Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's speech gives a virtual green light to the thuggish -- and massive -- Basij militia. It also raises the "moral" and Iranian constitutional ante on future demonstrations. From now on, demonstrators aren't legitimately petitioning for redress of grievances. They're civil disobedients - and, to a dishearteningly hate-filled part of Iranian society, they're something worse.

In civil-disobedience, you break a law non-violently and accept the legal punshiment to show that it's the unjust law that has betrayed the constitution, not your breaking that bad law publicly in order to defend the very rule of law. That strategy is risky enough here, but in Iran, it's inconceivable. Even just demonstrating peacefully will now demand more moral and physical courage than it did yesterday, or than civil disobedience usually does here. It will be cast as disobedience to the constitution itself - to the "Supreme Leader."

Watch the first 20 seconds of his speech and see his listeners' quintessentially fascist salutes, and you know what's coming. But consider that the U.S. hasn't always been better, and that some Americans still aren't.

Here in America, in what even Clarence Thomas called "the totalitarian regime of segregation," peaceful civil-rights marchers were met with fire hoses, police dogs, and murder -- but also with a new birth of open journalism and a federal government that began to back up them up.

Many Republicans still don't get this. At their 2008 convention, the "Yoo Es Ay! Yoo Es Ay!" chanters responded to their leaders almost as the Ayatollah's listeners have. Such people are everywhere, even next to you at work. You have to work on them, bit by bit, as has been happening in Iran.

Republicans and neocons who saw nothing wrong in their party's 2008 speeches and crowds are now piously praising the Tehran demonstrators, as Josh Marshall and Jon Stewart have been showing. But, in their hearts, pious neocon supporters of the street marchers want the regime to crush them, because that would justify another war. They've forgotten that the last one, in Iraq, boosted the Iranian mullahs' power. Even the neocon rhetoric is doing that again right now; the regime in Iran is capitalizing on it.

The regime is odious and should be overthrown. Even many Ahmadenijad voters now see this, as a former student of mine reported from Tehran and as Roger Cohen more recently confirmed. But an American or Israeli military reaction would reverse those changing perceptions and boost the regime.

Liberation must come somehow from the incredibly brave, disciplined, civilized people we've been watching, as it came in India, South Africa, and Eastern Europe. They need both more and less than bellicose American rhetoric and war-mongering, as I argued two days ago and as John Kerry insisted a day later.

So why do the war mongers keep falling into the trap of thinking that the time for intervention is at hand?

A hint comes from the semi-recovering neocon David Brooks, who is skirting that trap this time: "The core lesson of these events is that the Iranian regime is fragile at the core. Like all autocratic regimes, it has become rigid, paranoid, insular, insecure, impulsive, clumsy and illegitimate. The people running the regime know it, which is why the Revolutionary Guard is seeking to consolidate power into a small, rigid, insulated circle. The Iranians on the streets know it. The world knows it.....

"The nations of the West will have to come up with multi-track policies that not only confront Iran on specific issues, but also try to undermine the regime itself. This approach is like Ronald Reagan's policy toward the Soviet Union, and it is no simple thing. It doesn't mean you don't talk to the regime; Reagan talked to the Soviets. But it does mean you pursue many roads at once.

"There is no formula for undermining a decrepit regime. And there are no circumstances in which the United States has been able to peacefully play a leading role in another nation's revolution. But there are many tools this nation has used to support indigenous democrats: independent media, technical advice, economic and cultural sanctions, presidential visits for key dissidents, the unapologetic embrace of democratic values, the unapologetic condemnation of the regime's barbarities."

Brooks also knows, but stops short of saying, what most Americans and the world know, too: Republicans and neocons just don't get this. They hated Reagan's negotiations with Gorbachev, and George W. Bush, for whom Brooks campaigned ardently, refused to talk to Iran. As early as 2006 Brooks could have rewritten one of his paragraphs above to read:

"The core lesson of these events is that the Republican majority is fragile at the core. Like all autocratic regimes, it has become rigid, paranoid, insular, insecure, impulsive, clumsy and illegitimate. The people running the regime know it, which is why the Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and Alberto Gonzales are seeking to consolidate power into a small, rigid, insulated circle. Americans on the streets know it. The world knows it....."

The world now is rightly, breathlessly focused not on Republicans but on Iran, as it was on Eastern Europe twenty years ago. Now, as then, our war-mongers are trying to insinuate themselves into the action.

The better strategies are the ones that Brooks mentions but that the party of his youth and early middle-age hasn't learned any better than has the audience cheering the Ayatollah. The next 24 hours may tell whether the rest of Iran can stand up to them and the terrifying division in the country which their saluting represents. Meanwhile, let's face down their American counterparts and find other ways to support the brave democrats of Iran.