LIFT THE SANCTIONS AND ISOLATION:

The protests that followed Amini's death after she was arrested in Tehran by the morality police, apparently for an infraction of the Islamic dress code, started in earnest in her home province of Kurdistan, in the far northwest, and spread across the country. All the agencies of the state mobilized to meet the threat and began a nationwide campaign against the protesters, including beatings, arrests, deaths in custody, propaganda, and judicial indictments. After four weeks and an estimated two hundred deaths--casualty figures must be treated with immense caution--the protests don't appear to be letting up. By some measures, and making allowance for our reliance on reports that protesters have managed to send out of the country despite the government's efforts to block the Internet, they are growing.

The official response to the unrest bears the signature of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country's supreme leader, who more than anyone will determine how this will end. His approach to the most serious threat to the Islamic Republic since the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s is heavily informed by what happened the last time an Iranian regime tottered and fell. As a young cleric, Khamenei was a militant opponent of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, spent time in his jails, and was tortured by his police. The hatred he exudes for the Shah is indivisible from his contempt for the tactical errors that the monarchy committed in its final phase and his determination to avoid them.

It took a year for the Islamic Revolution to become unstoppable, and during that time the revolutionaries' greatest ally was the Shah himself. By heaping odium on Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, one of several prominent opposition figures, the government gave a divided opposition a leader to unite around. And the Shah's irresolution contributed to his undoing. With each sacked prime minister, each inept crackdown or mea culpa, he fueled the suspicion--not only among the revolutionaries but also his own close allies--that he lacked the ruthlessness necessary to save himself and his regime. That suspicion was borne out on January 16, 1979, when he fled Iran. Two weeks later Khomeini returned from exile and took control of the country.

So when, on October 3, in a speech to graduates of the army college, the supreme leader finally broke his silence over the current protests, it wasn't to offer a balm to those whose loved ones had been killed by the security forces or abducted by plainclothes agents and not seen since. He offered no apology for the death of Mahsa Amini, no sympathy for the family of Nika Shakarami, a sixteen-year-old girl who was arrested in Tehran and killed with a blow to the head. Instead, in his quiet, grandfatherly way, Khamenei told the new officers that it was the security forces, not the protesters, who had been wronged during the protests, and that the country's right-thinking, pious majority had been done an injustice by enemies determined to prevent Iran from acquiring "strength in all fields" (which one might interpret to include a nuclear weapon).

If we've learned anything about Khamenei since he took over as supreme leader from Khomeini on the latter's death in 1989, it's his readiness to use the sternest measures to defend a regime he helped set up. The character of the Islamic Republic has been formed by isolation and sanctions. The state's institutions are on perpetual high alert and its commanders and scientists are not infrequently assassinated. The supreme leader observes all this from his bunker. And when he speaks, he weighs his words, which a sizeable number of Iranians continue to believe are close to the words of God, and gives a sense of what will come.

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