It would seem advisable to feel one's way into this story, particularly after picking up on the mullah-versus-mullah action, along with a few choice highlights of "opposition" candidate Mousavi's resume. Mousavi (who defended the seizure of American hostages taken from the U.S. embassy there in 1979) served as the Ayatollah Khomeini's prime minister (and is believed to have had a connection to the 1983 attack on the Marine Corps barracks in Beirut), reportedly initiated contact with Pakistan's A.Q. Khan to launch Iran's nuclear program, and, as John Bolton recently pointed out, "is fully committed to Iranian terrorism." (So much for the Wall Street Journal's uncontested mention of Mousavi's "mercy Islam.") In a recent Al Jazeera interview, Mousavi revealed his opinion of Ahmadinejad's genocidal intention to "wipe Israel off the map." Mousavi said: "From the beginning, I objected to that phrase."

The phrase?

But there's more. In a seminal but barely reported speech on June 20, Mousavi explained his movement. It has nothing to do with freedom, with modernity or, as Iran-watcher Michael Ledeen has written, a call "in effect for the end of the Islamic Republic as we know it." Indeed, Mousavi's vision as laid out in this speech has everything to do with returning Iran to the past -- 1979, to be precise.

In a paean to the 1979 Islamic Revolution -- "an illumination, never experienced before" -- that empowered the noxious Ayatollah Khomeini, Mousavi explains his intent to revive "the Islamic revolution as it was" and "the Islamic Republic as it should be." Noting that this "noble message ... excited the younger generation, a generation that had not seen those times, and felt a distance between ... this great inheritance," he speaks of the "rights of the people" to fair election results, and pledges his loyalty to this cause. And finally this:

"We are not up against our sacred regime and its legal structures; this structure guards our Independence, Freedom and Islamic Republic. We are up against the deviations and deceptions and we want to reform them; a reformation that returns us to the pure principles of the Islamic Revolution."

Returning the "sacred regime" to the "pure principles of the Islamic Revolution" isn't the kind of "reform" most pundits have in mind. Which should be enough to turn their faces green -- jihad green -- but it won't.