No Going Back to Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Republic

Reuel Marc Gerecht, at the Weekly Standard, "The June 12 Revolution":

What's happening in Iran now is all about democracy, about the contradictory and chaotic bedfellows that it makes, about the questioning of authority and the personal curiosity that it unleashes. Khamenei knows what George H.W. Bush's "realist" national security adviser Brent Scowcroft surely knows, too: Democracy in Iran implies regime change. Where Iranians in the 1990s could try to play games with themselves - be in favor of greater democracy but refrain from saying publicly that the current government was illegitimate - this fiction is no longer possible. Khamenei has forced Mousavi and, more important, the people behind him into opposition to himself and the political system he leads. Unless Mousavi gives up, and thereby deflates the millions who've gathered around him, a permanent opposition to Khamenei and his constitutionally ordained supremacy has now formed. Like it or not, Mousavi has become the new Khatami - except this time the opposition is stronger and led by a man of considerable intestinal fortitude.

More at the link.