It's the dream, isn't it, to grow rich while running some s***hole Middle East country into the ground, before fleeing with your billions and retiring to some well-appointed quarters in Moscow's most exclusive neighborhood?
Hey, don't knock it — it worked just fine for Bashar Assad. And who knows? Maybe someday Syria will rise back up to the pre-Assad level of merely Mostly S***hole Nation in a decade or two.
But I'm not here today to talk about the fate of the exiled husk of the Assad Dynasty — can you even get decent falafel in Moscow? — but about the fate of Iran's revolutionary theocratic leadership and their billions of pilfered dollars.
You might recall that back in January, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pointed out that "We can see millions, tens of millions of dollars being wired out of the country, snuck out of the country by the Iranian leadership."
This was right around the time President Trump ordered the USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) Carrier Strike Group (CSG) to the Middle East, totally coincidentally, I'm sure. By the time the Ford CSG arrived on the scene, there's no telling how many more millions or billions of dollars were wired out.
But here's a question, and hopefully not for the ages: Whose money is it?
Legally and morally, those pilfered dollars belong to the people of Iran. But you can bet your last doubloon that the late Ayatollah Khamenei didn't put his share in a Swiss account with "For the People of Iran, Distribute in Case of My Death" on it.
Khamenei, as I'm sure you know, was killed in the early hours of the war by an Israeli airstrike because there is, after all, some justice in this world. Ayatollah Alireza Arafi is kinda-sorta Khamenei's replacement, in the sense that he's the senior cleric on the country's just-formed three-person provisional leadership council. As yet, however, there is no new turban-wearing Supreme Leader.
But Arafi himself is an interesting choice because his white turban is the one worn by non-Sayyid clerics — those without claimed descent from Mohammed. White is standard garb for scholars and doesn't carry the same prestige as the black turban. My takeaway is that choosing Arafi might not be quite scraping the bottom of the barrel, but he's also probably not the guy with the Swiss bank codes.
Also, there are reports, as yet unconfirmed, that we blew up Arafi. Don't sleep twice under the same bed, Alireza!
Whether or not Arafi still breathes (or if he still does, for how much longer...), the campaign to eliminate Iran's leadership is stunningly successful after just three days:
UPDATED FULL LIST of Iranian leadership killed in Israeli strikes:
— Theti Mapping (@ThetiMapping) March 2, 2026
🔴Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader
🔴Abdolrahim Mousavi, General Staff of the Armed Forces of Iran
🔴Mohammad Pakpour, IRGC Commander
🔴Aziz Nasirzadeh, Defense Minister
🔴Ali Shamkhani, Advisor for… pic.twitter.com/K2JLsLSsVy
"So out of 48 high-profile deaths, we have the names of 19 officials," and I don't hesitate to add "already." There could be more by now, or others we don't yet know of.
Also, as I understand it, Israeli forces perform most of the leadership strikes, while U.S. forces focus more on military targets.
That still leaves us with that burning question: With so many of the big names gone, who gets the money?
There's a caper movie to be had out of this situation. Can Danny Ocean put the team back together (minus, sadly, the late Bernie Mac) and pull off one last heist to settle an old, mysterious score with dead-end elements of the deposed Islamic Republic?
I'd pay good money to see that. Just don't ask where I stashed it.
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