That's actually a very good question. If you ask the opposition, especially the exiled opposition, monarchies, mujahedeen, or some of the leftists, they will tell you that they simply want to overthrow the regime, get rid of it. But they have not succeeded in the past 30 years or so, and obviously they won't do it from here. It's thousands of kilometres away.
But when you ask the new generation in Iran, the children of the revolution, they will say they're not happy with the social, economic, and political policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Thanks to the actual revolution and some of the unintended consequences of the Islamic Republic, you have a new generation, a massive demographic change, a systematic paradigm shift, a new generation who's familiar with everything that's happening in the world.
But they are realists. They do cost-benefit analyses. They want to see what they can do, and they want to set goals. At this point, they are not seeing things in black and white, zero to 100. They're ready to work within the system. For this reason, they voted twice for Mohammad Khatami in 1997. We know that reformists failed to deliver on their promise, thanks to the structure of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In 2009, they were ready to play within the restricted system. They voted for one of the candidates of the establishment. None of these four candidates was revolutionary or radical. They realized that the regime is not going to tolerate even Mr. Mousavi or Mr. Karoubi. So what they see is this: they want radical change, but they know it's not possible at this point. This is the first thing.
The second thing is that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a hybrid regime. It's a very complex system. It's not a totalitarian regime like North Korea or Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It's not a Stalinist, fascist, or Nazi regime. It's a combination of totalitarian and authoritarian, with some quasi-democratic elements in it. What Mr. Mousavi and Mr. Karoubi and some of the reformists, former President Khatami, really want to do is empower the pluralist and democratic nature of the constitution. Is it possible? I'm not optimistic about this, because the lion's share of power goes to the Vali-e-Faghih, the supreme leader, and the reformists are not really powerful. But they wanted to try it, so they are resolving this so-called contradiction.