Leader and the new government? Is this the United States? Who makes those decisions? And does the U.S. have a list of all of the hundreds of thousands of military forces?

10:23I thought that was a very naive line because there are aspirations, maybe. But how do you do that? And we had the same problems when we dealt with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that when we tried to form governments in both places, it didn't go well. And it led to insurgencies in Iraq that became ISIS. And in Afghanistan, the Taliban came back and seized power in our longest war. So this is where we just don't know so much. But in our last minute, I wonder if you can give us a take on other countries in the region because Iraq responded around, responded by attacking a whole list of Gulf states. In addition to Israel, of course, but my question is about the Gulf states seen as U.S. allies or otherwise enemies of Iran in some way, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Oman, I

11:26think. So did the Gulf states want this war? No, absolutely not. I think the Crown Prince and Saudi Arabia reportedly was urging Trump to start this war, even though he was publicly saying he didn't want war. But I think none of these countries wanted to become targets of Iran's response. And we've already seen the fallout, the three planes shot down today by, in friendly fire by the Kuwaitis and Americans died in Kuwait over the weekend that, you know, this is playing out ways across the Persian Gulf that I don't know that the United States anticipated. I think President Trump said today, I think maybe just CNN or one of the shows that the U.S. didn't expect that kind of widespread response by Iran. Robin Wright, from the New Yorker, her latest article, What Ayatollah, Ali Humman-Amen

12:32to Iran, and What Comes Next. Thank you so much for sharing your insights with us, Robin. Thanks, Brian. Since WNYC's first broadcast in 1924, we've been dedicated to creating the kind of content we know the world needs. Since then, New York Public Radio's rigorous journalism has gone on to win a Peabody Award and a Dupont Columbia Award, among others. In addition to this award-winning reporting, your sponsorship also supports inspiring storytelling and extraordinary music that is free and accessible to all. To get in touch and find out more, visit sponsorship.wnyc.org.