Assembly of Experts for Leadership

So according to the president, shortly after that statement, the Iranian ambassadors there, the representatives at the UN got into a room with Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff and said, are we talking or what? And the way it's playing out, this is purely pattern recognition.

But the way it is playing out from where I sit, this is still an instance where the political leaders of Iran, after 40 years of having their strings pulled by the Ayatollah and the mullahs, the Council of Experts, are in the crosshairs, if you will.

They are the ones who want to make a deal, are being begged by their, quote, constituents, if you can make that application to a country where basically people are told, here are your three choices, go pick one.

And do they respond to them or the Ayatollah? And the very end of President Trump's statement there says it all.

been anything, but one day is not enough to be excited.

An interesting story came out of Iran from a member of Iran's Assembly of Experts.

He said...

Mustafa Khamenei, a story about him.

Iran's constitution splits power between an elected president, who runs the day-to-day government and answers to voters, and a supreme leader, who serves as head of state for life, commands the armed forces, and appoints the heads of the judiciary and state broadcasting.

The supreme leader is chosen, and in theory can be removed, by the Assembly of Experts, an 88-member body of Shiite clerics elected by the public every eight years.

When Ali Khamenei was killed on the opening day of this war, that assembly held an emergency session and, within roughly a week, named his son Mojtaba as the new supreme leader, a move critics at the time noted cut directly against a constitutional design meant to prevent exactly this kind of hereditary succession.

The assembly itself meets only rarely outside of a genuine crisis, and most of its sitting clerics were themselves vetted for candidacy by the guardian council, a body the supreme leader half appoints, which is one reason outside observers have long treated the assembly's independence as more formal than real.

In Lebanon, the eighth round of talks in Rome between Israeli and Lebanese officials remains postponed until October, with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz continuing to insist Israel will not withdraw from its southern Lebanon security zone until Hizballah disarms nationwide, a demand Hizballah continues to reject as tantamount to surrender.

And inside Iran, the political rift triggered by Kayhan editor Hossein Sheri Atmederi's accusations against former presidents Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Khatami remains where it stood last week, with no formal action from the Assembly of Experts or the Supreme Leader's Office, though pro-regime rally participants have continued calling for consequences against the two former presidents.

Diplomatically, the Gulf remains split on how to handle Tehran even as the shipping crisis deepens, and China's role continues to draw attention as well.

At last week's BRICS summit in New Delhi, the United Arab Emirates held preliminary side conversations with Iranian officials, continuing a pattern of quiet engagement Abu Dhabi has pursued for years, even as Bahrain refuses any contact at all.