In a sense, writing history as it happens tends to be less satisfying as it might at first seem. A large part of this is due to the untrustworthiness of the contemporary press, especially official news sources. Yesterday morning, as I write this, a dear friend of mine asked me if I had heard of the helicopter crash of the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi. It did not take too long until I was in possession of all of the news that was then available about the situation, or at least all that was not behind a paywall and was written or translated into English, which still proved to be a lot. Even at this early stage–the story was then only about an hour old or so–there were a lot of unsatisfactory questions. That said, at least the basic narrative made a certain amount of sense. Raisi and a large group of other people in at least three helicopters (American-built, no less) had toured the building of a new dam and had celebrated that project with Azerbaijani political leadership before traveling back towards Tabriz. It is at this point that things begin to get murky.

According to Iranian official news sources, which are always going to be a little sketchy because of the unwillingness to release the truth, the helicopter in which the president and several other elites, including the governor of the province of East Azerbaijan (an up and coming politician himself), the Foreign Minister (equivalent to America’s Secretary of State), as well as a Friday prayer leader who turned out to be a noted ayatollah suffered a “hard landing” in the district of Varzaqan and the regime requested for prayers because the president was missing, even though at the time it was said that contact had been made with at least one of the crew members and one of the people who had been flying on the helicopter.

On the face of it, this led to way more questions than answers. First, the specific area of the “hard landing” kept on being estimated or revised, and none of the answers made sense. In some accounts it was in a forested region near some tiny village, and the specific villages that were nearest to the crash kept on changing, which suggested that this “landing” was looking more and more like a crash in difficult, mountainous terrain. The supposed closeness of the site of various villages led to considerable doubt as it took longer and longer for rescue teams to arrive at the scene. It would seem absolutely inconceivable that 16 hours (which is about how long it took) would be required for dozens of rescue teams to reach a village. Given that the villages in question were themselves only about an hour away (given highway speeds) from the major city of Tabriz, it was obvious that we were dealing with far rougher terrain than villages, which require at least some kind of flat space for construction or fields, or gently rolling country at worst for pastoral herding. Not only that, but it appeared that the weather itself–foggy, cloudy, and rainy–both seems to have been a cause of the crash (let us call it what it is) as well as hindering the rescue efforts for it.

How does one lose a president? What are the conditions in which the president was considered to be missing? The helicopter in question was not so large that a crew member and passenger who were possibly injured would not have been able to see other people around, unless they were either entirely immobilized due to serious injuries (not unlikely if we are dealing with a crash in mountainous terrain) or if the wreckage was not dispersed across a wider area where the fate of different people within the same vehicle would not have been known. This leads, quite naturally, to questions about the nature of the crash, which will be investigated for some time (though how transparently is not necessarily clear). In the past, it was rare and often disastrous when the leaders of regimes went missing, although in most cases their likely fate was not that hard to figure out. A leader went out to battle, his army was largely destroyed, and the leader of the regime is assumed to have either been killed or captured and subject to a certain amount of mischief at the hands of the winning forces that might have ended badly but was not necessarily communicated to the ruler’s government. Everyone else assumed he (usually a he) was no longer living and a successor was chosen so that the operation of the government could progress. Alternatively there were shipwrecks or hunting accidents or other dodgy occurrences of that nature and people were presumed lost so that people could move on. In the contemporary world, though, such things did not tend to happen any longer, given how closely connected leaders were at all times with others. How could someone like a president of a developed nation simply get lost?

Needless to say, the Iranian people really showed their sense of humor in these circumstances. This included fake movie posters with the “missing” president for Lost (in retrospect a rather appropriate one) as well as “Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle.” Calls for prayers regarding the potential of wild animal encounters led to a lot of funny pictures of bears with captions involving the bears not wanting to eat the president or wondering if the president had wanted to escape sixth grade exams or something of the like. While most of the nations of the world, somewhat predictably, gave messages of encouragement and support, as it is the usual habit of leaders to support the health and well-being of others in the same profession, one United States Senator commented rather bluntly that the Iranian president’s absence from the world would make the world a safer and better place (this is admittedly true of many world leaders, past and present, alas) and that no one would miss the president if indeed he was dead.

What accounts for this harshness and this willingness to make sport of one’s elected leaders? As it happens, Raisi had attempted to win the Iranian presidency before, in 2017, and was defeated even after a consolidation of the conservative vote in Iran by the incumbent. His victory in 2021 was credited, modestly, as the result of a carefully managed election, which does not inspire a great amount of support among those who doubt the election’s eligibility (which is a favorite sport among politically inclined people all around the world). Raisi also carried some baggage with more reformist elements of Iran, for good reason. In 1988, as a judicial figure in the Iranian regime, he earned the enduring nickname of the “Butcher of Tehran” because of his role in the killing of thousands of leftist political prisoners (which perhaps proves he was not all bad). After his defeat in 2017, like most losers of elections, he complained that there were voting irregularities (he apparently did not complain about such possible election interference, of course, when he won the next election, perhaps unsurprisingly). After his election, he continued his reputation as a hardliner who was harsh towards the protesters of Tehran, helping to encourage the environment of stark repression that led to deaths and imprisonment, the imposition of harsher standards of modesty for women, and a politics of brinksmanship where Iran helped Russia in its efforts against the Ukraine, engaged in proxy wars as well as increased hostilities with Israel, and sought to complete its efforts at acquiring nuclear status while being less than friendly with world inspecting regimes.

And while the articles were being written wondering when he would be found by one of the many rescue teams (the number kept increasing as time went on), and updates went on questioning whether or not the crash site had been located, the ending was rather abrupt and somewhat anticlimactic, in that once rescue teams arrived on the scene, there were no survivors, no signs of life, and as is the case so often in the past, the gears of government must move so that another person must take his offices–which were many. The deceased president had not only been the head of state for Iran, but also the expected successor of the aging Grand Ayatollah of Iran and a key member of the Assembly of Experts. These positions, like the foreign minister and the governorship of East Azerbaijan, would all have to be replaced by someone. “Let another take his office,” as it is written. And so it was that before too long, the appointed first Vice President became the acting president and new elections were planned for sometime within the next couple of months, with no obvious candidate in sight who could serve as a successor to be groomed for the role of Supreme Leader. Such concerns, though, deal with history not as it is being written, but how it has not happened yet, and are left to those who are more interested in speculation than I am. For my pen only deals with miseries that have happened or are happening, not on those which have yet to happen.