How Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, sees the world

It is Khamenei who has the ultimate responsibility for the apparent decision to skew Iran's presidential election in favor of his preferred candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and for unleashing the security forces that have killed at least 17 Iranians protesting the outcome in the past week, sending Iran into its greatest political crisis in 30 years. Khamenei is preserving his vision, say analysts, of what the Islamic Republic should look like in the short term by denying the popular will. But he has taken that step, they say, at a cost so great to his own image and to that of the office he occupies that the Islamic Republic is unlikely to be the same again. ...