The Khomeini of freedom.(Scan)

One cannot imagine an irony much thicker than Ayatollah Khomeini welcomed to Washington, yet that is precisely what happened. Hossein Khomeini, the 45-year-old grandson of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, recently addressed a packed audience at the American Enterprise Institute.

The younger Khomeini is also a cleric, and possesses the same stately forehead seen in the building-sized murals of his grandfather scowling at pedestrians on the streets of Tehran. The similarities disappear as soon as he speaks, though. He came to America with the message that his grandfather's revolution has been an abject political failure, that Iranians now wish to cast off their theocratic tyranny in favor of freedom and democracy, and that indeed they would like the help of the United States. Such thinking makes Hossein Khomeini every bit as revolutionary as his grandfather, albeit in a diametrically different direction.

In rapid-fire Farsi, Khomeini condemned Iran's past mistakes, and insisted that "liberation" should be the country's next project. The Iranian people have become "fatigued after 25 years of deprivation and suppression." Though they are making gradual strides toward greater liberty, Khomeini remarked, they may be too dispirited, and their theocratic government too oppressive, for them to succeed without help from the outside. Lest there be any confusion as to what this means, consider Khomeini's recent remark to Christopher Hitchens that it might be time to "bring in the 82nd Airborne."

A boiling point between the United States and Iran's theocracy might be reached in a number of ways, Khomeini suggested. Iranian clerics have been actively working to undermine U.S. interests in Iraq. He believes the August 29 assassination of popular moderate Shiite leader Ayatollah Hakim and 80 others in Najaf was done "at the behest of the Islamic Republic of Iran." ...