Benham Ben-Taliblu

As a person, they say, however, Khamenei was a bit more timid.

You could even say when it comes to crises, for example, every time there's a major protest, he retreats.

This is something that some of his closest advisors and former family members who have been outspoken since the 2009 Green Revolution have said and have put at the service of Persian diaspora media.

But Khamenei is many things to many people.

He's a hardline anti-American theocrat.

He is a failed poet.

He is someone who carries the burdens of.

and prejudices of coming from a very, very poor family that was discriminated against both for wealth as well as for going in to the institution of the clergy to begin with.

And he always really envisioned, I mean the failed poet thing in a sincere way, because he always envisioned himself as some kind of master literary figure.

But in reality, the hard, brutal truth was that

He was not.

He was, in essence, really just a mid-level theocrat put in charge of a major national security state.

And when you have all these pretensions and presumptions about power, but you don't have the capability to follow that through, the country will end up looking like Iran does look like today, which is a country of amazing potential.

But that really has been driven into the ground.

So despite what some people have reported in obituaries about his personal inclinations

that he likes to read Victor Hugo.

It's his track record that matters.

You know, people are actually very complex.

Terrorists can have families too.

I'm not interested in how Khamenei treated his cousins or his brothers.