NYTimes - The World: Empowering Iran's hard-liners

[applegrove]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/world/iran-leadership-larijani-israel-beirut.html

The succession fight was fueled by rage against the U.S. and Israel. But it was also a fight that revealed just how hard moderates were pushing for a different kind of Iran.

The hard-liners rejected any internal and external calls for regime change. Khamenei’s son, their preferred candidate, had the backing of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Iran’s ideologically driven military force.

The moderates, meanwhile, were arguing for a new face, a new style of governing and an end to hostilities with the U.S. Their two preferred candidates were Hassan Rouhani, a former president who oversaw the negotiations leading to the 2015 nuclear deal, and Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of the founding father of the Islamic republic who is close to reformist parties.

But with American and Israeli bombs falling from the skies, the clerics in charge of appointing a supreme leader grew less interested in a pragmatic leader able to rescue the country from its state of acute crisis, Farnaz wrote. They wanted to avenge the death of a leader they view as a martyr.

[stopdiggin]

1. which - as almost anybody with two functioning brain cells has already noted - was an eminently predictable outcome.