Killing Khamenei
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Killing Khamenei was raised with John Kiriakou by an Iranian viewer during the 2026 war, who asked what the Supreme Leader's death meant for the future of the regime and said he feared that another extremist would be chosen and the cycle would continue.

Kiriakou agreed with the fear and disagreed with the premise behind the killing. "That, I think, is exactly what's going to happen," he said of the succession.

The overestimated office

The substance of his answer is an argument about how much power the office actually carried. "You know, and the thing, too, is that I think that in the West, we seriously overestimated Ayatollah Khamenei's authority."

He concedes the authority that existed and confines it: "Certainly, he was the final word on on religious issues. Certainly. But, you can take him out and have literally nothing change."

The comparison offered on the programme, that the effect would be that of killing a Pope, Kiriakou adopted and repeated after a push notification reported that the Iranian foreign minister expected a new supreme leader within a day or two: "So, there it is right there. Nothing changes. It You can take out the Pope and there's just going to be another Pope."

The general error

Kiriakou treats the decapitation strike as an American habit rather than a single miscalculation, endorsing the observation put to him that Germany fought on beyond Hitler and that nothing about American daily life would change if a president were killed today. His own gloss is that a besieged leadership will do the opposite of collapsing: it will "project continuity in order to maintain domestic control."

He adds the historical rule that follows: "regimes radicalize under in times of war. That's just sort of history." The protests inside Iran, even at three hundred people, are in his reading exactly what makes a threatened government harden rather than yield.

The fatwa

The sharpest consequence Kiriakou draws is about the war's own justification. Iran's nuclear abstinence rested in part on a religious ruling by the man who had just been killed; a friend of his had observed the day before that "the next Iranian grand ayatollah or or supreme leader is just going to issue a new fatwa revoking the old fatwa and calling for a nuclear uh uh weapons program." Kiriakou's response was unqualified: "Of course they will."

See also

- Iran Posed No Threat
- Chaos As The Israeli Objective
- Iran Nuclear Assessment
- Marco Rubio And Iran Policy
