. WHAT IS NEXT IN IRAN?
The Regime Built on Iran’s Backs—and What Comes After Khamenei's legacy is not a nation — it is a system designed to survive at any cost to those it rules. By Wahab Raofi The death of a dictator is rarely a private event. It is the closing chapter of national suffering — and the opening of a reckoning. When that dictator has held absolute power for nearly four decades, his end does not merely mark a change of leadership. It forces an accounting of everything built in his name, and everything destroyed along the way. For more than 45 years, the Iranian people have lived under a regime that has treated their ancient civilization as an ideological fortress rather than a nation meant to serve its citizens. The clerics who seized power in 1979 constructed something more durable than an ordinary dictatorship. They built a theocratic military state — one in which revolutionary ideology and institutionalized repression fused into a permanent structure. At its apex stood A...