This is what my thoughts are that the Mullahs wanted him GONE, he was getting to big for his britches!!!
Except that he fully believed the Koranic model of Islamic government and chose a place of action and jihad INSTEAD of the naval gazing scholars who are to rule.
Say he had overthrown the Mullahs.
He would have been expected to hand over running the military operations to a warrior and become a serious student of the Koran full time and spent his days in Prayer, study, and philosophical meditations debating the Koran and the Hadith with similarly focused jihadi thinkers.
The general was a loyal doer, not a wannabe thinker.
I was thinking along the lines of when Fidel Castro sent Che Guevara to Bolivia to get him out of the way.
More likely was that the General was the equivalent of Reinhard Heydrich.