Iranians’ ambivalence about Mousavi’s leadership has also been reflected on their Facebook pages. The personal sites that bore the green logo “What Happened to My Vote?” began to change tone in early July. Many posted a picture of Mohammed Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister and national hero who was ousted in a CIA-backed coup in 1953. Under the photograph, his famous statement of anxiety about Islamist politics is quoted in bold: “I hope that Shiite leaders don’t have any serious intention of entering the political arena. If this were to happen, Iran will be at the brink of catastrophe.”
Mossadegh was a secular nationalist who was fiercely protective of Iran’s sovereignty. Invoking him as a symbol of the leader Iranians aspire to have reminds me of the 1997-2005 era of the reformist president Mohammad Khatami. I lived in Iran during a long stretch of that time and find the wistful references to Mossadegh eerily familiar. He reappears cyclically, at moments when Iranians despair of the leaders available to them, and of any chance to shed the Islamic theocracy that many consider corrupt and unaccountable
