War has already been declared in Iran — between Coca-Cola and the theocrats

The Shah is Dead. Long live the Shah — and I don’t mean Reza Pahlavi, the 45-year-old pretender to his late father’s Peacock Throne, whom many in Washington would like to install atop this most vexatious nation. The way things are going nuclear-wise, he may have a chance. But almost three decades after Khomeini’s revolution, the monarch who matters among Tehran’s business elite is the ‘Shah of Pistachios’, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Iran’s once and perhaps future president is widely believed to be the country’s richest man: his family’s writ runs to airlines, caviar, oil, mining, automobiles, property and agriculture, which pretty much covers the entire economy. There’s supposedly billions stashed in Switzerland, Singapore and Luxembourg; and property in France, Canada, Dubai, India and Thailand. The ex-president’s clan denies it but poor Iranians who see their leaders squander Iran’s wealth in Hezbollah adventurism (and probably in Iraq too) snort that Rafsanjani doth protest too much.