Iran cannot sustain its authoritarian regime, that's the message from this week's elections. Street crowds of angry youth--and youth are a majority in Iran--are bold now. Even if they are crushed tomorrow, as the mullah promise, the anger is not going away. It will incite division and intrigue within the government. The military may grow restless.
"Vox populi, vox Deo" is not just an ultimate reality in the West. Opposition leader Hossein Mousavi himself is only a latter-day reformer, after all, riding the wave of revolt the way the mullahs rode it in 1979. Only now the revolt is against the theocrats, not a pro-Western government. This is an election that got away from the the repressive anti-democrats.
Two weeks ago it didn't seem possible that the theocrats could be put into such a panic. President Obama then was only too eager then to find common ground with them. Only toward the end did it become clear that the public mood was different. The claim of a landslide for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was too clever by half; it confirmed the suspicion of fraud.
Now the illegitimacy of the regime is on display. It has an eerie familiarity, doesn't it? It is the feeling of freedom let lose when the Communists fell in the old Soviet bloc.
