Iranian journalist Mohsen Sazegara yesterday was hauled off to jail, the Associated Press reported from Tehran. It was the second time this year he has been taken into custody. The charge, his wife told the wire, was “provoking students.” The students are the ones who have been protesting in the streets of Iran this past week, demanding an end to the theocracy there. The theocracy has responded by arresting and beating them. So much for the recent claim of the deputy state secretary, Richard Armitage, that “Iran is a democracy.”

Supporters of genuine democracy and freedom in Iran make several points about this weekend’s protests. First of all, as Reza Torkzadeh of the National Union for Democracy in Iran told us, the protests mark a shift from earlier student-led efforts that had called merely for reforms of the existing regime. In recent days, the students went beyond that and openly called for an end to the Iranian regime. The pro testers included not only students but also their parents and other ordinary Iranians.

Moreover, as another Iranian freedom activist, Manouchehr Ganji, pointed out to us, until Iran is freed, it will cause America problems in the entire region. The Iranians are interfering with American interests in Iraq via their pawn, Ayatollah Mohammed Baqr al Hakim. They are interfering with American interests in Afghanistan via the Afghan warlord Gulbaddin Hekmatyar. They are interfering in Lebanon via Hezbollah, one of whose spokesmen has said he wants Jews to move to Israel so Hezbollah won’t have to hunt them down and kill them elsewhere. They are interfering in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza by supporting Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are even interfering in Saudi Arabia — an American indictment linked Iran to the 1996 bombing that killed 19 American troops at Khobar Towers in Dharan.

The foreign policy bureaucrats in Washington sometimes argue that the national security apparatus can only concentrate on one or two crises at a time and that before focusing on liberating Iran, America has to finish the job in Iraq and Afghanistan and get the Israeli-Arab negotiations on track. The converse is the case. Until the Iran problem is solved, it’ll be much more difficult to make progress toward peace and security in Iraq, Afghanistan or in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza.

The other argument often heard from the foreign policy bureaucrats is that there isn’t much that America can do to help the Iranian forces of freedom without “tainting” them as American agents. Yet millions of Iranians tune in to the satellite television and radio broadcasts from America without objection, much as millions trapped behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War did to American-sponsored Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. Nor was Solidarity “tainted” in Poland for receiving aid from American labor unions. So President Bush can only help by expanding American aid to the protesters from his words of support and encouragement — which have been wel come — to the funding and policy backing envisioned in the Iran Democracy Act that Senator Brownback has been championing in the Senate.

The events of the past week show that even if Washington wants to postpone dealing with Iran, the people of Iran themselves are impatient for freedom. The protests spread from Tehran to Shira and Gohardasht, the AP reported. These are a prelude to the even more massive protests that are planned for July 9 and that could topple the regime if they are large enough.

As Saddam Hussein’s regime was on the verge of being toppled in Iraq, the tyrant threw open the doors of the prisons. We hope Mohsen Sazegara and the other freedom advocates arrested recently in Iran get out of jail as soon as possible. But their release will be all the sweeter if they are freed not only from the chains of the Iranian judicial system but of the terrorist theocracy that holds all Iranians in its shackles.