On a quiet street in Tehran one night last week, the Iranian-American writer Cameron Abadi was stopped by a teenaged Basij militia member. The youth, still growing his first beard but armed and quite full of himself, demanded in rough provincial dialect that Abadi exhale enough to show if he'd been drinking.

Abadi, clean, was told to move on. But if the boy had had the wit to ply him with some questions, he might then have cried, "Take him in!" and doomed this New York-born-and-bred Yale graduate. Unbeknownst to Abadi, a colleague from a website he was writing for had just been arrested at the airport trying to leave. Abadi, lucky a second time two days ago, got a Turkish Airlines flight via Istanbul to Dusseldorf, where he caught a train to Berlin.

Even when the regime let the streets fill with peaceful citizens by day, it sowed the menace Abadi faced by night. Iranians were shocked because Tehran has so little street crime -- and so few cops -- that people walk at all hours without looking over their shoulders. It's a bit like New York City 70 years ago, when the novelist Howard Fast and his girlfriend slept in Central Park on hot summer nights to escape moral strictures as stifling as their airless apartments. They feared not muggers but an occasional police officer.

In Tehran now, too, the only public menace is the state. But the Iranian state teaches oppressed, angry boys to cling to guns and God -- both dispensed by the state itself, including by that senior boy and ex-traffic engineer, Mahmoud Ahmadenijad. Yet some U.S. neocons and lefties seem to like having him around.

Neoconservatives have been gloating about him. "See? We warned you," they say, jabbing at silly liberal moralists, who've temporized about Ahmadenijad because they've fixed their righteous fury on Israel and admire or excuse its would-be annihilators, Hamas and Hezbollah, which are funded by fellow theocrats in Iran.

Silly though some of those liberals indeed are (Don't get me started), neocons have become the other side of the coin, recognizing in Amadenijad a perfect foil for their own embrace of an American political party that engages in chillingly similar preachments and practices.

Sound fantastical? We've had Blackwater mercenaries patrolling the streets of New Orleans on contract to the federal government. We've had torture protocols that turn honorable conservatives' stomachs. We've had surveillance, renditions, and inexplicable detentions. We've had predatory capitalists unleashed to crush the hopes, health care, and home-ownership prospects of millions of heartbroken poor and lower-middle class Americans.

As those Americans become desperate and angry, we have Fox News showing them day and night whom to hate and make war on. We even have pastors telling parishioners to bring guns to church, and Texas legislators working to let University of Texas students do likewise in classrooms.

And we have neo-cons like Bill Kristol, who discovered the "pistol-packing hockey mom" Sarah Palin while taking a Weekly Standard cruise and commended her to John "Bomb-bomb-bomb, Bomb-bomb Iran" McCain. At the 2008 Republican convention, Kristol and most other neo-con war-mongers found themselves staring into a horror-house mirror at the Basij populism they'd worked so hard, if only semi-wittingly, to foment.

They saw nothing wrong because, like their preternaturally insecure forebears in Europe, they'd made themselves creatures of the national-security and corporate state -- becoming its apologists, strategists, myth-spinners, and flag wavers and thinking that, at last, they had arrived.

Alas, as in the France of the 19th century and the Kaiserreich and Austria-Hungary in the 20th, neocon creatures of the state always wake up only when their "national greatness" myth-making and yahoo populism have left them high and dry, hated by the very people they thought they were rousing. That will happen to them here, too -- all the more quickly if, as seems increasingly likely to Paul Krugman, the Obama administration fails to undo the lasting, scarring, damage that neocons and their patrons have already done to people's hopes, health, and homes.

This month, Iranians -- encouraged, undoubtedly, by our 2008 election and by Obama's address to them and his speech in Cairo -- tried to have their own Obama moment. "It's hard right now to remember," Abadi writes poignantly, "that before dread settled over the country, before violence and fraud tore the threads that bound Iranian society together, the Islamic Republic enjoyed several weeks of unprecedented vibrancy. There was, of course, the joyous green-clad tidal wave that swept over Tehran in the days prior to the vote. But, the streets of the capital were also home to many earnest, if mundane, displays of democracy..... in a spirit of generosity and optimism.

"[These Iranian democrats] were college-age volunteers who canvassed undecided voters. They were strangers who staged impromptu public debates on street corners. They were tens of millions who waited long hours in the summer heat to cast their ballots. And they were all Iranians who wanted their voices heard.

"It was the feeling that their devotion had been betrayed, that their claim to fairness had been violated, that sent Iranians onto the streets."

There, they were met by something like what Dick Cheney and his neo-conservative cheerleaders have tried to foster right here. Isn't it time we sensed what's at stake and what kind of American civic-republican (and even religious) energy it will take to make Obama deal wisely with the thugatollahs and with those in our midst who count on them as backstops or as foils?