Iran is in turmoil after the ruling mullahs apparently erred in handing incumbent President Mahmoud Imadinnerjacket a decisive victory -- nearly 2-to-1 -- that obviated the need for a runoff election. The loser, Mir Hossein Mousavi, called for protests, that quickly turned to riots.

There have been reports that Mousavi has been arrested. At a news conference, Imadinnerjacket seemed to indicate that Mousavi was under arrest for a moving violation.

Seriously.

Imadinnerjacket's answer is reminiscent of some of the things that come out of the North Korean regime -- disjointed, implausible and divorced from normal human experience.

Is this the beginning of the end of Iran's theocratic regime? According to National Review editor Rich Lowry, we're not there yet.

You typically need one of two things to happen for a revolution to succeed: The security forces have to splinter or flip, or the regime has to lose it nerve. No sign of either happening, but we can always hope.

On the bright side, Max Boot says the mullahs may have miscalculated in keeping Imadinnerjacket in power.

If the mullahs were really canny, they would have let Mousavi win. He would have presented a more reasonable face to the world without changing the grim underlying realities of Iran’s regime–the oppression, the support for terrorism, the nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs. He is the kind of “moderate” with whom the Obama administration could happily engage in endless negotiations which probably would not accomplish anything except to buy time for Iran to weaponize its fissile material.

But instead it appears that the mullahocracy was determined to anoint Ahmadinejad the winner–and by a margin which no one can take seriously as a true representation of Iranian popular will. Ahmadinejad is about the worst spokesman possible to make Iran’s case to the West–a president who denies the Holocaust, calls for Israel’s eradication, claims there are no homosexuals in Iran, and generally comes off like a denizen of an alternative universe. Even the Obama administration will be hard put to enter into serious negotiations with Ahmadinejad, especially when his scant credibility has been undermined by these utterly fraudulent elections and the resulting street protests.

That doesn’t mean that Obama won’t try–but he will have a lot less patience with Ahmadinejad than he would have had with Mousavi. And that in turn means there is a greater probability that eventually Obama may do something serious to stop the Iranian nuclear program–whether by embargoing Iranian refined-petroleum imports or by tacitly giving the go-ahead to Israel to attack its nuclear installations.

Here's hoping. Faster, please.