I Think I Might Have Khamenei Figured Out

Submitted by Alex (United States), Jun 16, 2009 at 16:30

Dr. Pipes expresses his all-too-reasonable wonder at Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's seeming courtship of disaster both at home and abroad with his manipulation of the latest election results to maintain President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power, but I think one must remember that rationality applies to only the means by which the Islamic Republic maintains its sovereignty, not to its nature or motives in the first place, which must inevitably be taken to their logical conclusion (and due to the Islamic Revolutions global sovereignty claims, this means destroying the entire human population, rather than just a small insular ethnic group, as happened in Cambodia).

I wrote in an unpublished article in 2007 that the point of no return for the Islamic Republic's own self-destruction lies in the official license of apocalyptic politics:

"The reason for the continued existence of radical apocalyptic factions in the Islamic Republic, though, lies likely in the role of eschatology as the prime locus for the reversal of the relationship between politics and ethics in Iran's ruling system, with the former beginning to serve the latter."

More to the point: Ali Khamenei supports Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his faction because the logic of the Islamic Republic's ideology demands support go to that actor(s) who is more radical than any other, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (and his rumored Hojjatieh clique) take Islamist ideology to its ultimate possible conclusion, hoping through their messianic complexes for the self-destructive aggression of a suicide-bomber not just in the context of an individual terrorist attack, but on the scale of a world armed with nuclear weapons. Even Sunni Islamists like bin Laden must be compelled to follow them, however discreetly or if only in spirit.

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