by Tim Black, spiked
Under Ayatollah Khamenei, the Islamic Republic became one of the most despotic, dangerous regimes on Earth.
‘Death to the dictator.’ Iranian protesters have chanted this in the direction of Ayatollah Khamenei for years now. On Saturday morning, a US-Israeli airstrike finally made good on their call to arms, killing the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic alongside several family members in a compound in the heart of Tehran.
It is a truly momentous event, an inflection point in modern history. We can and must debate the wisdom and morality of this act of US-led ‘regime change’ – historical precedents don’t bode well. But we should be in no doubt as to the wretched, wicked nature of the regime the US seeks to topple.
Khamenei wasn’t a minor despot like Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, desperately clinging on to power for power’s sake. He was the longest-serving tyrant in the Middle East, the head less of a nation state than of a brutal theocratic experiment – an Islamist entity founded nearly 50 years ago in lethal, cosmic opposition to the West, as represented by America and Israel.
Khamenei’s predecessor and mentor, Ayatollah Khomeini, may have birthed the Islamic Republic in 1979, exploiting the ideological tensions within Iranian Revolution for Islamist ends. But it was Khamenei who entrenched the Islamic Republic. He oversaw the post-Iran-Iraq-war expansion and consolidation of Khomeini’s revolutionary militia, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRCG), turning it into the basis of a parallel clerical-military state – one that effectively ran Iranian affairs and controlled large swathes of the economy. Under Khamenei, the Iranian parliament became a sideshow, politicians mere placemen and dissent a near impossibility.
And at the same time as Khamenei’s regime ruled with an iron Islamist grip at home, it violently promoted its Islamist, anti-Semitic mission abroad. Through arguably the most extensive terror network in the world – from Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis to Islamic Jihad and assorted militias in Iraq and Syria – his regime waged its religious war against Jews and America, to the detriment of stability in the Middle East and beyond.