Is Iran in the midst of another Revolution?  If anything, the Iranian protests in support of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi show that Iran's political class and the very definition of Revolution itself are so ambiguous as to permit any kind of interpretation.  A recent article in Foreign Policy highlighted the uncertainly surrounding the recent developments in Tehran.  It is hard to tell which way the wind will blow.

Indeed, the faction aligned against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei, his patron who also happens to be the supreme head of state, resembles both a revolution and a restoration.  Mr. Mousavi not only endorsed the taking of American hostages in Tehran in 1979, but he was also the Prime Minister of Iran from 1981 to 1989, the consolidating years of the Iranian Revolution, in which Iran went to war with Iraq and launched a nuclear program.  Mousavi also has the backing of a powerful clique among Iranian moderate clerics, led by Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former President who now heads the Assembly of Experts, a body that has the power to unseat the Supreme Leader of Iran.

In a remarkable transformation, then, Mousavi has become a symbol of popular discontent in Iran, even as he cultivates wealthy men like Rafsanjani.  The issues revolving around the Rafsanjani-Mousavi dynamic are complex, and Simon Tisdall has done an excellent job in explaining Rafsanjani's potentially decisive role in a piece for the Guardian.  The political maneuvering at work in Iran, so it would appear, is about clarifying what the Iranian Revolution means to Iranians, not about overthrowing an ancien regime and replacing it with a totally new one.

What to expect, then, from the current political turmoil?  Is an old-guardsman-cum-reformist like Mousavi a protege of the apparatchiks in Eastern Europe, who reinvented themselves for free market democracy after the end of the Cold War, despite having previously controlled the vicious implements of totalitarianism?  Or is he a Robespierre, waiting to turn the screws of state power on his enemies, if he somehow manages to emerge victorious?  No one knows, but it seems that this outburst of sentiment for Mousavi reflects the two-sided temptation of any national movement: to reinvent political discourse while simultaneously consolidating it. 

Update from 6/25/09:

I recently attended a panel discussion at Brookings over the future of U.S. policy toward Iran, given by experts with deep experience in diplomacy, intelligence, and scholarship (Chatham House Rules were in effect).  One of the panel members contended that the Iranian protests had created the seeds of a serious opposition movement.  Other points discussed were the uncertainty over the intentions of the Revolutionary Guard, the possibility of Iran becoming another Pakistan if it makes a nuclear bomb, and the need to craft multiple scenarios and tradeoffs, not just one direct approach, when dealing with Iran.

For what the protests on the ground are actually like, see this article in The New Yorker that offers a fascinating perspective on how the movement is actually quite broad-based.  For insight on the opinions of the religious elite, Slate analyzes the clerical divisions within Iran and each faction's claim on Islamic legitimacy.