SHED NO TEARS: Iran’s Rafsanjani is dead. He died of a heart attack.

I differ with this assessment:

…a moderate counter-figure to the ultra-hardliners clustered around Ahmadinejad, under whom Iran’s relations with the West plummeted…

Moderate counter-figure? Try calculated rhetorician in robes. Here’s one reason why I differ:

He held the chairmanship of Iran’s main political arbitration body, the Expediency Council, since 1990, when he was appointed by the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

That would be the Expediency Discernment Council.

Khomeini’s Iran plays a long game and it’s a dangerous game. Rafsanjani was a hard line Khomeinist who was dedicated to advancing Khomeini’s violent vision.

RELATED: Yesterday I added a link to a recent StrategyPage update as background to a post. It drew a couple of thank yous and that’s good. Over the years I have shared my disgust with lack of media context with Glenn, Ed and Stephen. The StrategyPage archives are a trove of “deep news” or “deep dive news.” Here’s the latest Iran update, from December 2016. It’s long. But here’s a useful extract:

The new American president-elect was elected in part because of popular anger over the 2015 Iran treaty. Then there is the fact that the most dangerous threat to Israel is not even Arab but Iran. Iranians are constantly reminded by their leaders that the official Iranian position is that any Moslem nation (especially Saudi Arabia and Turkey) that improves relations with Israel is betraying Islam. Iran also insists that the United States cannot be trusted and that the economic sanctions the July 2015 treaty lifted are not the main economic problem for Iran. That would be the two years of very low oil prices, which is Saudi Arabia’s way (along with some other local Sunni oil states) to put the hurt on Iran. That is only partially true but not relevant to the Iranians. One reason for seeking nuclear weapons is to give Iran the ability to persuade the Saudis to ship less oil and let the price go up. After that there will be the demand to let Iran run the Moslem holy places in Mecca and Medina. The Saudis are not willing to make deals that involve Iranian domination of the region. Yet the low oil prices have hurt the Saudis as well and all the Gulf oil states recently agreed to lower production in an effort to get prices up. What Arabs and Iranians both downplay is that the American fracking technology is changing the oil market more than anything else as is the growing use of non-oil fuels for energy. Even with record low prices the fracking industry survives and as the price of oil goes up more fracking operations resume production. Add to that recent natural gas deposits discovered and rapidly developed in Israel coastal waters and you can see why political relationships are shifting in the Middle East.