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.

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