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Ever since June 15 in Tehran I’ve been asking the most alluring and treacherous of historical questions: “What if?”

What if the vast protesting crowd of perhaps three million people had turned from Azadi (Freedom) Square toward the presidential complex? What if Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, had stood before the throng and said, “Here I stand with you and here I will fall?” What, in short, if Azadi had been Prague’s Wenceslas Square of 20 years ago and Moussavi had been Vaclav Havel?

... Having been in that Tehran crowd, I know the force was with it. I felt myself how fear evaporates with such numbers. Nobody, not in 2009, can slay millions. Behind those Iranians, too, lay greater forces, all Iran’s centennial and unquenchable quest for some stable balance between representative government and religious faith.

The millions didn’t want to overthrow the Islamic Republic; they just wanted the second word in that revolutionary name to mean something — enough, anyway, for their votes to count.