After a week in purdah, "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenei broke his silence on Wednesday with a brief and enigmatic message recorded in his current secret location.
Well, the location may be secret to most of us but not to Israel and its US ally, who claim they know where the "Guide" is hiding.
This was a strange message.
At no point did the "Guide" admit that Iran was facing a major crisis.
He spoke of "an imposed war" without specifying who imposed it and how, while implicitly claiming that Iran had no part in provoking it.
In other words, if he doesn't know why the war was imposed, he can't pretend to have any idea how to end it. Instead, he seemed to wish the war to continue ad infinitum by pretending that the US was demanding Iran's "unconditional surrender," something that, he boasted, the Iranian nation shall never accept.
By making the US the principal target of his real or fake ire, Khamenei hoped to minimize the humiliation of having suffered a bad beating at the hands of what he likes to describe as a "midget" with dreams of grandeur.
The fact, however, is that the US has not declared war on Iran and thus cannot see "unconditional surrender" as its goal. True, President Donald Trump put the phrase UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER on his social media account (in capital letters) like the "think of" notes one posts on the refrigerator in the kitchen.
To treat it as a formal position of the United States in the absence of a declaration of war by Washington requires a leap that only the Guide's poetical imagination may conjure.
Khamenei avoided any mention of Islam and shied away from his usual claim that Iran was part of a broader Islamic ummah rather than an independent nation. "The Iranian nation shall never surrender," he drummed up.
He forgot that if and when a call for "unconditional surrender" comes, it won't be addressed to the Iranian nation only because friend and foe know that the Iranian nation had no say in policies that triggered this tragic conflict and no power to even consider it as an option unless there is a new regime in Tehran. And in case there is a new regime, you may be sure that no one would demand an unconditional surrender from a nation that has never been an enemy either of Israel or the United States.
If the "Supreme Guide" isn't talking on behalf of the Iranian nation at this juncture, whom does he represent?
Can it be the Islamic Republic regime's governing instances? That isn't certain either.
Iran's High Council of National Security, which, under the current constitution, has the mission to decide matters related to war and peace, issued a brief statement just before the "Leader" taped the message in his hideout. In it, the council does not drag in the US.
Nor does it echo Khamenei's bitter-endism.
Instead, it expresses a wish for an end to the bloodshed and insists that it shall retaliate only if attacks continue.
To be sure, that double game may be a repeat of the trick the mullahs have often used to hoodwink the Western powers and beg for sympathy in leftist and "progressive" circles in Paris, London and Washington.
Nevertheless, I think the overall mood in Iran, including in the ruling circles, is against Khamenei's "to the last drop of blood" posturing, if only because people know this is posturing from a leader who is personally secure in his hideout.
Khamenei's faux defiance does not reflect the mood of the inner circles of influence in Tehran, who may see him as a down-market version of the Wizard of Oz, who, though he may be a good man, is a hopeless wizard.
None of the 12 full generals -- active or in retirement -- that the regime still has, have adopted Khamenei's end-of-times posture. Of the commanders-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps still alive, only one, Mohsen Rezai Mir-Qaed, has spewed fire and brimstone against Israel and the US. But then he is generally regarded as something of a stand-up comedian, often grandstanding while barely standing.
Nor is there any sign of the countless number of pot-bellied one-star generals whose boastful presence polluted Iranian airwaves and screens for decades.
From the big mullahs, only one, marketed as Grand Ayatollah Nuri Hamadani, has said that Khamenei's "gahzis" are on their way to Jerusalem (Quds) via Karbala while, in fact, the movement is in opposite direction.
Finally, Khamenei's message tries to cast him as a well-wishing adviser to Trump. "America's entry into this problem will be 100 percent against US interest," he says. "The US will be hit and suffer more than Iran will suffer."
Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987.
Gatestone Institute would like to thank the author for his kind permission to reprint this article in slightly different form from Asharq Al-Awsat. He graciously serves as Chairman of Gatestone Europe.
