The avenues of Tehran have filled with thousands for the funeral procession of the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a spectacle presented to the world as a display of national unity and reverence. Yet the scene has left many attentive observers puzzled rather than moved. The military operations that have unfolded across Iran over the past four months have made plain what earlier assessments only suspected: the clerical office long served as a screen for the actual center of decision and force.

Those operations demonstrated that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has held the decisive levers of power for years. The Ayatollah functioned, at best, as a legitimating emblem whose public role masked the Guard’s operational control; at worst, he operated as a pliable instrument whose statements were calibrated to preserve the appearance of theocratic coherence while real authority rested elsewhere. The recent clashes exposed this arrangement with unusual clarity, revealing an institutional reality that propaganda had labored to obscure.

It is difficult not to regard with regret the evident success of decades of indoctrination in binding segments of the population to a narrative that no longer corresponds to the distribution of power. Citizens who turn out in large numbers for such rites appear, in many cases, to have internalized a version of events that treats the Supreme Leader as the indispensable sovereign rather than the visible face of a military-dominated order. The result is a form of loyalty that persists even as evidence of its object’s diminished substance accumulates in plain view.

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