Sometimes clothes do make the man. Khamenei wore the turban of a senior Shiite cleric. But the pale plaid kerchief often looped around his neck was favored by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the praetorian force he elevated to near co-ruler status. By the early 2000s, the Guards had consolidated military, political, and economic power so extensively that a prominent Iranian economist remarked, with raised eyebrows, that the only comparison was to National Socialism in 1930s Germany.