Ali Khamenei is dead. Long live the people of Iran.
Though, perhaps, one ought to pause before the champagne is uncorked, because the manner of his going tells us rather more than the fact of it. He was not brought down by his own people, who had every reason and right to do so. He was killed in a joint American-Israeli military operation that, in the same sweep, struck 24 Iranian provinces, bombed a girls’ elementary school in Minab, and killed at least 108 children who had gone to school that morning entirely unaware that they were, apparently, a military target. Trump, with characteristic delicacy, announced the death on Truth Social, called Khamenei “one of the most evil people in History,” and declared the bombing would continue “uninterrupted throughout the week.” Netanyahu, not to be outdone in the theatre of liberation, said the goal was to “create the conditions for the brave Iranian people to take their destiny into their own hands.” One presumes the children of Minab were not consulted on this arrangement.
This is the oldest story in the world, really. The imperial powers do not remove tyrants; they remove tyrants who have become inconvenient. They have no end-game beyond their own definition of peace, which is to say: their access to resources, their preferred successor regime, their version of order. We have seen this film before, and the sequels are uniformly worse than the original. Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yugoslavia… the pattern is drearily consistent. Decapitate a society, arm every faction that presents itself, watch the resulting chaos with a mixture of satisfaction and bewilderment, then retreat to the fortified comfort of Washington or Tel Aviv and express surprise when the instability spreads. And when it eventually, inevitably blows back (as it did, spectacularly, on a September morning in 2001 in the USA, or a similarly calm October morning in 2023 in Israel), emerge from the bunker firing indiscriminately, kill a great many more people, generate a great many more enemies, and call it justice.
Trump is already being asked who should replace Khamenei. His answer: “I don’t know, but at some point they’ll be calling me to ask who I’d like.” He added that he was “only being a little sarcastic.” A little.
So yes: celebrate that a tyrant is dead. Evil, genuine evil, has been removed from the world, and no one who remembers the women hanged for removing their headscarves, the protesters shot in the streets, the decades of theological brutality visited upon an extraordinarily civilised people, need feel anything other than relief at his passing. Mourn him not.
But do not mistake the removal of a tyrant for the arrival of freedom. The liberators bombing school children to create the conditions for democracy are not, it turns out, particularly interested in democracy. They are interested in a compliant successor, a neutered nuclear programme, unimpeded oil flows, and a grateful ally they can point to at the next election.
The people of Iran deserved better than Khamenei. They also deserved better than this.
There is no new dawn here. There won’t be. We are not at the beginning of something. We are, as we have been for some time now, very deep in the middle of a very long night, and the people who claim to be carrying the torch are, on closer inspection, the ones who keep setting things on fire.
