Recent images from Iran -- of ferment, of impassioned young men and women on the streets -- take me back to 1979. That fall, I was teaching "The Great Gatsby" and "Huckleberry Finn" in spacious classes on the second floor of the University of Tehran without realizing the irony of the fact that, in the yard below, Islamist and leftist students were shouting "Death to America," and that a few streets away, the U.S. embassy was under siege by a group calling itself "The students following the path of the Imam."

      Their Imam was Khomeini, who had waged a war on behalf of Islam against the heathen West and its internal agents. This was not a purely religious war. The fundamentalism that he preached was as much based on religion and tradition as it was on the radical Western ideologies of communism and fascism. Nor were his targets merely political; with the support of leftist radicals he led a bloody crusade against "Western Imperialism": women's and minorities' rights, cultural and individual freedoms.
 
     The Islamist ideologues were also to attack my curriculum, and my intellectual foundations. "Gatsby" was deemed a symbol of American decadence, Kafka a "Zionist," and in the universities some vocal and persistent students and faculty demanded to replace Shakespeare, Racine and Aeschylus with works by Marxists or Islamists. The ayatollah had called the war with Iraq, which started in 1980, a blessing for his regime and many students volunteered to become martyrs, certain of the day they would march victorious into the holy city of Karbala.
 
     By July 1988, Khomeini had agreed to a dubious peace, an act which he likened to drinking poison. Many of the eager youth who had gone to war wearing symbolic keys to heaven had either died, been taken captive, maimed, or returned to a country that was becoming less and less interested in their war, or their holy texts. Many of their former Islamist comrades who had been given absolute power in the universities had become disillusioned with the corruption and broken promises of their leaders. Their contact with professors and classmates who were formerly branded as "Westernized" had opened their eyes to the attractions of a forbidden world, one they used to call the land of the Great Satan. More than my secular students, it was this group that craved the banned Western videos and satellite dishes; they craved also to read works of Western literature, along with the heretical modern and classical Persian poets and writers.
 
     In June 1989, a year after the war ended, the Imam was dead, leaving them alone with their rage against unfulfilled dreams, unspoken desires. The same former revolutionaries -- who in 1979 had anathematized all forms of modernism and democracy -- had now to turn inward and question their own ideology. This questioning became all the more urgent because they knew how isolated they were among the Iranian population, and how fast their revolutionary ideals had lost credibility -- because the revolution had turned the streets of Tehran into cultural war zones, searching and punishing citizens not for guns and grenades but for other, more deadly weapons: lipstick, a strand of hair, a colored shoelace, trendy sun glasses.

Because the morality police had raided private homes -- arresting, flogging and jailing citizens for giving parties, for having forbidden videos and alcohol in their homes -- the regime had politicized not only a dissident elite but also every Iranian individual. People like me were energized, not because we were political, but in order to preserve our sense of individual integrity and identity as human beings, women, writers, academics -- as ordinary citizens who wished to live their lives.
 
     In less than a decade after Ayatollah Khomeini's death, these illuminated revolutionaries -- the former young veterans of war and revolution -- were demanding more freedoms and political rights. They turned to reading Heinrich Boll, Milan Kundera and Scott Fitzgerald, alongside Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper. My book on Vladimir Nabokov could not have been published without the support of those individuals in the Ministry of Islamic Culture and Guidance who had come to realize, as Nabokov had done, that "Governments come and go; only the trace of genius remains."
 
     Soon the younger generation of Iranians, the "children of the revolution" whom the Islamists had hoped would replace their parents' modern aspirations with fervent revolutionary ones, were pulling off their scarves, and singing and dancing in the streets -- in defiance of the law, and under the guise of celebrating what was called Iran's "soccer revolution." Mohammed Khatami's election victory in 1997 was more a vote against the rulers of the Islamic Republic than in support of an obscure cleric with impeccable revolutionary credentials. President Khatami was not the cause of the movement for change but a symptom of it.
 
     And now in the first years of the new century, Iranians, foremost among them the young Iranians, the children of those who once had railed against "Gatsby," have taken to the streets, protesting totalitarian rule, asking for political, social and cultural freedoms, demanding more open relations with the world, as well as a secular constitution. The same people who made Mr. Khatami's victory possible now ask for his departure. The cries against the Great Satan have been replaced by the protests against domestic despots.
 
     But Iran's fate will not be resolved by a political "fix," or simple regime change; it goes much deeper than that. Over the past two decades, the anger against despotism has gone far beyond the political arenas of elections and public demonstrations. By reading and quoting the great thinkers and philosophers, by crowding lecture halls to discuss Flaubert and Rilke or great Iranian writers, Hedayat or Farokhzad, by breaking into riots to see films by great directors, Iranian or Western, by going to jail, quoting Kant and Spinoza, by refusing to act according to the dress code no matter how many times they are thrown in jail, the Iranian people, ordinary Iranian people, are making their statements, and revealing their civilizational aspirations.

      Whatever might happen in Iran -- and what happens there will have a profound effect on the rest of the region -- would not be because of the violence of desperate Iranian rulers or their half-hearted promises and pledges, but through that urge for freedom expressed today by the Iranian youth, reminding us once more that the desire for liberty and the right for a better life is not the monopoly of a few countries called "Western," but the heritage of all mankind.
 
     It is to the advantage of not only the Americans, but of all those who believe in freedom and democracy, to support the Iranian people's desire for a peaceful transformation toward democracy. For has not the most important lesson of Sept. 11 been that fundamentalism and terror, as well as democracy and human rights, are universal, and that stability and liberty in one part of the world will not be secured without their guarantee in other parts?
 
     Ms. Nafisi, a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins University, is the author of "Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books," (Random House, 2003).

     President Bush lent his support to the rising democratic protests in Iran over the weekend, calling them "positive" and "the beginnings of people expressing themselves towards a free Iran." But the bigger news may be that he has managed to persuade the State Department to agree.
 
     Foggy Bottom spokesman Richard Boucher said Monday that the U.S. is "concerned about the use of violence against the demonstrators" and that "it's time for the voices of the Iranian people to be listened to and heard." And yesterday Colin Powell called the protests a "positive" step toward freedom. That's an Iranian revolution in its own right, given State's previous unwillingness to have the U.S. confront the ruling mullahs' dictatorial rule.
 
     It's never easy to peer inside a tyranny, but the recent, week-long Iranian protests do seem to be something of a watershed. While the leading protesters are university students, their ranks have swelled with people of all ages. Public sympathy is only likely to grow if Tehran's rulers continue to sanction "vigilante" violence against the demonstrators. Yesterday there were reports that protesters were being arrested.
 
     These public uprisings have become increasingly frequent, and have forced the regime to bend. Last fall, thousands took to the streets to protest the death sentence of Hashem Aghajari, a courageous lecturer who questioned the authority of Iran's mullahs. The protesters won that round: Mr. Aghajari's death sentence was lifted, and the clerics' capitulation revealed the fundamental weakness of their position.
 
     This time around 250 Iranian intellectuals have signed a statement informing Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that, contrary to his self-image, he is not regarded as God's representative on earth and must be held accountable to the Iranian people. They are risking their livelihoods, and maybe their lives, in the process.
 
     All of this is encouraging news in both the war on terror and Mr. Bush's campaign to drive the Mideast into the 21st century, or at least the 20th. Iran continues to bankroll Palestinian and Hezbollah terrorists. It has attempted to undermine the U.S. presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and American officials believe it has become a hub for al Qaeda. The leaders of the recent suicide bombings in Riyadh may have operated out of Iran.
 
     This all coincides with new U.N. pressure on Iran to allow more intrusive inspections of its nuclear facilities. Nuclear inspector Mohamad El Baradei, hardly a hard-liner, told his International Atomic Energy Agency board Monday that Iran should "provide credible assurances regarding the peaceful nature of its nuclear activities." A recent IAEA report found that Iran is building a secret heavy-water nuclear power plant that can be used to produce plutonium for bombs. An Ayatollah nuke is only years, or less, away.

     The debate in U.S. policy circles has been, in distilled form, whether to engage the mullahs in dialogue or instead seek "regime change" as an American policy goal. State and its allies have supported dialogue, hoping to pry the reformist president Mohammad Khatami into a deal that would give up nukes and moderate Iran's anti-American foreign policy. But Mr. Khatami has been around since 1997, and the Clinton Administration failed utterly in its attempt at engagement. Mr. Khatami's credibility has suffered enough inside Iran that the protesters in Tehran's streets are now demanding his resignation.
 
     Ayatollah Khamenei, for his part, has twice accused the U.S. of orchestrating the current unrest -- an accusation echoed by his hard-line press. If only that were true. The Bush Administration has so far failed to support legislation, proposed by Senator Sam Brownback (R., Kansas), that would set aside $50 million for pro-democracy radio and satellite TV broadcasts into Iran.
 
     The potential influence of such broadcasts became apparent when Persian-language TV stations based in California beamed news of the demonstrations to Tehran last week. In response, throngs of Iranians -- entire families included -- drove to the protests to show support. The activists have vowed to continue their demonstrations until July 9, the four-year anniversary of a violent crackdown against an earlier round of protests in Tehran.
 
     The aspirations of these Iranian democrats deserve American support, both official and otherwise. Whether or not a revolution is imminent, Iranians should know that the U.S. is on their side. The weapons in this battle to topple the second member of the axis of evil are modems, PCs, fax machines and satellite dishes. The U.S. should do everything in its power to help the Iranian people liberate themselves.

     As the extent of the horror inflicted by the Baathaist regime is documented day by day, opponents of the war are increasingly shamed. With every mass grave discovered, those who marched with such moral assurance just two months ago under the banner of human rights and social justice must make an accounting. In the name of peace, they supported the legitimacy and defended the inviolability of a regime that made relentless war on every value the left pretends to uphold:
 
     • Human rights: Outside of North Korea, Hussein was the greatest violator of human rights in the world. The list of his crimes, the murders and the tortures, will take a generation to catalog.
 
     • Economic equity and social justice: Hussein was not just a murderer, he was the king of robber barons. Since 1983, Iraq did not even have a national budget. Every penny of its wealth was plundered by Hussein and his fellow mafiosi and spent on the most grotesque extravagances, while his people were made to starve.
 
     • The environement: Hussein was unquestionably the greatest eco-terrorist in history. During the gulf war, he produced the worst deliberate oil spill ever. He followed that with the worst oil-well fires ever. Then came perhaps the most astonishing ecological crime in history: deliberately draining the marshes of Southern Iraq in order to depopulate and starve out the "Marsh Arabs" who were hostile to his regime, creating a wasteland that will take years for the world—meaning Iraq's American rescuers—to undo.
 
     Torturer, murderer, plunderer, despoiler. "We've gotten rid of him," said presidential candidate Howard Dean, prewar darling of the Democratic left. "I suppose that's a good thing."
 
     It was a very good thing. A noble thing. And rebuilding the place that Saddam Hussein destroyed is an even nobler thing. It is fine to carp about our initial failures at reconstruction; it is well to remember, however, the nobility of the entire enterprise.
 
     Charles Krauthammer is a syndicated columnist based in Washington.
 
     This article originally entitled "Rebuilding Hussein's path of total destruction."