Between the mullahs and Bush: Iranian student movement loses its place.

• Author: Schmidle, Nicholas

On December 6, a crowd of more than 1,000 rambunctious students booed and heckled and mocked Iranian President Mohammad Khatami in an auditorium at Tehran University. "Khatami, Khatami, where are your promised freedoms?" they chanted. "Khatami, Khatami, shame on you!"

Eight years before, Khatami caught the students' imagination when he brandished a miniature copy of Iran's constitution and vowed, in the same speech, to uphold the rule of law. Now, the president has become something of a tragic joke among many Iranian students. "The students are very disappointed because they paid a heavy price for supporting Khatami," said student leader Abd Allah Momeni, "but in return they got nothing."

Emboldened by Khatami's promises after the 1997 campaign, the students grew less intimidated by the hardliners. On the morning of July 9, 1999, a group of militant vigilantes, Ansar-e Hezbollah, sought to crush the students' optimism by storming Tehran University's dormitory complex, beating students in their sleep and throwing some from second- and third-story windows. At least one was killed, and twenty injured. For the next eight days, thousands rioted in Tehran and eighteen other cities across the country. They waited for Khatami's backing. It never came.

Back in Washington, Iran-watchers described the protests as the first step toward a counterrevolution in the Islamic Republic. Since the events in July 1999, and encouraged by periodic bursts of student dissent on Iran's campuses, an influential cast of foreign policy advisers in Washington has grown infatuated by the likelihood of Iranian university students doing Bush's long-desired dirty work--enacting regime change in Tehran. Leading this pack has been the American Enterprise Institute's Michael Ledeen. With the right blend of moral and financial support from Washington, Ledeen contends, the students can overthrow the regime. In June 2003, when a small demonstration against rumored tuition hikes led into another round of violence, Ledeen wrote, "[The students] smell tell-tale odors coming from the undergarments of the doomed leaders."

In his inauguration speech colored by assumptions of the regime's frailty and the students' strength, Bush pledged to support "democratic reformers facing repression, prison, or exile everywhere." It was a thinly veiled reference to Iran. But the students may not want Bush's support.

I arrived in Tehran the first week of July, hoping to catch the student movement in...