Nothing could better symbolize Iran s 30-year-old regime at the limit of its contradictions. A supreme leader imagined as the Prophet s representative on earth Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini s central revolutionary idea now heads a militarized coterie bent, in the name of money and power, on the bludgeoning of the Iranian people. A false theocracy confronts a society that has seen through it.

I hope Iran policy makers in Washington and Europe are reading histories of that world-changing year, 1989. I hope so because the time has come to do nothing in Iran.

NEW YORK In his last month as head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei finds himself at the explosive crux of the world s nuclear politics, ferrying messages between the Obama administration and Tehran. They are talking through me, he says.

What if the vast protesting crowd of perhaps three million people had turned from Azadi (Freedom) Square toward the presidential complex? What if Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, had stood before the throng and said, Here I stand with you and here I will fall? What, in short, if Azadi had been Prague s Wenceslas Square of 20 years ago and Moussavi had been Vaclav Havel?

France and Germany fought three wars in 70 years before the bright idea dawned of enfolding their problem into something larger: the European Union. The United States and Iran have not gone to war but have a relationship of psychotic mistrust. The answer can only be the same: Broaden the context.