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An Iranian opposition supporter covers his face with his bloodstained hand during clashes with security forces in Tehran. Photograph: Amir Sadeghi/AFP/Getty Images

The remarkable refusal of Iran's reformist opposition to give in, and the regime's increasing air of desperation as it attempts, with diminishing legitimacy, to force it to do so, has left many observers, foreign and domestic, wondering whether the second Iranian revolution is finally underway.

With every fatal bullet, with every ill-directed teargas canister and every ill-advised arrest, the heirs to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the Islamic coup d'etat of 1979 find themselves stranded ever more invidiously on the wrong side of history.

Those who rose up with fervent courage to bring down the Shah 30 years ago are now cast in his vacated role of national oppressor, with their own revered martyr, Imam Hossein, used against them to dramatise the cruelty and inequity of their rule.

The fanatical students who drove an American president to ruin, the faithful warriors who faced down Saddam Hussein and his western backers during eight years of war, the ideologues wh... >>>