Kill the leader, create the worst enemy

The Trap of the Perfect Strike

The father was killed. The wife was killed. The child was killed. During negotiations. And now we wait for the successor to be reasonable.

Is that the calculation, the strategy? Eliminate the supreme leader at the beginning of the conflict, hope for a more pliable successor, and then go home with a clean victory?

An appealing theory—clear, elegant—and wrong.

No successor survives—politically or physically—by negotiating immediately after the liquidation of his predecessor.

Not because of ideology, nor out of a spirit of vengeance, even if that desire is indeed there, visceral and inevitable.

But because of pure mechanics, the arithmetic of power. Every authoritarian regime rests on a single axiom: the one who rules cannot appear weak. Not before the external enemy, but above all before the internal factions that observe, calculate, and wait for the first opportunity to replace him.

History leaves no ambiguity.

Muammar Gaddafi shot in a drainage ditch in October 2011: Libya did not produce a moderate successor, but two rival governments, six major militias, and a slave market documented by the United Nations.

Saddam Hussein hanged in 2006: Iraq gave birth to Islamic State.

Mojtaba Khamenei has barely taken his place when the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps must scrutinize his words, his tone, his hesitations, his cadence. In regimes where succession does not pass through the ballot box, legitimacy is proven in only one way: through hardness.

There is an additional layer—more intimate, more irreducible. The strike of February 28 did not only kill his father, Ali Khamenei. It also killed his mother. His wife. His son. His sister.

This man will therefore not govern with the abstract burden of succession, but with the fresh grief of a family liquidation. This man will not be available for diplomacy.

The West regularly confuses the summit with the system. “Eliminate Khamenei as one would cut off the head of a snake,” people said. Except that Iran is less a snake than an institutional hydra—pasdaran, clergy, networks of influence—each with its own interests and logic, and which did not wait for Khamenei to exist.

The Supreme Leader in Iran does not merely command these structures: he serves them. As they have no interest in moderation, he escalates—not out of inclination, but because he has no choice.

The paradox of the “perfect strike” is that it manufactures exactly the worst possible adversary. It takes a man who might perhaps have sought dialogue and turns him into a leader for whom compromise means political death. It takes a weakened regime and provides it with the one resource it lacked: a legitimate cause—revenge—universally understood, universally mobilizing.

The history of leadership decapitations in wartime has a cruel coherence. In the vast majority of documented cases, they have not shortened a conflict by eliminating the supreme leader in its first weeks.

Washington and Tel Aviv have forgotten that geopolitics is not a game of chess in which one removes a key piece to win the match. It is a game where every piece removed creates two new ones—more enraged, less predictable, determined not to end like the previous one.

There is a word to describe repeating the same action while hoping for a different result. But it does not belong to the vocabulary of strategy.

Khomeini to Michel, at Neauphle-le-Château, October 1978:

“Do you realize that you and I are sixty years apart! You remind me so much of my dear son Mostafa, who died almost a year ago to the day. Your presence, Michel, brings me serenity and encouragement in the fulfillment of my destiny.”

A Levantine Youth, Chapter 37, A Refined Man