A couple of cautionary notes.

1) As Fouad Ajami reminds us today, not everyone in Iran is desperate for Western-style freedom:

There was a discernible fault line in Iran. There were Iranians yearning for liberty, but we should not underestimate the power and the determination of those moved by the yearning for piety. Ahmadinejad’s message of populism at home and defiance abroad, his assertion that the country’s nuclear quest is a “closed file,” settled and beyond discussion, have a resonance on Iranian soil. His challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a generation older, could not compete with him on that terrain.

We focus on the protestors because they are brave, they are like us (relative to the rest of Iran), and we want them to win. But, alas, that’s not the whole story.

2) It may be that what we are witnessing here is a devilishly shrewd and effective crackdown, featuring a technological clampdown, targeted arrests at night, and brutality that falls shorts (for now) of an utter massacre. In the other words, the story may be how the regime pulled all the right levers to survive, despite its monstrous lies and inhumanity. The Iran experts I talk to and trust still think this result is likelier than not — although they all obviously hope they are wrong.