I harbor a deeply-ingrained aversion to conspiracy theories.

By nature, conspiracy theories are wrong far more often than they’re right, which means you’re going to waste a lot of time chasing them. And time’s money.

If you stumble across a conspiracy theory that turns out to be conspiracy fact, all the time you wasted on conspiracies that didn’t pan out can be recouped in one fell scoop (get it?), but the math’s a bit like playing the lottery: Yes, someone’s going to get that scoop, but no, that someone almost surely isn’t going to be you.

Of course, if your modus operandi says web traffic comes first and veracity last or by accident, then conspiracy-chasing (and its cousin, ambulance-chasing) is a “good” strategy. That’s particularly true in a world full of simpletons whose already short attention spans were condensed further by social media, and whose gullibility is eminently exploitable in a world where anyone can stand up a “news” portal with a few bucks and a laptop.

All of that said — i.e., having expressed my almost pathological disdain for “What really happened?”-style journalism — I’d be totally remiss not to acknowledge that the almost slapstick circumstances surrounding the demise of Ebrahim Raisi and Hossein Amir Abdollahian on Sunday raise a lot of questions, some of which are unavoidably conspiratorial.

The regime in Tehran is brittle and inept. As more than a few observers pointed out this week, traveling in Iran by car or by air is unusually dangerous. Raisi and Amir Abdollahian were flying in a decades-old, American-made helicopter — a Bell 212, the civilian version of a Vietnam-era Huey, according to reports — that was surely out of repair.

Javad Zarif, Amir Abdollahian’s American-educated, moderate predecessor, blamed US sanctions for the incident. “One of the culprits behind yesterday’s tragedy is the United States,” he told state media. “Because of its sanctions, Iran [can’t] procur[e] essential aviation parts.”

Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian diplomat whose post at Princeton is a source of irritation for some US lawmakers, voiced similar sentiments. “If I were the president of the United States… I would immediately cancel the sanctions on the sale of aircraft and aviation parts against Iran,” he wrote on social media. “Because so far, hundreds of Iranians have been victims of this sanction.”

Of course, Iran knows its aircraft are out of repair, and the decision to put Raisi, Khamenei’s likely successor, and Amir Abdollahian, the nation’s top diplomat, on the same out-of-repair helicopter and fly them over the mountains in dense fog seems derelict even by the standards of a regime that accidentally shot down a passenger plane in 2020 after mistaking it for an incoming American cruise missile.

LA-born Holly Dagres, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who spent her formative years in Tehran and writes widely about the regime, called Raisi’s death “another classic example of the Islamic Republic’s systemic mismanagement.” “Who decided to put the Iranian president and foreign minister on a helicopter without visibility due to dense fog?” she wondered, dryly.

Maybe that’s not the rhetorical question Dagres meant it to be. Who did make that decision? Because it was objectively stupid. Or at least objectively dangerous.

Also, there were three helicopters in the convoy. Why were Raisi and Amir Abdollahian on the same one? I imagine the answer is that they typically travel together, but if you were (inexplicably) determined to ferry two of your senior-most government officials around the mountains in the rain and fog, wouldn’t you at least think to maximize the chances that one of them would survive by putting them on separate aircraft? Relatedly, it needn’t be suspicious that the helicopter which didn’t make it was the one carrying the president — if there are three helicopters and one of them’s going to crash, each helicopter has a 33.3% chance of being the unlucky one, all else equal — but… well, Raisi sure was unlucky!

If you’re going to posit a conspiracy, you usually need to impute to someone a motive. Israel has a motive, but the cost-benefit analysis doesn’t make any sense. Killing Raisi and Amir Abdollahian would accomplish absolutely nothing strategically and if Iran could prove it, the regime would be well within its rights to declare war. Maybe you can assassinate militia commanders and IRGC generals operating in client states, and Israel’s shown you can assassinate nuclear scientists on a rival’s own soil, but what you absolutely can’t do is assassinate the president of a major country and expect to get away with it “because bad guys.” Particularly not when ~half the world thinks you should be arrested and tried for crimes against humanity. Besides, the implied logistics are absurd: Israeli mountain commandos sabotaging a decrepit Huey?

Khamenei’s not going to kill Raisi. Raisi was his protégé. As dedication to dogmatic fanaticism goes, they don’t come any keener than Raisi. His regime resume’s impeccable. No, he wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box, nor was he an especially adept political operator, but he’d kill you in a second for looking at him wrong, and quicker than that for dissent. And that’s what separates the Putins and the Raisis and the Xis and the Kims from the Orbans and the Erdogans of the world: They’re killers, all, but the first group are murderers. In this context, there’s a difference.

And yet, Raisi was unpopular even as unpopular regime figures go. He was completely hapless as a steward of the crippled economy and although the regime’s response to mass protests is always just to beat people (to death if necessary), Raisi’s cloddish handling of recent demonstrations plainly suggested that if it were up to him, Iran would summarily execute dissenters à la the 1988 death committees on which he enthusiastically sat. This isn’t 1988. And you can’t just run around the streets beating women to death. A “Met Too”‘er Raisi most assuredly isn’t. Or wasn’t.

According to a pair of sources who spoke to Reuters this week, Raisi was removed from the succession short list “some six months ago because of his sagging popularity.” The same linked article noted that “intensive lobbying had been underway by influential, pro-Raisi clerics to get his name reinstated.”

That’s all speculation, of course. Nobody knows what’s actually going on in the uppermost echelons of the regime, but competition between factions does exist. There’s overlap, and “moderate” is always a relative term, so the whole thing’s a bit of a Venn diagram, but the hardline establishment has a power center, so does the IRGC and so on.

Importantly, Khamenei’s not the only Khamenei. There’s Mojtaba. The son. In theory anyway, Khamenei wouldn’t want his son to be Supreme Leader: It’d be farcical in the extreme for the Revolution to come full circle and dead end in a de facto hereditary monarchy.

But just because Khamenei might not want it doesn’t mean Mojtaba doesn’t think it’s his. As Jason Rezaian wrote for The Washington Post, “there was a time when loyalty meant something in Iran’s theocratic system, but there has also been a long history of violent and unresolved deaths [making] Mojtaba and his cronies immediate suspects in the eyes of some Iranians.”

One way or another, it seems reasonable to assess that Raisi’s death materially increases the likelihood of tumult — violent tumult — in the event of Khamenei’s passing. If there was any truth at all to the idea that Khamenei favored Raisi as his successor, and assuming there was no hidden rift between the two men, the odds of a smooth transition are now materially lower.

As Rezaian put it, “For regime insiders, it’s yet another sign that deadly infighting is likely to increase after Khamenei dies.” Alex Vatanka, director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute in Washington, echoed that sentiment in remarks to Reuters. Indeed, he suggested the power struggle might’ve already begun: “[Raisi’s death] could result in regime infighting unlike anything we’ve seen since the early 1980s.”

This is, you’re reminded, a missile power, a nuclear threshold state and a regime without which a motley collection of heavily-armed, highly capable, regional militia would be rendered rudderless free agents virtually overnight in a collapse scenario.