In 1942, German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht wrote a short poem entitled “On Hearing that a Great Statesman Has Fallen Ill.” The poem goes: “If the indispensable man frowns – two empires quake.
If the indispensable man dies – the world looks around like a mother without milk for her child. And if the indispensable man were to come back a week after his death – in the entire country there wouldn’t be a job for him as a hall-porter.”
I was reminded of this poem upon hearing of the death of Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi. The late president was the lucky beneficiary of a process, underway over the last decade, in which Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has ensured the advance of ideological hardliners of Raisi’s type, at the expense of more capable but less zealous technocrats.
The intention of this effort, as outlined in the “Second Phase of the Islamic Revolution” document published in 2019, is to ensure the continuation and rejuvenation of the ideological and religious outlook underlying the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Khamenei, as Saeid Golkar, a US-based Iranian academic told me, “wants to see his ideological regime outlive him.”
The result, however, has been the ascent of individuals of mediocre abilities whose only qualification for occupying their senior positions is their unwavering ideological commitment to the regime. Raisi exemplified this process and was perhaps its most senior beneficiary.
The role of Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi
The late president’s main claim to senior office rested on his reputation as a zealous prosecutor-general in the late 1980s. At that time, Raisi became known as an enthusiastic member of a four-man team whose task was to sign death warrants for opponents of the regime held in regime prisons. The team was involved in the executions of more than 8,000 political prisoners.
This activity required no special skills and led to his moniker as the “Butcher of Tehran.” It also led to his subsequent appointment as attorney-general, and then to his “election” as president.
The main result of the elevation of hardliners of Raisi’s type, who lack any executive skills, has been chaos and dysfunction in the Iranian system.
The position of “president” in the Islamic Republic of Iran contains far less authority than might be supposed. Matters of national security and foreign policy are all in the hands of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Nevertheless, in so far as Raisi was able to make decisions and exercise authority, the results were in line with what might be expected.
Having campaigned on a set of promises in the social/economic realm – to tackle unemployment, reduce inflation, and strengthen the currency – Raisi departs the scene at a time when unemployment is at 9%, inflation 38.5%, and the rial at an all-time low against the dollar.
RAISI’S DEPARTURE won’t end this rise of the mediocre in the Iranian system. His temporary successor, former IRGC officer Mohammed Mokhber, is a product of the same process.
An interchangeable array of regime-dependent ideological hardliners remains available to the supreme leader to fill this post in the longer term – Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Saeed Jalili, and a few others.
A significant aspect of Raisi’s demise, nevertheless, is that he may well have been Supreme Leader Khamenei’s preferred candidate for the succession to the position of supreme leader.
Raisi hailed from the same region as Khamenei, Razavi Khorasan province, held similar views, and was a Sayed, a wearer of the black turban signifying descent from Muhammad, the prophet of Islam.
His disappearance, Golkar told me in our conversation, increases the chances that Mojtaba Khamenei, the current supreme leader’s son, will succeed his father – turning the Islamic Republic into an example of that most Middle Eastern of systems, a republican monarchy.
Foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian was also a beneficiary of the hardliners’ march through the institutions that produced Raisi.
The latter, however, may be a little more difficult to replace than Raisi. Amir-Abdollahian was an energetic, activist foreign minister, deeply embedded in and connected to the proxy militia networks that are Iran’s main instrument of regional power projection.
He had developed personal connections to key individuals in that nexus, including the leaders of Lebanese Hezbollah and Hamas.
Abdollahian’s demise does not represent a grave, serious blow to this strategy or these structures; but his successor, Ali Bagheri Kani, does not have these connections and will need to develop them.
SO WHAT might be learned from this advance of mediocre ideologues to the top ranks of the Iranian regime, at a time when Iran is just emerging from a period of great internal instability?
First, it is testament to the very different state of the Iranian regime’s capacities and fortunes externally and internally. Even though four years have passed since the killing of IRGC Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani, the major general’s project of power building by use of political and military proxies is flourishing.
As a result, Iran has consolidated its control of Lebanon and Iraq, dominates a large part of Yemen, and has freedom of action in most of Syria.
It has used the array of militias to launch a limited war against Israel and its Western allies which is being waged on five fronts – Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen/Gulf of Aden. Iran’s enemies have not yet come up with a strategy to turn back the march of the IRGC’s Islamist proxy armies across the Arabic-speaking Middle East.
It turns out that contrary to some predictions, Brecht’s edict concerning the “indispensable statesman” applies even to Soleimani. The structures and approach he pioneered were sufficiently strong and developed at the time of his death that they have been able to function even in his absence.
YET, AT THE same time that the Islamic Republic is advancing impressively across the broken Middle East, the regime remains in a state of unprecedented disarray at home.
Khamenei’s mediocrities’ mismanagement of the economy is producing seething discontent across a wide swathe of society.
This is reflected in the very low participation in elections, the nationwide protests of 2022-23, and the evidence of celebrations of Raisi’s and foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian’s demise.
The elevation of the hardliners has not led to renewed fervor on the part of the regime, but rather to the entrenchment of an elite determined to preserve the Islamic Republic at all costs because it owes its financial and political power to the regime’s continuation.
A Tehran-based analyst whom I spoke to estimated that this elite probably accounts for no more than 10-15% of the Iranian population.
This adds up to a regime that is externally successfully aggressive, and yet internally deeply vulnerable. If those elements opposed to the Islamic Republic’s advance wanted to develop a strategy to exploit this internal weakness, the direction, the targets, and the way forward are very clear.
The loss of Ebrahim Raisi, the eminently dispensable statesman, makes very little difference either way to this.
But the question of whether the regime’s opponents formulate such a strategy, or fail to do so, remains the single most important variable in considering the future of the Iranian regime and, given its external successes, possibly also of the region as a whole.