Still, while he has called for the annulment of the election and endorsed peaceful public protests, it is far from certain that Musavi will take up the mantle of frontal opposition to Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. Iranian politicians generally avoid street politics, and by their palpable silence so far, many of Iran’s most powerful patriarchs are likely seeking some negotiated outcome to the current crisis behind the scenes. For his part, Ahmadinejad’s smug post-election press conference and mammoth rally betray little sense of insecurity about the provocative path that the regime has chosen.

And that is precisely what Khamenei and some of the other hard-line leadership saw in the vibrant, jubilant scenes from the Mousavi rallies in the campaign’s final days—the young people dancing all night in the streets of the capital were not a sign of hope, as they were for many Iranians and spellbound international observers. Instead, for Khamenei they represented dangerous cracks in the stability of the Islamic system, the seeds of a "color revolution," as a Revolutionary Guard commander flatly asserted last week. Their goal in the manipulation of the election results was to eradicate the threat as quickly and definitively as possible. Subtlety was neither necessary nor desirable. Most analysts of Iran presumed that the rigging would be restrained by the need to maintain some perception of the system’s legitimacy, of which its representative institutions and popular participation are a crucial component. This assumption proved false. For Khamenei, stability does not require legitimacy, and when forced to choose the regime will sacrifice the latter for the former.

For the Obama administration, the developments of the past week in Iran represent perhaps the worst possible outcome. The U.S. administration’s strategy of engagement was never predicated on the personality of the Iranian president, who after all is not even the country’s final authority. But a win for the reformists would have added real energy to the effort, both within Iran and here at home, in the excitement over shifting ideological tides in Tehran and the inclusion of Iranian leaders who were both capable of and prepared to countenance serious negotiations. A plausible Ahmadinejad victory, while unwelcome, would at least have offered Washington the prospect of dealing with a consolidated conservative government that might have felt confident enough to pursue a historic shift in its relationship with an old adversary.

Of the 15 monks who took part in that protest in front of the journalists, only these three have escaped to India. That they made it here is considered extraordinary given how tightly Chinese authorities clamped down on Tibet. The refugee center here usually gets 2,500 to 3,000 Tibetans per year, but that dropped to 550 last year. By the end of May, only 176 refugees had arrived, said Ngawang Norbu, the center’s director.

The government limits the number of monks allowed to live in the monastery, they said. Officials cracked down on festivities honoring the Dalai Lama. When the Chinese-appointed Panchen Lama visited Labrang several years ago, monks were forced to stay indoors to prevent disturbances.

The FTA with the United States was negotiated beginning in May of 2004 under the government of Alejandro Toledo (2000-2005). The treaty was slated to replace the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act signed in 2002 and in effect until December of 2006. The FTA eliminated obstacles to trade and facilitated access to goods and services and investment flows. Modeled on the North American free Trade Agreement, it also includes a broad range of issues linked to intellectual property, public contracting and services, and dispute resolution.5