From his secret bunker last June, as Israeli missiles rained down on Tehran, Iran’s supreme leader issued an instruction he had never given before: to prepare for his succession. With the threat of decapitation strikes hanging over him, Ayatollah Khamenei drew up a secret list of three clerics who could take his place and told his assembly of experts to choose between them if he was killed.
It was the first of several key lessons the Islamic regime would take from that war as the prospect of another now looms. Khamenei also pickedfour layers of successionfor all the military and civilian leaders he personally appoints: others beyond that circle were ordered to name their own four rungs of replacements.
Iran’s supreme national securitycouncil came close to obliteration during the 12-day conflict last year before it ended with the US joiningIsraelistrikes and then calling an abrupt ceasefire.
In response,Khamenei, 86, revived a parallel institution that was last convened during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Command and control was reworked into a “mosaic” approach to allow provinces more autonomy in the absence of direct orders fromTehran, creating a diffuse structure capable of fighting on in the event of regime decapitation.
“They were taken by surprise last time around,” Ali Vaez, the Iran director of the International Crisis Group, said of the regime last year. “This time they are learning the lessons and preparing all sorts of contingencies. Iran’s strategic objective is not to capitulate but to survive and retain the capacity to fight back.”
President Trump accused Tehran of “sinister nuclear ambitions” on Tuesday in hisState of the Union speech, after deploying a “massive armada” in theMiddle Eastin an attempt to pressureIranto dismantle its uranium enrichment programme.
However, Trump has also introduced diffuse demands concerning Iran’s ballistic missile programme and its brutal repression of anti-regime protests. As officials gear up for last-ditch negotiations inGenevaon Thursday, the two sides look far apart.
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“There is no overlap between what the US is demanding and what Iran is prepared to concede,” Karim Sadjadpour, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said.
But if the gap between the two sides’ negotiating positions looks vast, it is dwarfed by their gulf of understanding. It was summed up by the reaction of Trump’s “envoy for everything”,Steve Witkoff, in an interview with Fox this weekend. “Trump is curious,” Witkoff said. “Why haven’t they capitulated?”
Source: Drudge Report
