Iran’s new supreme leader brings mystery element to Middle East crisis

What Mojtaba Khamenei will do with his leadership is now the key question after he succeeds his father Crowds in Tehran greeted the announcement of the country’s new supreme leader by chanting: “God’s hand is still upon us, Khamenei is still our leader.” As the world economy grinds to a halt, Iran is selling the elevation of Mojtaba Khamenei as a sign of reassuring continuity for a country determined to show its defiance of the west. Yet in reality he injects a new unpredictable, even mysterious, element into the Middle East crisis, since just as he is unknown to Washington, so he is a figure of deep obscurity to ordinary Iranians. By contrast, the first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, led Iran to revolution in 1979 and the second, Mojtaba’s father, Ali Khamenei, had been president for eight years before he was chosen by the Assembly of Experts within a day of Khomenei’s death. Before he was catapulted to power following his father’s assassination, Mojtaba had lived the life of a backroom bureaucrat, acting as “the path to access to his father” as a 2007 US diplomatic cable explained. There is only one video of him speaking in public, to a jurisprudence class,