More to the point: The yearnings by those in the streets of Iran today precede and supercede the concerns about yesterday's election results. They are seizing the moment of the election, but this is not really about the election. This is about a much deeper and wider discontent with the theocratic-political system they have lived under for 30 years. The timing of the protests has as much to do with the world's eyes being on Iran at this moment and the quorum of international media reporters that are inside Iran as part of that watch. (It's an advantage that the 1989 protesters at Beijing's Tienanmen Square did not have when their demonstration was cut short by a massacre.) The cost for the Iranian state of resorting to excess violence and brutality to shut down this revolt would, as a result, be much higher to its own goals at home and abroad, than it was for the Chinese regime twenty years ago. In that, the protesters have the system over a barrel.