Liberty is not something that can be rationed; one freedom leads to another. Iran's demagogue-in-chief understands that old truth, which is why he is so determined to crush this peaceful revolution in today's Iran. All the odds are in favor of his doing just that, but Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has already lost something far more important than Iran's presidency; he has lost legitimacy. His hands are covered with the blood of Iran's martyrs, and the list grows daily.

Mikhail Gorbachev, too, held on to the reins of power. For a while. But the irresistible attraction of freedom has a way of being underestimated, which was Comrade Gorbachev's decisive error. A little glasnost and perestroika -- openness and reform--has a way of leading to a lot. And those who open the floodgates just a little may be swept away by what they have loosed.

Now the world watches and waits for another revolution to be crushed. The president of the United States offers little but lip service to freedom's cause, and even that is tardy, hesitant, fearful, as if another people's thirst for liberty were some sort of embarrassment, an obstacle to his plans for a Grand Bargain with a dictatorial regime. A threat to, yes, peaceful coexistence, that old simulacrum for real peace.

The president doesn't want to look as if he were meddling in Iran's affairs, he explains, and of course he is immediately accused by the tyrants of meddling in Iran's affairs. Fearfulness has reaped its usual contempt.

No wonder Mahmoud Ahmadinejad struts as the world only watches and waits. Time, he must think, is on his side. Surely nothing can keep him from having his own nukes soon, just like Kim Jong Il in North Korea. Surely the police state in Iran, with its controlled media and government goons, will suppress this revolution, just as that earlier one in Hungary was stamped out.

But looking at the picture of that statue of Imre Nagy now in a place of honor in Budapest, it is hard to lose hope. A generation or two from now, whose likeness will be in Teheran's great square? I don't think it'll be Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's.