Accidental Blogger

An article in the Wall Street Journal sheds light on the other side of the Iranian Green Revolution - the mindset of the enforcers of the status quo. The Basij paramilitary force has been deployed widely by the ruling regime to disrupt demonstrators protesting the results of the recent Iranian election. Created by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, the members of the Basij are true believers of the Islamic Revolution. They believe that the current government under Ahmadinejad is the keeper of that faith.

When the protests broke out here last month, Mehdi Moradani answered the call to crush them.

On the first day of the unrest, the 24-year-old volunteer member of Iran's paramilitary Basij force mounted his motorcycle and chased reformist protesters through the streets, shouting out the names of Shiite saints as he revved his engine.

On the fourth day, he picked up a thick wooden stick issued by his Basij neighborhood task force and beat demonstrators who refused to disperse…

"It wasn't about elections anymore," says Mr. Moradani, a short, skinny man with pitch-black hair and a beard. "I was defending my country and our revolution and Islam. Everything was at risk."…

The Basij fanned out across Tehran, beating protesters with sticks, lining streets and squares, and roaring through neighborhoods on their motorcycles in a show of force. Regime officials praised the shock troops.

"Our efforts to unveil the faces of our enemy saved Iran from a grave danger," Yadollah Javani, the political chief of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, which commands the Basij, said last week.

The Basij was created in 1979 by the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. It was devised as a volunteer force, to back up the Iranian army in the Iran-Iraq war. Many of its young members were deployed to the battlefield to walk ahead of soldiers and detonate Iraqi mines.

After the war ended in 1988, the Basij evolved into a type of neighborhood task force. Members serve as law enforcers, morality police, social-service providers and organizers of religious ceremonies. In times of crisis, the Basij are tasked with restoring order and ferreting out dissidents.

All this is to be expected from the loyalists of the conservative Islamic state. Something more unusual caught my eye in the last few paragraphs of the article - the ultimatum issued by the fiancee of the young Basij volunteer, Moradani.

For Mr. Moradani, the biggest shock during the election turmoil came in his personal life. He had recently gotten engaged to a young woman from a devout, conservative family. A week into the protests, he says, his fiancée called him with an ultimatum. If he didn't leave the Basij and stop supporting Mr. Ahmadinejad, he recalls her saying, she wouldn't marry him.

He told her that was impossible. "I suffered a real emotional blow," he says. "She said to me, 'Go beat other people's children then,' and 'I don't want to have anything to do with you,' and hung up on me."

She returned the ring he gave her, and hasn't returned his phone calls. "The opposition has even fooled my fiancée," he says.

Don't you wish that Laura Bush and Lynn Cheney had exercised similar forceful ways with their husbands to thwart their thuggish ways? Instead, we only find political wives who "stand by" their feckless men.