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January 31, 2007

Instability in Iran

Thomas Lifson
The New York Sun offers a trio of items today offering hope for the possibility of regime change in Iran.

Khameni's health
Speculation is mounting in American and Israeli intelligence and defense circles about the declining health of Iran's 67-year-old supreme leader, who is believed to be suffering from cancer.

At the end of December, Iran analysts inside the intelligence community were asked to draw up possible succession scenarios for Ayatollah Ali Khamenei after he appeared on state-run television looking gaunt and sickly. On January 4, stories spread throughout the Internet and some Iranian exile publications that Ayatollah Khamenei was dead. [....]

The death of Ayatollah Khamenei would likely set off a battle for succession. Among the top candidates for supreme leader is a spiritual leader and mentor to Mr. Ahmadinejad who has advocated an apocalyptic version of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Shiite Islam, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi. Another is a former Iranian president and interlocutor with the Israelis when America and the Jewish state sold arms to Iran in exchange for Hezbollah's release of hostages in Lebanon, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
A power struggle in Tehran offers promising circumstances for an uprising.

An editorial in the Sun is titled "After Khameni." It's conclusion:
If there is an opportunity now - and it appears there is - the thing to do is to seize it.
Meanwhile, Steven Stalinsky of MEMRI writes  of Iran's economic crisis, which sounds grave indeed. Food prices are up substantially, as the country becomes more reliant on imported foodstuffs. Unemployment is high, domestic farms are in decline, in part because of water supply problems. There are reported lines at gas stations. Meanwhile, the government squanders money on exporting jihad and on atomic weapons.

Life has gotten worse under the mullahs. If a grand confluence of domestic unrest, lower oil prices (thanks, Saudi Arabia!), and a vacancy at the top causes the regime to be toppled from within, the world would be a better place.

Hat tip: Ed Lasky

Posted at 09:44 AM | Email |

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