The United States and Israel had been dealt a “decisive blow”, according to a statement attributed to Iran’s supreme leader and issued on Thursday.
Note the construction, because it is not a stylistic choice. Attributed to. The statement was not delivered by him. It was read out by a prayer leader at a ceremony marking the anniversary of the death of the republic’s founder.
Mojtaba Khamenei has been supreme leader of Iran since March. He has not been seen or heard in public at any point since taking the office. He was wounded in the strikes that killed his father on 28 February, the first day of the war, and every communication since has arrived in writing or through somebody else’s voice.
The argument here is that this is not a detail about one man’s health. The office he holds was built around personal visibility, and an invisible holder changes what the office is, in ways the system has no procedure for.
The first test: what the office actually ran on
The supreme leadership is not primarily an administrative post, and its authority has never rested only on the constitution.
It rested on presence. Friday sermons. Televised addresses at moments of crisis. Appearances at Nowruz, at commemorations, at the war cemeteries. Meetings with the Assembly of Experts, with commanders, with families of the dead, photographed and broadcast. Forty odd years of a specific face saying specific things at specific moments.
That accumulation is what made the office weightier than its written powers. A ruling delivered by a man the country has watched for decades carries something a memorandum does not, and the system has depended on that difference at every difficult juncture since 1989.
None of it is available to the current holder.
The second test: what happens to a ruling nobody hears him give
The practical problem is verification, and it is more serious than it sounds.
A written statement read out by a third party is authenticated by the institutions that transmit it: state media, the office of the leader, the clergy who read it. Those institutions are themselves staffed by appointees of the office. So the statement is authenticated by bodies whose authority derives from the person whose statement is being authenticated.
That circle holds perfectly well while nobody has an interest in breaking it. It becomes fragile the moment two parts of the system want different things, because there is no independent way to establish what the leader actually said or whether he said it.
In a system where the leader’s word settles disputes between institutions, the settling mechanism now runs through a channel that the disputing institutions control.
The functions that require an act
Between those two problems sits a practical one that nobody has addressed publicly.
A good deal of what the office does is not rhetorical. The Leader endorses the credentials of an elected president, without which the president does not take office. He appoints and dismisses the head of the judiciary, the commanders of the armed forces and of the Revolutionary Guard, and half the Guardian Council. He signs decrees.
Those are acts, and each of them has to be performed by somebody or by an instrument bearing his authority. Written orders are ordinary in any system and nothing about a signature requires an appearance.
But the same verification problem applies with more force, because an appointment is not a statement of opinion that can be tested against a man’s known views. It is an instruction with immediate consequences for who holds power, and the only thing standing behind it is a document and the word of the office that transmitted it.
No commander has publicly questioned an order in three months, and there is no reason to think any has privately. The point is that the system has, for the first time, no mechanism by which one could be tested if it happened.
The third test: the succession precedent this sets
The third element is what the last three months have established about how the office is filled.
The Assembly of Experts chose the previous leader’s son. That is the plain fact, whatever the merits of the individual, and it is a fact in a republic founded on the proposition that hereditary rule was what it had overthrown.
The system’s own answer is that the Assembly deliberated and selected, and that the relationship is incidental. That answer was easier to make in 1989, when the Assembly chose somebody who was not related to anyone and whose religious rank had to be accommodated to the choice. It is harder now, and it will be harder still the next time, because a precedent has been set that did not exist before March.
The reading that cuts the other way
It should be said that absence is not necessarily weakness, and the assumption that it is may be a Western reflex.
A leader who does not appear cannot be seen to be diminished, cannot be questioned in public, and cannot be photographed next to somebody who later becomes inconvenient. Scarcity has been a source of authority in more than one system. The pronouncements arrive with the weight of rarity rather than the wear of familiarity.
And a leader wounded in a strike that killed his predecessor has an obvious security reason not to establish a pattern of appearances, which any adversary would read as a schedule.
So the invisibility may be strategy, may be injury, may be both, and from outside there is no way to tell which. That is itself the point: a system that used to answer this question every Friday now does not answer it at all.
It is worth adding that Iran is not short of visible officials. The president speaks, the foreign minister negotiates in public, commanders give interviews. The state has a face; it simply is not the face of the office that outranks all of them.
What is unresolved
Whether anybody outside a very small circle knows the answer.
The declaration of victory this week is the kind of statement a leader makes in person. It is the natural occasion for an appearance: the war has effectively stopped, the anniversary of the founder’s death provides the venue, and the message is the most favorable one available.
It was read by somebody else.
Either he chose not to appear on the single most advantageous day he has had, or he could not. Both are consequential and they point in opposite directions, and the institutions in a position to clarify are the same ones whose standing depends on the answer.
