Inside the mind of Iran's Khamenei

CS Monitor

Deep inside an old Tehran political prison, three turns off a dark corridor and through a small gap, lies a bleak cell for solitary confinement. Too narrow for a prisoner to extend his arms, it was once the cell of the man who today holds the official title in Iran, "God's deputy on earth."Scratched into the blackened paint is a hopeless verse about "the prison ashamed of the face of the liberated."

It was here in the 1970s that opponents of the American-backed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi were held and tortured by the SAVAK secret police, as popular anger outside swelled inevitably toward the 1979 Islamic revolution. That event would oust the shah and usher in a self-proclaimed "government of God."

The downtown prison has since been turned into a museum called Ebrat, which means "lesson" or "example." Its ghoulish displays are a stark reminder of just one critical influence – a wary anti-Americanism – on the thinking of its most famous inmate, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Holding absolute power at the top of Iran's theocratic regime today, Mr. Khamenei will make the decisions that yield war or peace, determine détente with the United States or another generation of hostility, and dictate how far Iran goes toward a nuclear weapons capability. Few other global actors will be more important to understand as President Obama begins a second term, with Iran dominating issues across the Middle East and beyond.

Yet to many, Khamenei, whose black turban denotes a direct line of descent from Islam's prophet Muhammad, remains an enigma. A bookish revolutionary cleric with a passion for poetry, who years ago wore his clerical collar in the style of the "chic sheikhs," he was once considered a liberal, and on one occasion in the late 1980s even challenged the absolute power of the post he now holds.

Since taking the top spot in 1989, Khamenei has been a calculating player on the world stage, never leaving Iran but claiming leadership, with endless rhetorical flourish, of a global Islamic revolution. He has survived assassination attempts, remains deeply paranoid about his personal security, and is preoccupied with what he sees as the threat to the Islamic republic from Velvet Revolution-style protests and "Westoxication." And despite having lesser clerical credentials than many of Iran's most senior theologians, who have chafed at Khamenei's role as velayat-e faqih – the supreme religious ruler, who is meant to be infallible – he has godfathered the unruly and often vicious political scene inside Iran for nearly a quarter century.

Today, Khamenei presents himself as an uncompromising commander of an ever-strengthening Iran-led "Axis of Resistance," locked in battle against what he lambasts as the declining "arrogant" power of the US, other Western nations, and Israel.

Yet Iran also faces a host of US-led sanctions that are targeting its economy, choking its oil exports, and cutting off its central bank to pressure the country into halting its nuclear program. Does Khamenei see a way beyond the covert war that has shaken Tehran in recent years with the assassination of nuclear scientists, unexplained explosions, and computer viruses aimed at Iran's nuclear facilities – all of which he blames on the US and Israel? And what will he do if Israel or the US bombs the country's nuclear sites?

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