When the most popular television program in Iran is Baywatch, it's a good sign the country's theocracy is in trouble. The almost daily protests in the streets are a more visible portent.

More than 65% of Iran's population is under the age of 25. They are, by all accounts, wildly pro-American. American television programs are beamed down via satellite. Repression has spawned a lively underground sub-culture as rich as anything that existed in the underground during the Communist dictatorships in Central and Eastern Europe.

All of this activity is now boiling to the surface and threatening the mullahs. The theocracy has lost two of its most powerful sources of control -- moral authority and political legitimacy (derived in the view of the mullahs from moral and religious authority). The mullahs, led by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, now rule by coercion alone. They can arrest dissidents, try them in their puppet courts and even hang them. But the seething revolt against clerical authoritarianism only draws strength from each violation of human rights.

Mr. Aghajari refused to appeal his sentence, but his lawyer filed an appeal anyway Monday, the day before the verdict became final. The Ayatollah, in an unusual intervention that suggests the mullahs may recognize the danger of a massive uprising against them, ordered the judiciary on Saturday to review the sentence.

Even if his sentence is overturned, in which case Mr. Aghajari would nonetheless face flogging and other punishment, it is unlikely that the crisis will be defused. Those hoping for a better life have grown disillusioned with the failure of their supposedly reformist President, Mohammad Khatami, to be more assertive against the theocracy. His government occasionally pushes reformist legislation through parliament only to see the legislation overruled by religious authorities. Five years of thwarted reform have emboldened Iranians to seek change by a more direct route.

The protests were originally confined to student groups who were cautious enough to dress up their political agitation as hooliganism. There aren't any false pretenses these days; demonstrations are overtly political and openly pro-Western and pro-democracy. They are also no longer confined to student movements. Industrial workers in Alborz, Arak and other cities have stages symbolic strikes in sympathy with the students.

If Iran's head is dominated by the theocrats, its heart seems to be in the West. Indeed, the government's own pollsters asked Iranians recently whether they wanted dialogue with the U.S. and over 70% said yes. In a real democracy, that would set off a policy debate and possibly a change of policy. In Iran, it got the pollsters arrested. Their trial on a long list of charges, including conducting "flawed" opinion polls, began this week.

Since coming to power with the overthrow of the shah in 1979, Iran's theocracy has brought economic destruction, caused one of the most massive brain drains any country has seen and driven much of Iranian culture underground. While disfiguring one of civilization's great cultures, Iran's religious leaders have served as the founding fathers of modern Islamic terrorism, creating and financing Hezbollah at the time of the 1979 revolution, and then extending their network through ties to other terrorist groups.

The rebellion in Iran is thus the first front in the war on terrorism that is being waged from the grass roots. Revolution may be too strong a word at this stage, but the popular revulsion on display now may well turn into one. It's impossible to say whether the next chapter to this story will follow the Tiananmen script, the Serbian one or something closer to the velvet upheavals in Central and Eastern Europe that brought down the Berlin wall. One thing is certain: Iranians have had their fill of rule by tyrannical clerics.