THE ECONOMIST: The killing of Ali Larijani weakens Iran — but at a cost

Just four days ago Ali Larijani was marching at the head of a crowd along the streets of Tehran.

He had joined a protest marking Quds (Jerusalem) Day, the Iranian regime’s ritual, annual denunciation of Israel.

His appearance was intended to convey defiance. America had just put a $10m bounty on his head.

Given the disappearance of Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s new supreme leader, who has not been seen in public since his appointment and is rumoured to have been badly injured in an air strike, Mr Larijani, the head of Iran’s security council, appeared as much as anyone to be running the Islamic Republic.

Now Israel says it has killed him, and two other senior officials, in more bombing raids.

The relentless assassinations are likely to make the regime more brittle — but they may also make it harder to bring America and Israel’s war on Iran to any sort of negotiated end.

Israel depicts the killings of senior Iranian officials as paving the way for the Islamic Republic’s overthrow or collapse.

“We are undermining this regime in the hope of giving the Iranian people an opportunity to remove it,” Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, said after Mr Larijani’s death was announced.

In a separate raid, Israel says it also killed the commander and deputy commander of the Basij militia, a paramilitary force that has been used to quell protests.

Over two weeks into the war, Israel still seems to have excellent intelligence on the whereabouts of Iranian officials.

It is also bombing bases of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the regime’s most elite fighting force.

It has even hit street checkpoints manned by the Basij in Tehran.

However, Israeli intelligence assessments suggest the regime cannot be brought down by air strikes, but only by internal dissent.

They also contend that protesters will not take to the streets, as they did in their millions two months ago, while the bombs are still falling.

In the meantime, the assassinations appear to be designed “to progressively disintegrate the state”, as a former British intelligence officer puts it, across the three main pillars of the regime: the IRGC, Islamic clerics and the bureaucracy.

Mr Larijani was unusual in that he straddled all these camps.

He was the son, brother and son-in-law of senior ayatollahs and trained in a seminary. But he also taught philosophy, specialising in the Western Enlightenment and the work of Immanuel Kant.

He fought with the IRGC during the Iran-Iraq War, and as culture minister and head of state broadcasting hounded reformists.

Yet he also aligned himself with Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, the pragmatic former president who led post-war reconstruction in the 1990s and pursued détente with the West.

Moreover, Mr Larijani knew the levers of power.

Abroad, he acted as an envoy for the supreme leader to China, the Gulf states and Russia.

When Oman sought to broker a last-minute deal on the eve of war, it was Mr Larijani, for example, who set Iran’s negotiating parameters.

Some saw him as the potential leader of a more pragmatic “second Islamic republic” or even Iran’s counterpart to Delcy Rodríguez, Venezuela’s vice-president whom Mr Trump elevated to head of state.

“They’ve removed the one person most likely to reach an accommodation,” says a veteran opposition figure.

There is always a chance that another pragmatist might emerge from the internal jockeying now under way.

Figures such as Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, a former IRGC commander and parliamentary speaker, or Hassan Rouhani, a former president and architect of Iran’s nuclear deal with America in 2015, could help shift the regime in a more conciliatory direction.

But hardliners may spy an opportunity.

They had previously vetoed Mr Larijani’s candidacy for president and pressed him to step down as speaker of parliament.

They are thought to want to appoint Saeed Jalili, a more ideological figure, to replace him at the head of the National Security Council.

That would signal an Iran less likely to agree to any deal to end the war and more likely to pursue nuclear weapons.

“They will substitute Larijani with a madman who prefers martyrdom and will go to the end,” says an Iranian journalist recently arrived in Britain.

Opponents of the regime may see an opening, too.

Growing numbers of the security services are said to be reluctant to show up for work, for obvious reasons.

Meanwhile, unrest simmers. Iranians have not rallied round the flag in the numbers they did after America’s and Israel’s previous bombing campaign, in June.

Reza Pahlavi, son of Iran’s last monarch, who was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution, called for protests to mark Chaharshanbe Suri, an ancient Persian festival, on March 17.

Should such calls be heeded, and met by repression from the Basij, some fear Iran might descend into chaos or civil war.

And even if the regime holds everything together this week, the longer the conflict drags on, the more brittle Iran’s political order becomes — and the greater the risk that the state fractures into competing centres of power, with unpredictable consequences.