Showing that 81-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei learned well from the history of totalitarian regimes, he completed the trifecta, consolidating his own Mullah power, and pushing 59-year-old ultra-conservative Chief Justice Ebrahim Raisi into President, then promoting his 64-year-old chief lieutenant 64-year-old Mohseni Ejehi into his new Chief Justice. Moderates, like 72-year-old former President Hassan Rouhani or 64-year-old former House Speaker Ali Larijani, are a thing of the past, giving way to a brutal reality that Iran, like Communist China and Russia, has zero time for of any Democratic reforms. Aging Khamenei, who’s already beat back prostate cancer, has consolidated conservative light-skinned Mullah rule for the foreseeable future, all from the same Azeri tribe of Azerbaijani and Turkish ancestry. Khamenei, who sees his days numbered, wants Iran in conservative hands.
Iran’s population has been beaten down for years at the hands of the Basij militia, a voluntary paramilitary force given free reign to terrorize the population when the public strays from the Ayatollah’s strict version of Shiite’s strict Sharia law, essentially anything the Ayatollah, considered the Supreme leader, dictates. Shiites originated after the death of Mohammed when half the faithful followed his cousin Ali as the divine representative of Allah. Ayatollah Khamenei takes the Shiite domination of Iranian life seriously, something de-emphasized during the reign of the Shah Reza Mohammed Pahlavi and his father who ruled Iran for nearly 100 years. During the Shah’s reign, Iran became a more tolerant, modern country, built off science, education, technology and medicine, all of which modernized the ancient Persian Republic. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomenei ended the Shah’s rule in 1979.
For the past 40 years, Iran’s mullahs have carried out one of the most brutal crackdowns on any civilization in world history, watching citizens jailed and slaughtered much like Soviet Russia and Communist China. While hiding behind religion, Aytatollah Khomenei understood the principle behind totalitarian rule, understood the unrelenting crackdown of human freedom and dignity, something left in short supply in today’s Iran. Backing Ebrahim’s Raisi’s election as president and now Mohseni Ejehi as Chief Justice of Iran’s Supreme Court shows that Khamenei means business when it comes to consolidating mullah control over the Islamic Republic. Like other totalitarian regimes, Iran targets the U.S. and Israel as its mortal enemies, much like the Soviet Union and now Russian Federation Targets the United States. Communist China too uses the U.S. as its scapegoat enemy.
Both Raisi and Ejehi have been associated with the great purges since the 1979 Islamic Revolution where any dissent has been vaporized, with tens-of-thousands of Iranians gone missing, presumed dead at the hands of the Ayatollah’s henchmen. Ejehi paid his dues, once dismissed by former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad whose reign from 2005-2013 was marked by provocations toward Israel, especially Holocaust denial celebrated in Iranian Street . Ejehi ran afoul with Ahmadinejad while serving as Intelligence Minister when he objected to Ahmandinejad broadcasting confessions of jailed dissidents. Ejehi lost his post, eventually currying favor with Khemenei before Ahmadinejad left office in 2013, never permitted by the Aytollah from returning to Iranian politics. Ejehi was best know for sending former Tehran Mayor Gholoamhossein Karbaschi to prison after a public lashing.
Raisi and Ejehi came up the ranks as henchmen for the Ayatollah, prosecuting dissidents and Shah-like intellectuals in the 1990s, often sending them to prison where they were liquidated after convictions in Kangaroo courts. Raisi and Ejehi are the perfect loyalists from Khamenei who’s years left as Iran’s Supreme Leader could be numbered because of health. Working closely with the Basij militia, Raisi and Ejehi know how to stifle dissent, especially when it comes for reformist policies that in any way resemble anything the Shah’s past. Under Raisi and Ejehi’s leadership, many of the regime’s dissidents and opposition activist were either imprisoned or liquidated. Both Raisi and Ejehi proved their blind loyalty to the Ayatollah, now repaid with two of the most powerful positions in the Islamic Republic. Both think nothing of rigging their own elections to consolidate the Ayatollah’s power.
Iran’s future looks bleak for any progressive-minded citizen that longs for the days when the Shah offered education, culture and real opportunity to businesses, academics and sciences. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has experienced an unprecedented brain-drain of its best academics, engineers, doctors and scientists, all because the Ayatollah’s Azeri clan has to monopolize the nation’s wealth. But with Iran’s brain drain the Ayatollah forgot that the country’s most precious resource is not uranium for nuclear fuel but its people no longer seeing any future in Iran accept for those connected to the Ayatollah’s tribe. Installing Raisi and Ejehi turns back the clock on any hope for an Iranian future. U.S. President Joe Biden knows that today’s Iran is not the same one in which he entered the 2015 Nuke Deal. Ayatollah’s power grab makes a workable deal next to impossible.
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