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Where's Khamenei?
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It's been over a week since the rumor that Iranian Supreme Leader Ail Khamenei is dead or in a coma started. Interest in the story has faded (in our frenzied-paced, attention-deficit world), but to the best of my knowledge it has not be definitively disproved. Have there been any convincing recent Khamenei sightings?
The Iranian press reported on a supposed October 17 meeting between Khamenei and the president of Senegal. However, the photos from that "meeting" appear to have been faked. (See "Khamenei: I'm still not dead," but evidence remains equivocal.") On October 18 Khamenei supposedly condemned the suicide bomb attack on the Revolutionary Guards in Baluchistan--but only through Iranian news agency reports.
On October 26, Khamenei supposedly (and rather predictably) blamed violence in Iran, Iraq and Pakistan on "foreign agents." But he was simply "quoted on state television." And on the same day we learned that Khamenei supposedly opposes direct negotiations with the United States, but we know it only because parliament's vice speaker Mohammad Reza Bahonar claims that he said it.
Khamenei occupies the single most important position in the Iranian power structure, and his status remains obscure. The fact that the government doesn't take the simple step of showing him in a public forum, indisputably alive and well, may mean that he is not. Which leads to the question, Who's in charge?
A possible succession struggle, in the middle of the mullocracy's greatest crisis of legitimacy, while they continue their race to acquire nuclear weapons makes this a particularly interesting, particularly plastic, moment in Iranian history.
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