Is it not the case though that the people who are protesting and wanting to "get back to the Islamic Revolution believe deeply that is was/is a people's revolution and democratic? Seems to me that regardless of intent, the actual effect of this burst of protest to strengthen the yearning for real democracy where the people and not the mullahs are sovereign.

Amazing video, Mr. Horowitz. And I believe your interpretation is correct. Perhaps Montazeri's statements today will help bring about a constitutional removal of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei.

OMG, where to begin… No wonder Solzhenitsyn felt exasperated about the Western “intellectuals” retreading discredited Russian paths of 19-20 centuries.

Let’s see – a victorious revolution against dictatorial and ultimately impotent monarchy, a bunch of fanatical ideologues riding the popular wave to power, and unhesitatingly resorting to brutal terror in order to grab and hold it; populist “democracy” as a thin cover for state terror, ideological fanaticism, adventures abroad and support of ideologically close foreign terrorists; ineffective and ignorant economic policy, which squanders vast natural reserves (poverty of your own people isn’t considered a reason to curtail pumping huge sums into foreign comrades, nor into the source of utmost pride – WMD); disastrous war drawn to successful conclusion over dead bodies of untold thousands of your own soldiers sent to certain death by incompetent tyrants. Where have I seen all this before? Oh yes, not to be missed – a bunch of useful idiots in the West, who applaud the heroic people who love their Republic so much (with a particularly nauseating twist of being moved by thousands of people shouting “Allah-o-akbar”). Can’t these people understand a totalitarian state 60 years after Orwell?

Of course it’s

not about ending the Islamic Revolution, it's about getting back to it.

Yes, I guess the goal of the vast majority of those Tehran marchers is not to break the regime, but to purify it, and return it to its noble roots. And Moussavi is not a liberal, but a close confidant of Khomeini (brings back the memories of all those “true Leninists”, wiped out by Stalin, or of the “true revolutionaries” of Rohm, wiped out by Hitler in 1934).

But whatever the marcher’s perceived goal may be, the “noble roots” are covered with blood and poison, and there can be only 2 outcomes – the regime either crushes them, or it falls. I hope for the latter, but fear the former. I guess the best possible outcome would be something like China after Tiananmen, or the Soviet Union during Khruschev’s “thaw”, with hope that either economic collapse will bring political change, or that reasonable economic policy will make political repression untenable in a very long run. But in the long run we’re all dead…

I think the Iranian experience, especially for young Iranians, is so fundamentally different from ours that it is best for us to watch, learn and try to understand (thank you Rockridge). And all three of these actions requires us to remove our own self-editing cultural and ideological blinders. Americans are so used to having complex trends and events boiled down into sound bites that it has almost become impossible for us to observe and then learn from the observation.

I am learning a lot from observing what we can gather here from what is happening in Iran. Much of it is instructive and inspiring.