After Disputed Vote, Iran’s Leaders Face Continued Protests

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• JIM LEHRER:

  Gwen Ifill has more.

• GWEN IFILL:

  For a closer look at what's happening in Iran and what it all means, we're joined by Karim Sadjadpour, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He formerly worked in Tehran for the International Crisis Group and was there during the last Iranian election in 2005.

  And Gary Sick, a former National Security Council staffer who dealt with Iran policy under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan, he is now a senior research scholar and professor of international affairs at Columbia University.

  Professor Sick, I want to start with you. You've watched this kind of ups and downs and protests in Iranian politics over the years. How significant were today's protest?

  GARY SICK, Middle East Institute at Columbia University: I think this is a real turning point. The whole idea of the Islamic Republic was to have a mixture of Islam and Islamic rule, but with the voice of the people, a form of democracy, republicanism. That has broken down.

  Today, the people simply don't trust the government, and the government — I think it's clear — does not trust the people. There's a fight going on, and the fight is getting very nasty, indeed. I think it's gone further than the ruling elite ever thought that it would.

• GWEN IFILL:

  Kareem Sadjadpour, we saw these pictures apparently five miles long, these protests. Did you see that they felt, as Gary Sick says, do they feel different to you today?

  KARIM SADJADPOUR, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Absolutely. I think this is really an unprecedented moment in the 30-year history of the Islamic regime. And the sense of rage and injustice you saw on the streets today in Tehran and throughout the country was really palpable.

  And what's different about this time around is that, in the past, all of these demonstrations have been the people against the regime. And this time, you see unprecedented fissures amongst the revolutionary elite themselves. Someone like former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was one of the founding fathers of the Islamic Republic, is now in the opposition.

  Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has impeccable revolutionary credentials, who was the prime minister during the 1980s, is now part of the opposition. So we've never seen these types of fissures before amongst the political elite themselves.