“Go home, it’s all for nothing.”

I don’t think it’s all for nothing. Someone wrote that Mousavi’s great qualification was that he is not Ahmadinejad. Someone should tell Obama, who keeps trying to talk to Ahmadinejad, that that a current of illegitimacy runs through the current political structure. So the protests aren’t all for nothing. But they are not about putting one candidate in power.

I hate to interpolate my own experiences into current events because the parallels are inexact, but back in 1986, when Marcos’ Defense Secretary Juan Ponce Enrile rebelled against the dictator, a million people rushed out to build a human wall around a man who only weeks before, was their arch-enemy. That was the EDSA Revolution. In the strange calculus of conflict, the enemy of the enemy is my friend. Yet the fundamentals remain. Enrile was no democrat and he was soon marginalized because most people understood that opportunism, not principle, led him to turn away from his dark master. He was forgiven his trespasses, but never trusted.

The right lesson to draw here is that the character of the current Iranian regime is suspect. You can trust it as far as the people of Iran trust it; that you can rely on any agreement with it that the people of Iran would rely on themselves. Which is to say, hardly at all. The wrong lesson would be to assume that simply if Mousavi took office, then a Velvet Revolution had taken place.