Reporting from Beirut and Tehran—
Osama bin Laden was a Sunni Muslim extremist who considered Iran’s Shiite majority faith a blasphemous deviation from the Koran. His ideological fellow travelers killed members of the Islamic Republic’s Revolutionary Guard in eastern Iran and slaughtered Shiites in Iraq.
But his death was a great victory for the United States and the Obama administration. And so, within the cold calculus of Middle East politics and diplomacy, it was a defeat for Tehran.
