Is Khamenei Really a Great Strategist?

The Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei is “one of the outstanding diplomats in the world and a strategist,” a reality that “is acknowledged by the world,” according to Abbas Mousavi, a spokesman for the foreign ministry of the Islamic Republic.

After 31 years at the helm and enjoying absolute power, Ayatollah Khamenei is one of the longest-serving rulers in the world. Iran’s power and wealth is at his disposal and although according to the country's constitution the president is the head of the executive branch, he cannot even agree to UNESCO’s education goals without the Leader’s permission.

With his absolute power and his control over Iran’s wealth, Khamenei is able to dictate his own policies and strategies to all those who are supposed to run the country. Regardless of the cost and the consequences of these policies, his power allows him to turn whatever he wishes into a government priority.

Over the last 30 years, Mr. Khamenei has been driven by a number of priorities, which Abbas Mousavi describes as “strategies.” The key priorities fall into three areas:

 

1. Political: Organization of a political establishment and movement so that the Supreme Leader can dominate executive affairs;

2. Military: Strengthening of military institutions that support the Leader and identification of alternative sources for military hardware; and

3. Scientific: Technological mastery of nuclear enrichment.

 

Ayatollah Khamenei became Supreme Leader in 1989 after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini and during a time of volatility. He was not a Shia marja — religious authority — and his election as Khomeini's successor was considered to be temporary. Some clerical members of the Assembly of Experts, the body that has the power to designate and dismiss the Supreme Leader, voted for him provided he would seek their advice in issues of Islamic jurisprudence. In a meeting of the Assembly of Experts, Khamenei himself told them that his leadership would be a “nominal” one because he was not a marja.

Under Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, the leader’s “household,” or office, consisted of a small group of less than a hundred people but, in his first decade as the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei expanded this department to such a degree that it turned into a parallel government with ultimate power over the military, the media and the judiciary. Naturally, this vast bureaucracy required new sources of finance and to secure the necessary funds, the institutions that were transferred under the Supreme Leader's authority were given considerable leeway to engage in economic activities. It has been more than 30 years since Ayatollah Khamenei took over the leadership of the Islamic Republic, but today it is not known what share his “household” commands within the country’s budget,  or what its sources of revenue are.

Ayatollah Khamenei consolidated his power through the vast expansion of his “household” and by bolstering the Revolutionary Guards. A new branch of the Revolutionary Guards was established, the sole responsibility of which was to protect the Supreme Leader, his “household” and his subordinate institutions. Then, after the presidencies of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989-1997) and Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005) — after two decades as the leader — Khamenei took action to carry out his main political “strategy:” creating a political base and establishment that would work for him.

 

First Strategy: Very Costly Defeat for the Regime

This is how the country’s “principlists,” a unique group of ideologists who were neither reformists nor conservatives, were born — and how Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became their symbol. In 2009, during his twentieth year as the Supreme Leader and when the disputed presidential election led to unprecedented protests by the people, Khamenei discarded his customary reservations, came out in full support of Ahmadinejad and drove away, imprisoned or put under house arrest his former friends and colleagues.

Khamenei invested all his political capital in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who appeared to have created a new political movement beholden to the Supreme Leader from top to bottom. But, only two years after the disputed 2009 election, Ahmadinejad started challenging Khamenei and he fell so much out of favor with Khamenei that the Supreme Leader asked him not to run for presidency ever again. Ahmadinejad went against the wishes of the Supreme Leader and prepared to run in the 2017 presidential election, but, of course, he was disqualified by the Guardian Council, the body that approves or rejects candidates across Iran's political spectrum.

In recent years, Ahmadinejad has been one of the most outspoken critics of Ayatollah Khamenei. Without addressing or naming him directly, he has called the Leader’s appointees, such as Sadegh Larijani, the former head of the judiciary, a “dictator” and has said that he opposes “the way that the country is run.”

Khamenei’s political strategy has gone so wrong that now Khamenei’s circle is more worried about supporters of Ahmadinejad than about the remnants of Hashemi Rafsanjani supporters and those who still support the reformist Mohammad Khatami.

Due to the ongoing house arrests of the 2009 presidential candidates and the high number of protesters who were arrested or killed, the disputed election and its aftermath live on in the public mind. On the other hand, the group of politicians who have remained faithful to Khamenei enjoy a kind of legal immunity that allows them to engage in every kind of corruption in exchange for their loyalty. A good example is Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the former mayor of Tehran, who has escaped facing any consequences despite “astronomical” corruption cases against him.

In summary, Khamenei’s political strategy to create a loyal political force has been an unmitigated and costly failure.

 

Second Strategy: The Questionable and Lopsided Return on Military Investment

Ayatollah Khamenei’s second strategy relates to his efforts to increase the military might of the Islamic Republic. This strategy focuses on designing and manufacturing missiles with various range capabilities, and it is driven by Iran’s inability to buy military craft, which has resulted in the weakening of its air power.

Without the ability to buy fighter planes or to manufacture them inside the country, Khamenei has focused the military under his command on building a variety of missiles, based on technology imported from North Korea and China. In recent years, whenever the Islamic Republic has felt threatened, it has boasted of its missile power, and then tested missiles, often publicly announcing the tests, as well as unveiling “underground missile sites.”

Iran’s almost daily emphasis on its missile program has been so relentless that in 2010 the UN Security Council passed a resolution demanding that Iran stop its ballistic missile program altogether. During Iran’s nuclear negotiations with the Security Council’s permanent member countries plus Germany, this ban on producing ballistic missiles was altered to become a time-limited restriction but, since then, Iran has continued its provocations by stamping the side of missiles with inflammatory words such as "Israel must be wiped from the face of the earth,” by launching missiles into Iraq, by providing light and heavy arms to paramilitary groups in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Sudan, and by establishing missile bases in Syria close to the border with Israel. As a result, the missile program that could have been a defensive measure to compensate for a shortage of fighter planes has turned into a continuous irritant for both the US and Europe.

One of the main reasons US President Donald Trump cited for leaving the nuclear agreement and for re-imposing sanctions was Iran’s ballistic missile programs.

Therefore, Ayatollah Khamenei’s missile strategy has also been costly for Iran, and it is not clear how it has helped the interests of the country, or even the narrow interests of the regime.

 

Third Strategy: Nuclear Enrichment that Continues to Burden Iranians with Unnecessary Costs

Over the last 31 years, Ayatollah Khamenei’s third key strategy has been to master the controversial technology of uranium enrichment domestically. Aware of the international community’s sensitivity towards uranium enrichment, for years Iran engaged in clandestine research and development to enrich uranium.

When this clandestine project was exposed but Iran still refused to provide reliable data to the International Atomic Energy Agency, it turned into a complicated crisis that has engulfed both the Islamic Republic and the Iranian people since 2004. In other words, a long period of Khamenei’s leadership has been overshadowed by this nuclear crisis and the unprincipled insistence on continuing this project has done major, long-term damage to the livelihood of Iranians.

A few months after the crisis over Iran’s nuclear program started, the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and countries including Canada, Japan and Australia all imposed sanctions.

While the administration of President Mohammad Khatami had achieved some success in improving national welfare, in economic development and in helping the urban middle class, economic sanctions reversed this trend. Instead, a group of regime “insiders” and their attempts to “bypass sanctions,” which resulted in significant financial gains for them, became a dominant force in the economy. President Rouhani has called these insiders “sanctions traders” and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has referred to them as “brother smugglers.”

The nuclear agreement could have been beneficial to both the regime and the Iranian people but, as a result of Khamenei’s adventurism by allowing his supporters to engage in provocative behavior and projects like the ballistic missile program, the US left the nuclear agreement. Not only did it re-impose the previous sanctions, it prevented the Islamic Republic from benefiting from the European Union’s lifting of the sanctions. Even Russia and China, two partners of the Islamic Republic, were forced to carry out sanctions imposed by the US.

Under the pressure of more than a decade of sanctions, the Iranian economy and the lives of Iranians have been shattered and become fragile. The rate of economic growth that was supposed to go into double-digits is now below zero and, with Ayatollah Khamenei’s insistence on refusing to negotiate with the US to reduce tensions, there are no prospects that the situation will improve.

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The unprecedented divide between the people and the regime, the instability in Iran’s international relations that has led to a negative view toward not just the country but Iranian nationals as well, and an economy crushed by sanctions without any prospects of improvement — these are the consequences of Ayatollah Khamenei’s three main projects, initiated 31 years ago when he was put at the helm of the Islamic Republic and became the chief “strategist” of the regime.