In both comedy and dictatorship collapses, timing is everything. Bashar al-Assad had just enough sense of timing to escape with his life to a Moscow dacha, and one presumes, a significant portion of Syria's national wealth. Nicolas Maduro ... not so much.
Those lessons must have resonated in Tehran. According to the Times of London and picked up in other media outlets, Iran's supreme leader has already made plans to bug out if the protests keep picking up momentum. Ali Khamenei is even checking to see if there are beautiful days in Mr. Assad's neighborhood:
Days after declaring that Iran would not “give in to the enemy” and vowing to bring its adversaries “to their knees,” the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is reportedly preparing a contingency plan to leave Iran if the unrest escalates or if security forces fail to contain the protests, according to an intelligence assessment cited by The Times.
The assessment, per the report by The Times, stated that the 86-year-old leader would depart Tehran with around 20 people, including family and close aides, if military or security services refuse his orders, defect, or lose control of the situation. Among those included in the plan is his son Mojtaba – his preferred successor.
“The ‘plan B’ is for Khamenei and his very close circle of associates and family, including his son and nominated heir apparent, Mojtaba,” The Times quoted an intelligence source as saying.
Beni Sabti, a former Israeli intelligence official who fled Iran several years after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, said Khamenei’s most likely destination would be Moscow. This is because not only does Khamenei “admire Putin”, but the Iranian culture is more similar to the Russian culture.
It is? Russian culture is Western-oriented, almost to a pathological degree. Russian culture has long sought to become the center of Western Christendom. Putin's public pronouncements often talk disparagingly of Western decadence and of the virtues of Russia's Orthodox morals, a point hammered so often that it becomes a familiar talking point from Putin apologists in the US.
And should we mention the vodka, the music, and other aspects of "culture" that Khamenei actively suppresses in Iran?
Khamenei may admire Putin, although that admiration must have dimmed significantly when Donald Trump's strikes on Iran demonstrated Putin's impotence. If he chooses Moscow or Minsk, however, it won't be out of cultural affinity. It will be because Moscow or Minsk may be the only places where Khamenei has any hope of safety after getting on the last plane out of Mullah Tehran as the regime collapses. He doesn't want to end up on a US warship, sailing to a federal indictment in the Southern District of New York to face charges of terrorism and the murders of countless Americans in Iraq and elsewhere.
Khamenei may have to decide quickly on his Plan B. The Wall Street Journal notes that the seizure of Maduro has already begun changing the calculus in Tehran:
Iranian leaders were already reassessing their vulnerabilities after a disastrous year in which Israel decisively broke with a longstanding reluctance to attack the country directly and shattered Iran’s air defenses in a 12-day war in June. Trump joined the attack late in the war to bomb key Iranian nuclear facilities.
Israel also decimated Iranian allies Hezbollah and Hamas, which were key members in Tehran’s network of regional militias that helped deter attacks.
Maduro’s capture will now force the Iranian regime to weigh more heavily the possibility that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei could be forcibly removed, said Roozbeh Aliabadi, an Iranian consultant at geopolitical advisory firm Global Growth Advisors.
“Maduro’s capture is a game changer for Iran,” he said. “It opens up possibilities that didn’t exist in Iran before.”
First off, Iran attacked Israel first, first through their proxies as usual, but also directly in missile attacks. Israel attacked Iran directly in response to the missile barrage. Let's make sure we get this sequence correct, because it matters in viewing the options Khamenei now has to deal with the regime's most potent existential crisis in its 47-year reign. They have fooled around; they have found out; they have been exposed as a paper tiger. The destruction of their nuclear facilities and their utter incompetence at open war, combined with the body blows to their terror-network proxies, leave them with almost no deterrence and very few military options.
This is important in understanding the impact of Trump's seizure of Maduro. Hezbollah maintained robust operations that both produced revenue and conducted strategic terror and espionage missions for Khamenei. Maduro's removal leaves Hezbollah almost completely exposed in Venezuela, removing the last vestiges of deterrence and retaliation against the US. Khamenei isn't worried that the US will abduct him from a Tehran bunker; that kind of operation would be far more complicated than the Maduro mission. Khamenei is getting the night sweats because his regime is about to lose all of its revenue streams, and that makes him vulnerable to elements in the IRGC who might start to think that they can cut a deal with the West by giving up the mullahs and adopting a straight military junta to maintain their grip on power.
This isn't just the Madman Theory at work, although that element exists. Trump just kicked out one of the last struts undergirding Khamenei's rule in Tehran. And now, the Ayatollah has to start thinking about timing.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to President Trump and his administration’s bold leadership, we are respected on the world stage, and our enemies are being put on notice.
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