IRAN AGAIN: Here's Franklin Foer in The New Republic about the role of the son of the Shah in promoting democracy. He also makes the point that current president Khatami is looking more like Gorbachev than anyone else: "a reformer, not a revolutionary." Then:

Khatami was, after all, trained in the conservative seminaries of Qum. As Fred Halliday noted in these pages ("Mohammed and Mill," October 5, 1998), his writings on Western philosophy followed praise of John Locke with passages about the hollowness of secularism. Then there's the fact that he has close allies with long histories of abetting Lebanese Hezbollah, and he has made no bones about "defend[ing] the values of the revolution"--a revolution that many Iranians now view the way Russians viewed the Bolshevik revolution in 1991.