Editor’s Note: Roya Hakakian, the Iranian-American author of Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran, is a recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim fellowship. Roya is also the author of Persian-language poetry books as well as the forthcoming book of non-fiction from Grove/Atlantic, due out in early 2010.

LESLEY: Roya Hakakian, thank you so much for joining us on wOw to talk about the situation in Iran.

ROYA: It’s my pleasure.

LESLEY: It does seem that the situation in Iran has turned dark and violent with the regime, the Mullahs in power, having unleashed a wave of brutal suppression on the protesters. It just seems that they were determined to stamp this out at any cost to their reputation. So what do you think happens now for the opposition? Is it completely over? Is this tantamount to Tiananmen Square?

ROYA: I cannot, obviously, answer this in a terribly objective way because I am an Iranian who has been waiting for this moment for almost 30 years now. So, no. In the most objective manner I can say, I don’t think it’s over. What has happened in this round of uprisings in Iran since the election is that the tables were completely turned on the regime. By that I mean that people had been told stories about the 1979 revolution, had heard all the recollections from their elders about how the Ayatollah invited people to go to their rooftops and chant, "God is great," or "Allahu Akbar"; how people peacefully marched and flowed through the streets in Tehran and other cities throughout Iran in 1978 and early 1979, and they were placing flowers in the barrels of the soldiers’ guns. All those stories played themselves out again, but this time against the very regime who has been using it as tools of its own propaganda for 30 years. And because they then turned around and did even worse than the Shah’s army had ever done, by shooting randomly at people – the images that we have seen about Neda Agha-Soltan and others – they have completely lost their own moral ground. They have completely lost their own legitimacy. And from this moment forward, they can no longer claim to have really been on the side of justice, to have been that same revolutionary government that always meant to protect the poor as Ayatollah Khomeini had once claimed, and to be on the side of the little man in Iran. So I think the revolution that started in 1979 has come to maturation now in 2009, and I personally see it as only a matter of time for the regime to come undone.

LESLEY: Really. Well let me ask you a couple of questions that have kind of been nagging at me. I’m intrigued by the government’s – I guess I would say – clumsy attempt to blame the whole protest on foreign powers, particularly the British.

ROYA: Yes.

LESLEY: They have put out what is so obviously coerced, and I put this in quotes, "confessions" by the protesters – "The Brits made me do it." And there was a statement I saw that the bullet that killed Neda, that young girl you just referred to, was a foreign bullet. Now who does that kind of obvious propaganda actually persuade? Why are they doing that?

ROYA: I have been sitting in front of my laptop for the past week and thinking to myself … for 25 years people have told me, "Oh, Iran has changed so much since you left. You don’t know anything. You’ve been out of Iran for 25 years, you have no idea what’s going on, on the ground." And you know what? The past week has proved to me that, yes, so much has changed – and nothing has changed, at the same time. It’s staggering how much everything is exactly where it was in the year that I left, in 1984.

LESLEY: But let’s say in ‘84, or any of the years in between, that if the supreme leader had said, "Foreign powers perpetrated this," perhaps a large swath of the population would have believed them. They had that legitimacy. But why do they think it’s going to work this time?