Clearly, the regime has forces in reserve that could crush the demonstrations, and I have no doubt that it has the will to do so. But watching how presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi and his reformist allies have skillfully drawn on the same repertoires of
contention as the 1979 revolution — such as the nighttime rooftop calls of the takbir–
to cast the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as the new shah and the demonstrators as the true heirs of the revolution, it seems possible to me that a massive, Tiananmen Square-like crackdown could, by further confirming that narrative, actually have a galvanizing effect.
