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Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's Legacy Is One of an Iran in Ruins
(The National-UAE) Ali Alfoneh - Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei leaves behind a weakened regime and a country in ruins - the stark and somber legacy of his 37 years in power. When he assumed leadership in 1989, Khamenei regarded the revolution as an unfinished project. Suspicious of reform at home and reconciliation abroad, he repeatedly obstructed initiatives that might have brought the regime into a more peaceful accommodation with both its own people and the wider world. When then-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani sought to merge the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with the regular military, Khamenei vetoed the effort, preserving the IRGC as a parallel force ultimately loyal to him. Towards the end of his life, Khamenei came to be widely perceived as personally responsible for the regime's failures. In the end, Khamenei fell victim to his own resistance to political, economic and social reforms that might have bridged the widening gap between state and society. He was also undone by the very project intended to guarantee the regime's survival: the nuclear program, whose advance brought Iran to the threshold of nuclear weapons capability but also invited devastating Israeli and American attacks. The writer is a senior fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.