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Ever since the Islamic revolution in 1979, Iran has cast itself as a utopian model. On the very day he established the "government of God," Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini – the founder of the revolution that toppled the repressive pro-Western regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi – declared that Iranians would be "exemplars for all the world's oppressed." In some parts of the Middle East, Tehran has lived up to that ideal – by consistently confronting Israel, first, and by defying another perceived enfant terrible: the United States.

Yet now, nearly six months after a contested presidential election that has riven the country more than at any time since the birth of the Islamic theocracy, a new narrative is arising around the Arab world in which Iran is no longer a political demigod. Beset in recent months by the bloody spectacle of regime enforcers stamping out pro-democracy protests, and by dozens of deaths, torture, and allegations of rape in secret prisons, Iran is losing influence among some of its friends in the region and stiffening opposition among foes.

Many analysts, in fact, believe the autocratic crackdowns in Iran may mark the end of a years-long arc of expanding Iranian and Shiite prominence across a wide swath of the Arab world. More
important, they see the fallout coinciding with something far more fundamental... >>>