TEHRAN

Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Roger Cohen

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Times Topics: Iran | Ali Khamenei

No Iranian puzzle frustrates America and its allies as much as how to reach Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader who sets the country�s direction.

When I asked one veteran Iran hand how old Khamenei is, the answer was: �Not old enough.� Years of probing have failed to unearth a conduit to the man with the white beard and outsized glasses whose image, often smiling, dots the billboards of Tehran. The guy�s a mystery.

Solving it lies at the heart of the Iranian challenge facing President Obama because although Khamenei�s authority is not absolute, his veto power is. He can no more be bypassed than the Great Recession.

Khamenei, imprisoned and tortured under the shah, will be 70 in July. He�s led Iran for two decades, since the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. His vast authority includes the right to name the heads of the elite Republican Guards, the armed forces, the judiciary and state television. He has indirect power to vet parliamentary candidates. Yet he cloaks his absolutism in the mild garb of the arbiter.

Under the system know as �Velayat-e-faqih,� or the guardianship of the religious jurist, an idea developed by Khomeini to justify the clergy assuming political power, Khamenei is virtually assured of ruling for life. Short of the reappearance of the �hidden imam,� not spotted since his disappearance in the 9th century, his earthly deputy presides as custodian of the Islamic Revolution.

To many Iranians, this setup represents the core betrayal of the revolution, whatever the elements of democracy � including a June presidential election � that have emerged around the Constitution�s incorporation of the contested idea of a God-given guide.

To many western officials � enamored or unhappy by turns with various more colorful figures than Khamenei, and casting around for the real center of power in Iran�s labyrinth of the democratic and the deified � the system is equally maddening.

But it�s not about to change. On the contrary, I�d say the central Iranian political phenomenon of recent years has been the reinforcement of Khamenei. How to engage with Iran begins and ends with him.

The notorious wealth of his chief rival, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, has tended to reinforce Khamenei�s pious image. The favoring of the Revolutionary Guards under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has strengthened an institution beholden to Khamenei. The reformist wave has ebbed.

More important, his attacks on �the arrogant powers� � read the United States � have been buttressed by the hubris of the Bush administration. His passionate support for the Palestinian cause has resonated, most recently because of the Gaza debacle. Even his attempts to align the Islamic Revolution with the world�s disinherited against U.S. �economic dominance� have been comforted by the travails of global capitalism.

So what does this astute man want? What will he give? Khamenei said last year: �Undoubtedly, the day the relations with America prove beneficial for the Iranian nation, I will be the first one to approve of that.� This suggests dogma does not preclude movement.

Khamenei sees his primary task as safeguarding a revolution whose core values include independence, cultural and scientific self-sufficiency, the global revitalization of Islam as a guiding body of law, and social justice. He believes America demands �submission and surrender to its hegemony.�