Foreign Policy: By Reza Aslan.

Don’t snicker. Once President Ahmadinejad is gone, there’ll be no one left to stand up to Iran’s mullahs.

The president then began repeatedly criticizing the clergy for their enormous wealth, which stood in stark contrast to most Iranians’ economic suffering under international sanctions. In a surprise move, Ahmadinejad curtailed the amount of money that the government pays to religious institutions, which have ballooned over the past three decades into a source of tremendous personal enrichment for many in the clerical elite.

What’s that saying? You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone? Well, after eight long years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran, I’m willing to bet that even those of us who loathe the man are going to end up missing him — not just because of the comedy he provided with his bellicose rhetoric and his inane populism, but because he may have been the last, best hope of stripping the clerical regime of its “God-given” right to rule Iran.

Back in 2011, I argued that those who oppose the clerical regime in Iran and who yearn for a more secular nation that looks for inspiration in the glories of its Persian past instead of its Islamist present may have an unexpected champion in their corner: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

I was not suggesting that Ahmadinejad is some sort of democracy icon or that he is even a good guy, let alone a competent president — though he is far more politically sophisticated than his critics generally assume. It is a Western fallacy that “more secular” necessarily means “more free.” But the fact remains that no president in the history of the Islamic Republic has so openly challenged the ruling religious hierarchy, and so brazenly tried to channel the government’s decision-making powers away from the unelected clerical bodies that hold sway in Iran.

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