The secret of success is successors.
The Islamic Revolution could have come to a screeching halt on June 3, 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini died of cancer just shy of his eighty-seventh birthday. But Khomeini never saw himself as a one-man show. He had invested his life in building a movement of disciples to embrace his Radical vision, export it around the world, and carry it on long after his death. In so doing, he had carefully groomed an inner circle of trusted, loyal, and ideologically pure protégés to whom he felt he could entrust the movement’s leadership.
When one of these protégés, the Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri—one of Khomeini’s closest friends and his designated heir—betrayed him, daring to take public issue with the regime’s human-rights record, Khomeini turned instead to another disciple, giving the keys to the kingdom, as it were, to the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Khamenei was born in 1939 in the town of Mashhad to a poor but devoutly religious family who were descendants of Muhammad. In 1958, at the age of nineteen, he entered seminary in Qom, where he met his mentor while attending his classes on Islamic mysticism and jurisprudence. Khomeini immediately took a liking to the bright and eloquent young Ali, taking him under his wing not only to teach him the intricacies of Sharia law but also to instill in him a hatred for the shah and a passion for waging jihad to purify Iranian society and one day establish an Islamic state.
Ali was an eager and devoted follower. He translated the books of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Radical, into Farsi. He wrote a number of books of his own. He also became so immersed in underground, subversive political activities that by 1979 he had been arrested, imprisoned, and tortured by the shah’s secret police at least a half dozen times. Through it all, Ali Khamenei emerged as one of Khomeini’s most trusted deputies inside Iran during the ayatollah’s exile in Turkey and Iraq.
When Khomeini finally returned home and rose to power, he made Ali, who was only forty at the time, a member of his Revolutionary Council, then promoted him rapidly. Khomeini often tapped him for the honor of delivering Friday sermons and prayers to the teeming masses in Tehran. By 1980, Khomeini had named him defense minister, just as the Iran-Iraq War was breaking out. By October of 1981, Ali Khamenei had been elected president of Iran, where he served until his mentor’s death and his surprise promotion to the nation’s Supreme Leader, having narrowly survived several assassination attempts along the way.
A Confrontation with the U.S. Is “Unavoidable”
One of the most striking features of the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is just how few strikingly unique features he really has.
Few have questioned his religious devotion, but no one in Iran—least of all his fellow clerics—sees him as a game-changing theologian, the way his mentor was. No one questions his intelligence, but neither does anyone see him as a brilliant political strategist, as his mentor was. He has been widely described as an impressive orator—that was one trait Khomeini picked up early on—but as Iran’s Supreme Leader he has mostly shied away from being perceived as the public face or voice of the Revolution, preferring instead to play the behind-the-scenes puppet master to whoever is serving as the nation’s president at any given moment.
He has, in many ways, seemed to suffer an inferiority complex, as if he knows he is not up to the monumental task of leading the Revolution forward that was laid upon him and fears everyone around him knows this as well. He actually signaled such self-doubts during his inaugural speech as Supreme Leader. “I am,” he said, “an individual with many faults and shortcomings and truly a minor seminarian. However, a responsibility has been placed on my shoulders, and I will use all my capabilities and all my faith in the Almighty in order to be able to bear this heavy responsibility.”258
In his new role, therefore—a role I don’t think he ever really believed he was qualified for or was actually going to get (or perhaps last in for very long)—Khamenei made clear he was sticking to his mentor’s message: anti-American, anti-Zionist, and fully committed to exporting the Revolution and confronting the West, whatever the cost. Consider a small sampling of Ali Khamenei’s more troubling quotes:
“The end of the U.S. will begin in Iraq. As the Imam said, ‘One day the U.S., too, will be history.’”259
“The bitter and venomous taste of Western liberal democracy, which the United States has hypocritically been trying to portray through its propaganda as a healing remedy, has hurt the body and soul of the Islamic Ummah [community] and burned the hearts of Muslims.”260
“It is natural that our Islamic system should be viewed as an enemy and an intolerable rival by such an oppressive power as the United States, which is trying to establish a global dictatorship and further its own interests by dominating other nations and trampling on their rights. It is also clear that the conflict and confrontation between the two is something natural and unavoidable”261 (emphasis added).
“A day will come that the current U.S. president [George W. Bush] . . . will be tried in an international supreme court for the catastrophes they caused in Iraq. Americans will have to answer for why they don’t end occupation of Iraq and why waves of terrorism and insurgency have overwhelmed the country. It will not be like this forever, and someday they will be stopped as happened to Hitler.”262
“Today more than ever, the Muslim peoples are disgusted and furious with the Americans. . . . The American regime can expect a resounding slap and a devastating fist-blow from the Muslim nation for its support of the Zionist crimes and criminals. . . . America’s and Israel’s aggressive character and conduct revives the spirit of resistance in the Islamic world, [now] more than ever, and makes the value of Jihad clearer than ever.”263
“There is no way to confront the barbaric Zionist wolves and the aggression of the Great Satan except through martyrdom.”264
“The Iranian people have been defeating America for the past twenty-five years. The world of Islam has been mobilized against America for the past twenty-five years. The people call, ‘Death to America!’”265
“There is a great resemblance between the behavior of today’s Americans and the behavior of the Nazis. . . . The Americans are infected today with satanic pride and arrogant egotism.”266
“It is the mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to erase Israel from the map of the region.”267
“Regarding atomic energy, we need it now. Our nation has always been threatened from outside. The least we can do to face this danger is let our enemies know that we can defend ourselves. Therefore, every step you [members of Iran’s nuclear scientific community] take here is in defense of your country and your evolution. With this in mind, you should work hard and at great speed.”268
“A wave of Islamic revival has swept through the Islamic world, and Muslim nations are expressing a strong desire to return to Islam and practice this lofty religion. This awakening has stemmed from the great Islamic revolution of the Iranian people under the leadership of our late magnanimous Imam. . . . The enemies told us not to export our Islamic revolution! . . . However, our Islamic revolution [is] like the scent of spring flowers that is carried by the breeze [and has] reached every corner of the Islamic world.”269
It is worth noting that while Khamenei has talked tough (and has continued to fund terrorist groups throughout the Middle East), he has done little to rock the boat in real and practical ways. He permitted virtually no serious and lasting reforms at home; nor did he launch any new wars abroad. Rather, he spent much of his first fifteen years as Supreme Leader building the domestic political base that he sorely lacked when he came to power, and he built critical new international alliances—notably with nuclear powers Russia, China, and North Korea—that he believed would eventually help Iran accomplish its national objectives.
And then, in 2005, he chose an unexpected and virtually unknown protégé of his own to install as president and carry his own message of radical change to the nation . . . and the world.
“The Little Street Sweeper”
No one
saw Mahmoud Ahmadinejad coming.
When he announced his candidacy for president in April 2005, the five-foot-four-inch Radical received almost no media coverage. He received no newspaper endorsements. No political parties supported him. He had few political credentials and almost no experience.
Born to a poor but devoutly religious family on October 28, 1956, in Aradan, a small town in central Iran, he had no personal wealth or family connections going for him. The son of a grocer, Ahmadinejad was only twenty-two when the Revolution unfolded. He had not been close to the Ayatollah Khomeini. He had not studied political science, public policy, history, or even Islamic theology in college. Instead, he held a doctorate in traffic management and had been a professor for a few years after his time in the military. He had not married into a political family; his wife was also a professor.
Ahmadinejad was not the head of a trade union or some other nationwide organization. He had come in twenty-third in his 1999 campaign for a seat on the Tehran City Council. He had barely been elected mayor of Tehran in 2003, when only 12 percent of the city’s eligible voters had turned up to the polls. He had then tried to endear himself to the city’s poor by occasionally donning an orange jumpsuit and helping the municipal street cleaners sweep up trash in one neighborhood or another.270
After more than a thousand candidates had been denied the right to run for president by the central government, one early poll put Ahmadinejad second to last in a contest among the eight remaining candidates, drawing a paltry 2.8 percent support.271
The front-runner in the race was Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of the most respected clerics and politicians in the country and the man who had succeeded the Ayatollah Khamenei as president in 1989 and served until 1997. The chairman of the Tehran City Council—a close political ally of the mayor—told reporters, “There is widespread pressure on Ahmadinejad to withdraw. Everyone wants him to leave the race, but he himself is not prepared to go.”272 Ahmadinejad later joked, “They said to me, ‘No one has heard of you, you won’t win votes.’ I told them, ‘If no one has heard of me, then don’t worry—if I lose, no one will notice.’”273
Two months later, however, everyone noticed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. On June 17, 2005, the Iranian political class felt blindsided when Ahmadinejad won 19.5 percent of the vote, while Rafsanjani failed to secure a victory with only 21 percent, falling well short of the necessary threshold of 50 percent. The BBC reported that Ahmadinejad’s campaign staffers were so shocked by the results, they “had not even prepared a podium for him to speak from in response to the results.”274
Then, one week later—on June 24—the entire world was stunned when Ahmadinejad not only won the runoff with Rafsanjani but did so in a landslide, winning 62 percent to 36 percent, with the government claiming that about six in ten eligible voters, some 28 million Iranians, had actually voted.
AHMADINEJAD STUNS WORLD
—Arab News, June 26, 2005
The IRANIAN SURPRISE
—Al-Ahram, July 7, 2005
U.S. MULLS SHOCK RESULT IN IRANIAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
—Agence France-Presse, June 25, 2005
Agence France-Presse rightly characterized the election as a “political earthquake” whose tremors were being felt around the world.275
“Today is the beginning of a new political era,” Ahmadinejad declared upon learning of his astounding victory. “I am proud of being the Iranian nation’s little servant and street sweeper.”276
In just two months, the militant mayor had gone from virtually no press coverage to global saturation coverage, and he immediately used his new media platform, vowing to accelerate Iran’s nuclear program and provoke direct confrontations with the United States and with Israel. And that was just the beginning.
Chosen by Allah or the Ayatollah?
Rafsanjani immediately cried foul.
“All the means of the regime were used in an organized and illegal way to intervene in the election,” the former president insisted.277
Rafsanjani’s supporters alleged—with no small amount of evidence—that the Ayatollah Khamenei had hand-picked Ahmadinejad and thrown his enormous political weight behind him. Khamenei, after all, controlled the millions of current and former members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, an elite branch of the Iranian Army. He also controlled the hundreds of thousands of current and former members of the Basij, a vast Iranian network of paramilitary operatives that helps Iran’s uniformed and secret police forces maintain order and serves as a reserve force in time of war or internal crisis. If Khamenei chose to signal these and other networks not only to vote for someone but also to round up millions of other votes, he certainly had the power to do so, and allegations of ballot box stuffing by the Revolutionary Guards and many other forms of election fraud were rampant throughout that summer.278
Ahmadinejad, however, refused to admit being chosen by the ayatollah. Rather, he believed he was chosen by Allah.
In an October 14, 2006, speech to the Union of Islamic Engineers, for example, Ahmadinejad claimed a divine connection to Allah and suggested he had been chosen for a unique mission: to launch the second and final round of the Islamic Revolution, to make Iran a nuclear power, and to usher in the reign of the Twelfth Imam. He claimed to be directly and personally inspired by Allah and suggested that only Allah’s favor on his life could account for his meteoric rise to power and his ability to constantly stymie the foreign policy objectives of the United States and other Western powers vis-à-vis the Middle East.
“I told you that the second wave of the Revolution has already begun with my election to the presidency, and that it is bigger and more terrible than the first,” Ahmadinejad told the gathering “On the nuclear issue, I have said to my friends on many occasions, ‘Don’t worry. They [the West] are only making noise.’ But my friends don’t believe [me], and say, ‘You are connected to some place!’ I always say: ‘Now the West is disarmed vis-à-vis Iran [on the nuclear issue], and does not know how to end this matter.’ But my friends say: ‘You are uttering divine words!’ . . . Someone asked me: ‘So-and-so said that you have a connection.’ I said: ‘Yes, I have.’ He asked me: ‘Really, you have a connection? With whom?’ I answered, ‘I have a connection with God.’”279
Ahmadinejad then contrasted his direct inspiration from Allah with his claim that President Bush was directly inspired by the devil and thus doomed to defeat. “The president of America is like us. That is, he too is inspired. . . . But [his] inspiration is of the satanic kind. Satan gives inspiration to the president of America.”280
Four years after Ahmadinejad was elected the sixth president of Iran, the evidence is now quite clear that the Ayatollah Khamenei chose him, blessed him, and gave him enormous latitude to make apocalyptic pronouncements and bring Iran to the verge of war. The real question is, why? Who is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad? What does he believe? Where does he believe Iran and the world are headed?
The answers I found to these questions were surprising, in part because while Ahmadinejad speaks so highly of the Iranian Revolution’s founder, he has a distinctly different theology, one that has dramatically changed the course of Iran, perhaps forever.
A Follower of the Mahdi
Mahmoud is the fourth of seven children—three boys, four girls—but Ahmadinejad is not his actual given surname. His father’s name was Ahmad Sabaghian. The name Sabaghian281 means “dye-master,” suggesting that the family was at one time engaged in dying wool for Persian carpets. But according to a relative, when Ahmad moved his family to Tehran when Mahmoud was a year old, he decided to change the family name, perhaps to sound less like rural peasants and more intensely religious. Ahmadinejad, the name he chose, is a combination of two Persian words, Ahmad and Nejad. Together, the words mean “of the Ahmadi race” or “of the race of the righteous” or, more broadly, “of the race of the Prophet Muhammad,” a reference to the fact that one of the names of Muhammad was Ahmad, meaning “righteous one.”282
A
hmad was originally a teacher of the Qur’an but could not earn enough money teaching to support his family. He ran a grocery store that failed. For years he ran a barber shop in Aradan, a town of about ten thousand people. Then he became a grocer again in Narmak, a community on the outskirts of Tehran, and later a blacksmith and metalworker when a construction boom in the capital took off during the 1950s. His wife was a descendant of Muhammad and all her life wore a full-length black dress and head-covering known as a chador that hid everything but her eyes.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may not have had money or a well-connected family, but he had a powerful intellect and deep religious convictions, and both have helped him advance significantly. After high school, he placed 132nd out of some one hundred fifty to two hundred thousand students who were competing for only about ten thousand freshman openings in Iranian universities. He eventually chose to attend the University of Science and Technology in Narmak. When he was twenty-two, the Revolution broke out, and he and his brothers became deeply involved in pro-Khomeini political activities on campus. Ahmadinejad helped found the Islamic Students Union and worked for a politically active student religious publication called Jeegh va Daad, which is Farsi for “Scream and Shout.”
During this same period, it appears Ahmadinejad was also involved in a shadowy Islamic society known as the Hojatieh, whose leaders taught that the Twelfth Imam was coming soon and whose members believed they were required to take spiritual (but not political) actions to hasten his coming.283
Even in the intensely religious environment Khomeini was creating at the time, many believed the Hojatieh was a religious cult. Worse, from Khomeini’s perspective, the movement discouraged people from being fully devoted to creating an Islamic state, preferring instead to wait for it to come from the sky. In 1983, therefore, Khomeini actually banned the Hojatieh, and Ahmadinejad seems to have subsumed his sympathies for the group to protect his opportunities for career advancement.
Inside the Revolution Page 18
