Iran has come to the boil. Against the background of huge public demonstrations, the reformist party that controls the largest block of seats in the elected but largely powerless Iranian Parliament yesterday threatened to walk out, if the ayatollahs continued to stall measures for social and political change...

Last Friday afternoon, while the media were checking out for the weekend, the U.S. president, George W. Bush, delivered his most under-reported speech. It was timed to land Friday morning in Iran, Islamic sermon time, and this was part of the intended effect. The White House was delivering a "maximal" affront to Iran's "maximal" Shia fundamentalist regime. The speech deviated from the previous U.S. policy, which had been re-enunciated earlier in the week at a State Department press conference, of having nothing to say about Iranian demonstrations. It was fed to Iran in Persian ("Farsi" to the snobs), by a private, Iranian-exile satellite TV station in Los Angeles.

The "reform process" in Iran turns out to be similar to the "peace process" that re-launched Arafat in Oslo: something that takes forever, and moves consistently backwards.

It is the principal source of arms for the world's Islamist terrorists; and the power behind a huge buildup in weaponry including medium-range missiles by the Hezbollah in Lebanon (who operate there under Syrian protection. At least twice in the present year, Israel has been on the verge of going to war with Syria, to destroy this growing cache.)

In a further sign that the regime was losing its grip, it then confined its police to barracks in Isfahan, as it had done the previous day in Tehran -- doubting their loyalty. Instead they sent foreign thugs with paramilitary training, chiefly Palestinian and Iraqi Arabs, and Uzbeks and Tadzhiks from Afghanistan, to beat the demonstrators down. It was a desperate measure -- an implicit acknowledgement that the whole Persian people have now sided with the opposition.

The students first, and now every part of Iranian society except the people whose livelihoods depend on the tyranny, demand re-admission to the modern, explicitly Western, world. (Several of the Persians I correspond with have emphasized this point: "We are a Western people. We are not part of the East.")

The question remains: are the mad mullahs finally entering the garbage chute of history? It is the question we asked of the Soviet regime, when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and of the Chinese Communists in Tiananmen Square. Neither regime was reformable. The Soviets lost their nerve, and collapsed; the Chinese politburo, red in tooth and claw, massacred and survived. The Bush administration is betting, for the moment, that the unreformable ayatollahs will lose their nerve. But if they do somehow keep it, the U.S. Fifth Fleet is waiting offshore.