It’s too soon to report that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is dead, but it’s not too soon to start thinking about what happens when he is. Certainly intelligence services are abuzz with talk of his doom, and until he surfaces in something other than a government-issued propaganda photograph that could have been taken years ago, there will be plenty of cause for speculation. The New York Sun first marked the ayatollah’s medical difficulties in a front page dispatch on December 12, picking up Michael Ledeen’s reporting on PajamasMedia that Khamenei had been hospitalized with a cardiac crisis and cancer. Combine that with the reported rumblings in Tehran against President Ahmadinejad and one has the makings of a leadership crisis in Iran on which the West, if it plays its cards right, can capitalize.

For this is a war in the outcome of which the entire West — not only Israel or America — has a stake. Ayatollah Khamenei’s official biography notes that he translated into Persian from the Arabic the book “An Indictment against the Western Civilization,” by Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian who is also revered by Al Qaeda and whom Paul Berman has called “The Philosopher of Islamic Terror.” What will be important is that any turmoil or disarray in the Iranian leadership is taken full advantage of by those pressing for a change in the regime. It will be easier to accomplish such a change of regime before the regime is equipped with nuclear weapons, and much more dangerous to accomplish after Iran goes nuclear, although the example of the Soviet Union shows that it is not impossible. If there is an opportunity now — and it appears there is — the thing to do is to seize it.