For the hard-liners who sought to rein in the reformers during the Khatami era, the election of George W. Bush provided an unexpected opportunity. When Bush called Iran part of an "axis of evil" in 2002, despite its behind-the-scenes assistance in toppling the Taliban, and warned of possible military action against Iran, the reformers, many of whom had campaigned for diplomatic relations with the United States, became easy prey. Hardliners clamped down on the press, arrested ministers and parliamentary deputies, and escalated the kidnapping and murder of reform activists and even some members of Parliament.

The election of Ahmadinejad to the presidency in June 2005 marked the end of the reform era. While religious and secular oppositionists continued to call for greater civil liberties, they and much of the youth had become disillusioned with Khatami and his reformist colleagues. More than 20 million voters boycotted the elections, from which many prominent reformists had been excluded through a vetting process. Boycotters were heeding calls from democratic dissidents like Ganji and Ebadi. A former mayor of Tehran backed by the Supreme Leader and the Revolutionary Guards, Ahmadinejad was able to defeat the corrupt Rafsanjani. Ahmadinejad's election marked the ascendancy of militant veterans of the Iran-Iraq War. Shrewdly exploiting the reformists' failure to address issues of poverty and class, Ahmadinejad promised to reduce unemployment and to provide greater subsidies, especially low-interest loans. Since his election, conservatives have gained a firmer grip on power and cracked down on labor, women and gays.

Thanks to US interventions in neighboring Afghanistan and Iraq, the Islamic Republic's two most formidable enemies in the region, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, have been vanquished, while the Shiite-dominated state emerging under the American occupation in Iraq is poised to become a key ally of Tehran. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have also turned the nuclear issue into a matter of national pride, comparing it to Mossadegh's fight for the nationalization of Iran's oil. The Islamic Republic's support for Hezbollah during the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon has gained it many admirers internationally, while Ahmadinejad has forged alliances with Latin American leftists like Hugo Chávez and Daniel Ortega.

Nonetheless, opposition inside Iran has continued, whether in the form of the One Million Signatures Campaign for women's rights, or the Tehran bus drivers' strike, or the 2006 local elections, where candidates backed by Ahmadinejad were soundly defeated in Tehran and many other places.

For many people on the left outside Iran, the era of Ahmadinejad has presented a quandary, forcing them to choose between anti-imperialism (at the risk of defending an Islamist theocracy) and solidarity with the opponents of a repressive theocracy (at the risk of appearing to do the bidding of the Bush Administration). Danny Postel, an editor at the online journal openDemocracy, believes that much of the left has made the wrong choice, ignoring the great promise of Iran's dissident movement. In Reading "Legitimation Crisis" in Tehran, Postel takes the US left to task for neglecting this important social movement and suggests that the new Iranian democratic discourse is an original form of "liberal Third Worldism" that is distinct from neoliberalism and deserving of our support. (One chapter is pointedly titled "We Know What We're Against, But What Are We For?") The US left, he believes, has made the error of viewing Iran through a narrow "American prism," rightly opposing US military threats against the Islamic Republic but failing to raise its voice in support of Iranian progressives battling theocratic repression--i.e., failing to demonstrate solidarity with our true allies in Iran. But anti-imperialism need not come at the expense of solidarity. (A similar error, notes Postel, was made during the Bosnian war, when "anti-imperialism" led some on the left to side with Milosevic's Serbia.)

The heart of Postel's book is a long interview with French-educated philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, who discusses the ongoing interplay between Iranian and Western intellectual traditions and social thought. Unfortunately, by the time Postel's book was published, Jahanbegloo had been imprisoned in Evin and pressured into silence. (Dabashi, while praising Jahanbegloo as a "sincere social activist," writes that he possesses a "colonized mind" because of his belief in "modernity" and his supposed failure to endorse the critiques of modernity by Heidegger, Foucault and Derrida.)

Jahanbegloo's fate echoes that of other Iranian progressives over the past century who have so often been driven into exile, imprisoned or killed. The secularizing, progressive revolution that began in 1906 and continued with Mossadegh remains unfinished, the pace of reform slowed by the weight of clerical rule. While the Islamic Republic has been forced to open up somewhat since Khomeini's death in 1989, it has also shown itself to be far more resilient than its critics understood. This is partly because, by many sociological measures, Iran has come a long way since 1979. Life expectancy has increased to more than seventy years, infant mortality by age 5 has dropped to thirty-six per 1,000 live births, fertility rates have decreased to 2.1 births per woman and women make up more than 60 percent of the students enrolled in colleges and universities. But the chief card the regime has played is national unity in the face of external threats--a gift that keeps giving, courtesy most recently of the Bush Administration. These threats (particularly talk in Washington of "regime change") have emboldened Iran's hard-liners and driven its vibrant democratic movement into a strategic impasse. The challenge facing progressives in North America is to find a way to give more support to Iranian democrats and feminists even as we oppose the US imperial agenda. The international solidarity displayed by progressive members of the British public during the era of Iran's Constitutional Revolution just might provide us with a model.

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