It was a painful volte face, a grim reminder not just of the fickleness of politics in the Islamic republic but the dangers of giving moral support – however conditioned – to those who elected you without using a controlling hand.Obviously, the President hopes he can get away with the suggestion that the rioters on Tuesday were not students But Ali Khamenei was ready for that. Indeed there had.”Some of the newly arrested people were not students.” They had “ill intentions” and would be “dispersed”. The President then went on to praise the newspapers supporting Ali Khamenei which had all along condemned the student protests. The initial police raids, he said, had been “an insult to the university” But there had been a “deviation”. Mr Khatami’s span out of control, after Iran’s initial support for the students who protested at police raids that followed the closing of a pro-Khatami newspaper.Who exactly did burn the buses, loot shops and try to storm the Interior Ministry on Tuesday in express opposition to Mr Khatami’s own wishes? In his long, sad public address on Tuesday night, the President tried to draw a distinction between the original student demonstrations, which he had supported, and the anarchy that followed.

But those who cluster around the Supreme Leader, the vigilantes with their sticks, the morality police, they are the servants of the clerics So their massive crowd yesterday was awesomely controlled. But can he succeed? By the very nature of his democratic election, Mr Khatami could never control the crowds He believed he was their servant, not the other way round. Mr Khatami was trying – is trying – to give the Islamic Republic a human face. In a flicker of a theological eye, all Iran’s hopes of democracy seemed to have been crushed And back, too, came the threats. Hassan Rowhani, a senior cleric, announced to the thousands of “Islamic” demonstrators that students who had damaged public property – by inference Mr Khatami’s supporters – would be tried as enemies of the state, a hanging charge if ever there was one.Mikhail Gorbachev tried to give Communism a human face and failed.

And yesterday, marching through the streets of Tehran in their tens of thousands – infinitely outnumbering those who came out to support Mr Khatami’s government of “civil society” – came Ayatollah Khamenei’s men, screaming insults at the “mean and wretched enemies of Islam” and shouting the old slogans: death to America; death to Israel; death to hypocrites.
We used to hear this all through the revolution and the hard, rigid years that followed “Our blood is our gift to our leader,” they shouted. President Mohamed Khatami’s extraordinary success over his conservative opponents – forcing even Iran’s unelected Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to sympathise with Mr Khatami’s student supporters – has been crushed by the anarchy of those very same students. FROM VICTORY to political defeat in 24 hours. No one has yet produced reliable speech-recognition software for the organisation’s powerful computers, and the system can easily be overloaded by pranksters.. But, to the disappointment of civil rights activists, its other current practices will continue.Its only limitation is computer and telephone technology. Mention “cocaine”, “weapons”, “revolution” or their various euphemisms, and the call will trigger alarms.