New Delhi, July 3 -- TEHRAN - The 88 members of Iran's Assembly of Experts are the only body in the Islamic Republic authorized to choose and remove a supreme leader. On June 29, sixty-three of them - nearly three-quarters - issued a joint statement urging Iran's negotiators to hold the red lines "set by the supreme leader" in the Islamabad MoU talks. The statement was directed at Mojtaba Khamenei, who is the supreme leader. Sixty-three clerics told the man they had just appointed that he had approved the wrong deal.

The statement's content was conventional enough - maintain red lines, protect the rights of the resistance front, do not surrender sovereignty over the nuclear file. Its significance was structural. The Assembly of Experts h...