A new Iranian revolution in the making?

Governments rig elections for only one reason: They’re afraid of the people.

The fear appears to run deep among Iran’s ruling mullahs and their allies. The massive demonstrations since Friday’s presidential election show that their worries are well-founded.

So far, no proof has emerged that lunatic-in-chief Mahmoud Ahmadinejad engineered his own re-election as president Friday, but the circumstantial evidence would persuade any impartial jury.

His nearly two-thirds majority against three opponents, including the popular Mir Hossein Mousavi, was suspect. More suspect was his “victory” in their hometowns and among their ethnic constituents. Our last presidential election would have been less than credible had Barack Obama triumphed among white Arizonans or John McCain among black Chicagoans.

Most suspect of all was the government’s announcement of Ahmadinejad’s win within hours of the polls’ closure. Voters turned in 40 million paper ballots, all of which had to be counted by hand. Some American jurisdictions have trouble getting returns out that fast, even with computerized systems.

Since Friday, staggering protests have filled the streets of Tehran with hundreds of thousands of demonstrators. The city last saw angry crowds of this magnitude 30 years ago during the revolution that toppled the country’s monarchy and put the mullahs in power. Comparable crowds toppled the regime of Fernando Marcos in the Philippines and the old communist governments of Eastern Europe.

Iran’s supreme leader, the unelected Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, can’t have missed those parallels. He was nervous enough Monday to order an investigation of the election – by the theocracy’s rubber stamp Guardian Council. That’s probably a meaningless gesture, but it’s evidence of fear in high places.

Iran has been divided for many years. Millions of its people support the radical, anti-Western Shiite theocracy. Millions of others are thoroughly sick of it. They want their country to be normal, respected and not constantly baiting the rest of the world with the threat of terror and nuclear weapons. Some just want an end to the economic distress they’ve suffered on Ahmadinejad’s watch.

The Middle East would be a much safer place if these demonstrations produced an Iran run by moderate, humane people. But mass demonstrations haven’t always ended in democratic triumphs. The Chinese communists slaughtered enough people in Tiananmen Square in 1979 to keep revolution at bay. The Soviets did the same in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

How brutal are Khamenei and Ahmadinejad? How determined are the demonstrators? Those questions may be answered in the next few weeks.