NotBornYesterday's Journal: The Iranian leadership has jumped the shark.

Iran's mullahs had a pretty good thing going for a few decades. They rode to power on a revolution against a tyrant, and they've been riding a tide of religious fervor and nationalist sentiment ever since. Every year, they trot out a parade of Iranians to chant "Death to America", they burn some flags every now and then, and they fight a proxy war through Hezbollah against Israel and by extension, against us. It's the kind of thing that sells well at home, and serves to keep most Iranians united through fear and hatred of a common enemy.

Until now.

Iran's theocratic leadership is so accustomed to beating the drum of nationalism to rally support and unite the country against the Great White Satan, that they must not have realized that such tactics only work well when the enemy is external. They have found that in order to control their own people force, propaganda, and censorship are required. Force is something Iran's leaders know well, and are not afraid to use in thuggish abundance. Propaganda and censorship are skills they have used to greater or lesser degree since the 1979 revolution, but seldom if ever against a foe that is large, vocal, and internal. Low-tech (beating people on the streets and taking their cell phones and cameras) and high-tech methods (filtering internet access, tracking down digital dissidents, posting demonstrators' photographs for public aid in identification, etc) methods of censorship have been on display, and I have to begrudgingly give them credit for being more savvy in this area than I initially gave them credit for. What can I say. I'm naive sometimes.

Although they seem to have leveraged technology to their advantage for censorship, their propaganda skills are a little rusty. They are still insisting that the enemy is us; that western powers are fomenting the unrest that has spilled out onto the streets of Tehran. The mildest of criticism ("we deplore the violence") from outsiders has been met with shrill rhetoric from Mr. Ahmadinejad, who has been all too eager to stretch and morph mild and civil remarks from world leaders into vitriolic propaganda to support his - and the Mullahs' - insistence that the protests are due to outside interference.

Lies only work when those being lied to don't know the truth, or are willing to deny it. In other words, the lies have to be plausible. The fact that the grandiose distortions the Iranian leadership is accustomed to projecting (the Holocaust didn't happen, we don't have the problem of gays in Iran) don't sound plausible to most reasonable folks has been largely irrelevant while the foe has been external. But the religious leaders of Iran (dictatorship by committee, if you will) didn't even bother to cheat the vote in a believable fashion, and that has made all the difference in the aftermath. The Iranian people didn't buy it when the election results came in. They aren't buying the outside agitation myth. The emperors new clothes are being seen for what they are.

The people in the streets know the truth, and don't seem willing to let it go easily. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei also know the truth. Now it seems there will be a staring contest, and despite the protesters having the more vulnerable position, neither side appears willing to blink yet.