The New Yorker:

The country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed by U.S. and Israeli strikes, but the conflict is far from over, and has convulsed the Middle East in a spasm of interstate violence.

By Ishaan Tharoor

“All I want is freedom for the people,” President Donald Trump told a journalist, early on Saturday, not long after launching a joint military operation with Israel against Iran. Trump was talking about ordinary Iranians, subjected for almost half a century to a repressive theocracy—a regime that, just weeks prior, had carried out a brutal crackdown on Iranian protesters which possibly saw tens of thousands of people killed. Much like another U.S. President whose Middle East misadventures he often denounced, Trump was already styling himself as a liberator.

If not liberated, Iranians woke up on Sunday to a stark new reality, as Iranian authorities confirmed that the sweeping round of strikes had killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, along with a cadre of other top officials. Khamenei, a clerical despot driven by rigid dogma and a ruthless instinct for survival, had been in power since the fall of the Soviet Union, his legacy shaped by years of geopolitical isolation, the shadow wars he waged abroad, and the uprisings he quashed at home. Trump cheered the news in a social-media post: “Khamenei, one of the most evil people in History, is dead.” In Iran, a state television anchor declared that “the leader of the great nation of Iran, the vanguard of the Islamic Ummah, his excellency Imam Khamenei drank the nectar of martyrdom and in the month of Ramadan ascended to the highest heaven.” A trio of surviving officials—President Masoud Pezeshkian; the judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei; and a jurist from the Guardian Council, Iran’s constitutional watchdog—will guide a transition.

For Trump and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, the decapitation of such a totemic figure as Khamenei marks a moment of triumph. It boosts Netanyahu’s warfighting image at home and will help Trump wave away any reminders of his own lengthy rhetorical record opposing costly regime-change wars in the Middle East. And it will further obscure hand-wringing over the apparent illegality of his intervention, which triggered an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council on Saturday and elicited a chorus of objections from congressional Democrats over the President’s misuse of war powers.

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