Millions of Iranians take to the streets to defy a theocratic dictatorship that, among its other finer qualities, is a self-declared enemy of America and the tolerance and liberties it represents. The demonstrators are fighting on their own, but they await just a word that America is on their side.

And what do they hear from the president of the United States? Silence. Then, worse. Three days in, the president makes clear his policy: continued "dialogue" with their clerical masters.

Dialogue with a regime that is breaking heads, shooting demonstrators, expelling journalists, arresting activists. Engagement with -- which inevitably confers legitimacy upon -- leaders elected in a process that begins as a sham (only four handpicked candidates permitted out of 476) and ends in overt rigging.

Then, after treating this popular revolution as an inconvenience to the real business of Obama-Khamanei negotiations, the president speaks favorably of "some initial reaction from the Supreme Leader that indicates he understands the Iranian people have deep concerns about the election."

Where to begin? "Supreme Leader"? Note the abject solicitousness with which the American president confers this honorific on a clerical dictator who, even as his minions attack demonstrators, offers to examine some returns in some electoral districts -- a farcical fix that will do nothing to alter the fraudulence of the election.

Moreover, this incipient revolution is no longer about the election. Obama totally misses the point. The election allowed the political space and provided the spark for the eruption of anti-regime fervor that has been simmering for years and awaiting its moment. But people aren't dying in the street because they want a recount of hanging chads in suburban Isfahan. They want to bring down the tyrannical, misogynist, corrupt theocracy that has imposed itself with the very baton-wielding goons that today attack the demonstrators.

This started out about election fraud. But like all revolutions, it has far outgrown its origins. What's at stake now is the very legitimacy of this regime -- and the future of the entire Middle East...

...this election had, in every way, only the appearance of democracy. Mir Hossein Moussavi, Ahmadinejad's main rival, was no less a player than those in the political system. On the key subject of Iran's "right" to nuclear arms, he had positions that were hardly different from those of Ahmadinejad. And, when questioned on his rival's negationist views on the Holocaust, he didn't hesitate to declare: "Even if there was a holocaust in Germany [we can appreciate the subtlety of the phrase "even if..."], what does that have anything to do with the oppressed people of Palestine, victims of a holocaust in Gaza [nothing more need be said)]?" The Iranian Gorbachev, in other words, is unfortunately still not on center stage. The man who would be bold enough to advocate a true Perestroika remains inconceivable and un-conceived in an Islamist republic that is, for the moment, sealed shut. And the observers who rambled on about the "alternative" presented by Moussavi, formerly Khomeini's prime minister as well as the all-powerful director of the Iranian equivalent of Pravda, were overly naive--a little like those who, during the ascendancy of the Soviet Union, talked about the otherwise imperceptible conflicts of factions within the master structure, and thereby further orchestrated the charade. This is a fact...