Ayatollah Khamenei not, NOT, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Brilliant piece by (the brilliant) Vali Nasr.
Highlights (my emphasis):
Khamenei transformed the top job, taking many of the powers of the presidency with him and turning the office of the supreme leader into the omnipotent overseer of Iran’s political scene. Today, mandarins around him manage the interplay among the country’s bickering centers of power: the parliament, the presidency, the judiciary, the Revolutionary Guards, the military, the intelligence services, the police agencies, the clerical elite, the Friday prayer leaders and much of the media, not to mention a constellation of formal and informal foundations, organizations, councils, seminaries and business associations…
For Iran’s top cleric, 0Khamenei also has scant religious authority — a surprising deficiency for the chief of a theocracy and a stark departure from Khomeini. Most Shiites in Iran and abroad now look elsewhere for spiritual guidance, to a handful of bookish ayatollahs or to neighboring Iraq’s most respected Shiite religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. All this has made the supreme leadership into an office that’s far more political and Iran-focused than had been intended by Khomeini, who wanted to run not merely a country but a pan-Islamic revolution.
Why does he matter? Because
As the National Intelligence Estimate itself put it, “Tehran’s decisions are guided by a cost-benefit approach rather than a rush to a weapon irrespective of the political, economic, and military costs.” But Tehran’s decisions are also guided by one man, and anyone serious about understanding the sources of Iranian conduct needs to keep an eye on him.
