India, March 2 -- On the morning of February 28, a coordinated US-Israeli airstrike - codenamed Operation Epic Fury - reduced decades of carefully constructed Iranian theocracy to rubble, both literally and figuratively. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader for 37 years, was killed in his office in Tehran along with top military commanders, including the commander-in-chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). This is not merely a leadership transition; it is the violent unravelling of a geopolitical order that has stood since 1979.

Khamenei never publicly named a successor - a deliberate choice that has now produced a constitutional crisis at the worst possible moment. While Iran's 88-member Assembly of Experts is const...