Seyyed Ali Khamenei

From AICbackground

Seyyed Ali Khamenei

Supreme Leader of Iran

"The powers dominating our world do not value anything but power and we must speak with them in the only language they understand, the language of strength."

"This regime (Israel) is an infectious tumour for the entire Islamic world.."

"The Palestinian issue is not an internal Israeli matter. It involves the interests of the whole Islamic world, including Iran. All should strive to return that piece of land to Islamic hands."

Background

You were born in 1939 in Mashhad, the great holy city of eastern Iran, to an Azeri(Caspian Turkish) family. You spent much of your young adult life training in the Shiite seminaries of Najaf and Qom. You first met the great Khomeini while attending theology lectures in Qom, where he lectured on Islamic Mysticism. You joined his underground Islamic Movement in 1962. For the next seven years, you organized underground pro-Islamic, anti-Shah groups, getting thrown in prison many times for your activities. In 1974, SAVAK, the Shah's secret police, arrested you and tortured you at their headquarters, releasing you a year later.

Revolution

One of the founders of the Islamic Republic Party in 1978, you became a member of the Revolutionary Council, after the Islamic Revolution the following year. From then until mid-1980, you held many positions, including Deputy Defense Minister, Commander of the Revolutionary Guards, Friday Prayer Leader of Tehran, Majlis (Parliament) member, and advisor to the Supreme Defense Council.

In June of 1981, you were injured by a bomb planted by the terrorist group PMOI and lost the use of your right arm. After a month-and-a-half hospital stay, you resumed your public role. In September of 1981, you were elected Secretary General of the Islamic Republic Party; in October of the same year you were elected President of the Islamic Republic of Iran. You were reelected for a second term in August of 1985. After the death of the great Imam Khomeini in 1989, the Assembly of Experts honored you with the position of Rahbar (supreme religious leader of Iran). This is a position of extreme power, which gives you much sway over the course that Iran will take.

Your appointment was not without its difficulties, however. The Islamic Constitution produced by Khomeini in 1979 stipulated that the Rahbar must be the most powerful and respected Shiite cleric in Iran, holding the position of Marja-e Taqlid, or "Grand Ayatollah." You were one step below that upon your appointment, being an Ayatollah. Though this puts you in the elite ranks of the Shiite world, the fact is that only 3-5 Marjas exist at any one time, and they seriously outranked you in the eyes of the world's Shiites, being something equivalent to the Popes of the Islamic world. To secure your appointment, the Guardian Council actually forced parliament to amend the constitution, allowing a non-Marja to hold the position. Soon thereafter, the Assembly of Experts attempted to bolster your standing by appointing you a Marja themselves. This naked political move seriously damaged the credibility of Iran's Shiite establishment throughout the Islamic world, and even though you are thus technically a Grand Ayatollah, you are wise enough not to flout the fact often.

Rahbar

You typically exert influence through other government bodies and appointments: you are head of the Supreme Defense Council, member of the Council of Experts, and head of the Cultural Revolution Council. These jobs give you a hold on the army, appointments, and the press. When you need to impose your will on parliament, you do it through the Guardian Councils, whose members have all been vetted by you as confirmed believers in the Revolution.

Having been profoundly influenced by your religious training, and the Islamic Revolution, you were one of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's most powerful followers. Regardless, you have emerged as a "moderate" Iranian leader. You want to end your country's international isolation and believe that Iran must open up to foreign aid and investment. You also recognize the importance of the economy to your political future. But you still hold on to your hatred of the "Great Satan" of America. Fighting imperial America's puppet, the Shah, for half your life, has given you a clear sense of the evil that the United States represents. However, you are not blind to the power of the imperialists, and you recognize that sometimes concessions are needed. Although you publicly encourage your followers to oppose the Great Satan, you played a key role in the release of the Western hostages. This concession was made to improve relations with the United States at a particularly delicate time. Although you are wise enough to recognize America's power and not antagonize it unduly, you have consistently rejected any talk of official dialogue with the US or Israel, and it is unlikely that you will change this opinion even at this critical juncture.

Your hold over power has been increased lately as a result of the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the Iranian presidency. Ahmadinejad is rumored to have been a Baseej, or religious volunteer, during the revolution, which places him squarely in your camp. Also, as the public face of the Islamic Republic Ahmadinejad has made a number of inflammatory statements, especially pertaining to Israel, which have gained him harsh international opprobrium, despite the fact that his is actually a ceremonial position, and that many of Iran's most delicate policies, including the nuclear program, are firmly in the hands of you and a small number of other elite clerics. To tamp down his rhetoric you actually took out a page in a Tehran newspaper in early 2007, pleasantly reminding Ahmadinejad to leave certain affairs to the experts. Despite the welcome respite Ahmadinejad's rhetoric has given you from international eyes, he has also been a frustrating figure internally, as Iranians on the street have come to realize just how thoroughly his rhetoric has damaged Iran's international credibility, particularly in terms of revoked foreign investments and the possibility that his bellicose speeches have actually made it more likely that Israeli would attack Iran directly.

Nuclear Program

Since 2002 it has been an open secret that the Iranian government, under your guidance, has been constructing a nuclear power program. Iran's enemies have concluded that this is the precursor to a nuclear weapons program, while Iran has contended that this program is purely for civilian applications, meant to alleviate Iranian society's overdependence on fossil fuel-derived power. Ahmadinejad's inflammatory nature has helped to divert pressure from this issue on occasion, but his calls for the destruction of Israel have ultimately only made the Jewish state more aggressive towards this nuclear program: Israel, or America, will almost surely attack Iran if they are convinced this program is about to produce nuclear weaponry. As it stands currently, as of early 2007 the UN Security Council has endorsed a new sanctions regime against Iran to prevent your government's acquisition of any components that could aid the nuclear program. Likewise, American naval forces have been deployed to the Persian Gulf in great numbers in a naked show of American strength.

Your role in this program is not publicly known, but as veritable dictator of Iran you are certainly involved in it at some level. Your negotiators have done a good job of stalling on nuclear talks up to the present, but with new sanctions and enemy forces mobilizing you are running out of time to reveal the truth about your nuclear agenda. In pragmatic terms it is quite likely that you would like nuclear weapons, for the simple reason that nuclear weapons have reliably deterred American agression in the past (North Korea, China, Russia). In the run-up to nuclear weapons, however, you must pursue an aggressive new policy in the region to ensure your regime's security.

Regional Policies

To defend against any potential American or Israeli attack, your government has attempted to gain regional allies capable of striking back at Israeli and American interests asymmetrically, which means promoting armed movements capable of killing Israelis and American troops in Iraq should either of these countries decide to forcibly interdict your nuclear program. To directly deter America, you have forged strong relations with the new Iraqi government, inviting Iraq's president to Tehran in November 2006. The Iraqi government, including the autonomous Kurdish municipality in the north, have reciprocated by allowing Iran to station intelligence officers throughout the country, for the purposes of monitoring the situation and overall advancing Iranian interests. In a less official capacity, you have dispatched agents to begin arming Shiite militias sympathetic to Iranian interests, and as a result your allies and their militias are now significant powers in the Shiite regions of southern Iraq. In the even of confrontation with America, these militias could probably succeed in cutting off American forces in Baghdad from support in the Persian Gulf, making them virtual sitting ducks for the many armed groups in and around central Iraq.

Regarding Israel you are much less circumspect: you feel the Zionist entity is an illegal occupying force on Muslim land, and you would like to see it destroyed. In practical terms this is an old rhetorical strategy for the Iranian government, and a cheap way to score points with Sunni Arabs who would otherwise distrust Iran's Shiite government, since 2000 you have begun making good on this threat, and have only increased your efforts as the Iranian nuclear program has exploded into a full-on international crisis. In 2000 it was revealed that you were sending massive amounts of weaponry to Hamas, and since they assumed leadership of the Palestinian Authority you have been active in both funding and arming this organization. Israel continues to intercept the bulk of the materiel Iran sends to Palestine, but this has not fazed you, as you continue to praise the "martyrs" who die resisting Israel.

Your most open challenge to Israel, however, comes from Lebanon, where your government has continued Khomeini's legacy of funding and mentoring the Shiite militia-cum-social revolution called Hezbollah. In 2006 Israel and Hezbollah went to war against each other (destroying Lebanon's infrastructure in the process), and it became clear in successive engagements that your regime had armed Hezbollah with some of the world's best anti-tank, anti-aicraft, and surface-to-surface missiles. Despite the overwhelming power of the Israeli memory they could not destroy Hezbollah, and the Shiite militants proved they had rockets, supplied by Iran, capable of striking Israel's major cities. This has been the crowning achievement of your exportation of the Islamic Revolution, and as of 2007 you have not only completely re-armed Hezbollah, but also warned the Israelis that any preemptive strike upon Iran will make them think of the 2006 war as a pleasant dream in comparison to what Hezbollah will do to northern Israel.

Roleplaying Notes

You are the Supreme Leader of what, in your opinion, is the world’s only truly godly country. You are the direct heir of a lineage of revolutionary-clerics that have punctuated the last century of Iranian history, rising to promote freedom and faith over godless autocracy and soulless modernization. Unfortunately, the faithful are always challenged, as your countrymen are being challenged right now. Many Iranians do not see the wisdom of the political order your mentor, Ruhollah Khomeini, gifted to the Iranian people. His notion of Islamic government was a revolution in human political history, and you are deeply honored to currently helm this ongoing revolution; more importantly, you are not about to let your misguided enemies destroy this perfect system. You are convinced that the current generation of youth is being led astray as a result of western subversion—after your generation expelled the Shah and his American and Zionist masters, an entire generation grew up blissfully unaware of how dangerous the west truly is. You know that these youths will come around, with the proper guidance, but in the meantime you must make it clear to them that their ignorant attempts to overthrow god’s law will not succeed, even if this means repressing your own countrymen.

Internationally, you cannot afford to be this sentimental an individual: you know that America and Israel want nothing better than to destroy your regime, which would almost certainly mean the deaths of you and your colleagues at the hands of whichever puppets the Americans put in your place. Thus, you are forced to play a ruthless game: while Ahmadinejad has been busy drawing public attention to himself, you have been busy behind the scenes strengthening alliances with other forces opposed to American global dominance, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the new socialist regimes of Latin America, and North Korea. Iran’s nuclear campaign is an important part of this race for survival: you must seek a nuclear deterrent, both to stave off what you are convinced is an impending American attack, and to use as a bargaining chip against western economic aggression in the future. America and Israel only understand force; you will not rest until Iran is strong enough to completely dissuade any of their imperialist schemes.