One sure sign that a civilization has succumbed to totalitarianism is that its greatest minds flee abroad.

That's the case with Iran, where anyone who opposes the ruling Shiite theocracy risks arrest, torture and execution. Last month, for instance, it was revealed that Tehran had seized the 2003 Nobel peace medal of Iranian human-rights dissident Shirin Ebadi, the first Muslim woman ever to win the prize. Since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's "re-election" in June, Ebadi hasn't dared set foot in her home country, declaring, "I am effectively in exile."

On Tuesday, the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) gathered several such Iranian-born thinkers for a discussion about the country's future -- along with an elite assortment of American foreign-policy experts from government, academia and name-brand think tanks. The timing was grimly appropriate: Twenty-four hours earlier, Iran's government had peevishly announced plans to build no fewer than 10 nuclear plants in response to condemnation from the International Atomic Energy Agency. While the conference was wide-ranging, all the discussion came back to two central questions: How to stop Iran from getting the bomb, and how to assist the country's growing but oppressed freedom-seeking opposition.

According to Carnegie Endowment for International Peace scholar Karim Sadjadpour, the Iranian Revolution has gone through three stages since 1979.

The first was the decade of Ayatollah Khomeini, who led the overthrow of the Shah from exile in France, and ruled Iran as Supreme Leader till his death in 1989.

The second stage, which consumed most of the 1990s, witnessed what was effectively a power-sharing arrangement between Kohmeini's successor and ideological flame-keeper, Ali Khamenei, and then-president Hashemi Rafsanjani, a corrupt businessman who cut deals with all and sundry, including Saudi Arabia and the United States.

Rafsanjani often is described as a Westernfriendly pragmatist. But in fact, as conference attendees learned from Argentinean special prosecutor Alberto Nisman, he oversaw Iran's barbarous suicide bombing of the 1994 AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires. It says much about Iran that such a mass murderer could be described as a "moderate" figure.

The rise to power of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 marked the third phase: the ascendancy of the ultra-theocratic Khamenei faction, and the marginalization of Rafsanjani and his allies.

But in their brutal effort to cement power in Iran's fraudulent June 12 presidential election, the hard-liners overplayed their hand, breathing life into the country's quasi-underground opposition movement. And so we now enter the revolution's fourth phase, marked by massive public disillusionment with the country's leadership. According to FDD Senior Fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht, Iran has now become "the most energetic proto-democratic society in the Middle East."

Earlier this month, at a November 4 rally commemorating the 30th anniversary of the U.S. embassy seizure, crowds shouted "Khamanei is a murderer, and his rule is unjust," and tore down Khamanei billboards. According to Former CIA director R. James Woolsey Jr., who sits on the FDD leadership council, the country's religious establishment now even flouts Khamenei when he makes basic pronouncements on nuts-and-bolts Islamic issues, such as the timing of holidays.

Does this mean the theocracy will come crashing down in coming months? The consensus answer at last week's conference was no --for four reasons.

First, there is little desire, even among the regime's most bitter internal opponents, for any sort of cataclysmic upheaval. "This is a place where Islamist utopianism is dead," flatly declared Farhad Khosrokhavar, an Iranianborn French scholar who remains a keen observer of events in his native country. "The idea of martyrdom -- which was an Iranian invention to begin with--is also dead."

"If we're comparing 1979 to 2009, there are some important distinctions," added Sadjadpour. "The current opposition isn't willing to call their followers onto the street to achieve martyrdom."

Secondly, the reform movement's support is geographically and demographically uneven. Most of its followers are students and educated, middle-class urbanites. Until the reformers attract the mostazafin-- the "oppressed" lower classes -- they won't succeed.

Third, the reformers don't yet have a charismatic leader who can channel the nation's dissident fervour in the way Kohmenei did 30 years ago. Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the defeated presidential candidate who now leads the country's Green Movement, is a popular figure -- but it's unclear whether he can inspire a sustained, nation-wide phenomenon, especially given the campaign of fear and harassment that he and his followers continue to endure. Meanwhile, exiled reformers are scattered geographically, and profoundly divided on the important question of whether change should come within the existing Islamic revolutionary framework.

Fourth, there is the sheer depravity of Iran's existing leadership, and its desperation to hold power. "There's a major difference between Iran and the Velvet-style revolutions of 1989," said Khosrokhavar. "The repressive powers of Eastern Europe refused to beat people in the streets. But in Iran, the army is willing to do so. In fact, they saw [June 12] as an opportunity to take control completely."

The point was graphically illustrated by FDD scholar Michael Ledeen, author of the newly published book Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West, who pointed out that Iranian prison guards routinely rape female prisoners before their execution -- since women who lose their virginity before marriage are believed to be barred from heaven. If a government is willing do this, Ledeen stressed, it will do anything.

Since June, in fact, the regime has become unrecognizable from the one that took power 30 years ago. While its leaders still pledge fealty to Islamic principles, their country increasingly is adopting the methods of brutal, secular dictatorships such as Syria and North Korea. Many of the Islamic Revolution's original leaders are openly disgusted by this trend. (Last Monday, for instance, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, Iran's most senior cleric, declared that the head-cracking tactics of the regime's Basij militia were against religion and "in the path of Satan.") But they don't control the country anymore. Even Khamanei is in danger of becoming something of a figurehead: Power now rests primarily with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a radicalized branch of the military that oversees the nuclear program, runs corrupt export rackets, trains terrorists and controls the money and weapons spigot to Hezbollah.

If the "Islamic Republic" has retained any sort of coherent creed, it isn't Islam -- it's militant anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism. Ahmadinejad's greatest symbolic ally on the world stage is a communist infidel: Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. (The Iranian President has visited Venezuela seven times since coming to office). The only thing the two leaders have in common is a hatred of Washington.

This transformation augurs badly for the international campaign to end Iran's covert uranium-enrichment program. While nuclear weapons may or may not be consistent with Islam, they are utterly indispensable for a regional power whose single-minded goal is to confront the Great Satan.

A desperately felt need to burnish the regime's nationalistic bona fides at home is also a factor: As former IAEA weapons inspector David Albright told the conference, rogue-state nuclear programs usually have as much to do with domestic politics as foreign threats. That's why even Iran's most passionate reformers rarely dare to come out against the country's nuclear program. "If they did," Khosrokhavar explained, "they would instantly be accused of selling out the country."

So what should be done? No one at the Washington conference advocated a military attack against Iran's nuclear facilties -- which would destabilize the Middle East, and instantly heal any rifts that might otherwise be forming within Iran's hard-line establishment.

Instead, the experts supported more aggressive sanctions, especially those targeting the IRGC and its terrorist activities. (Canadian officials considered adding the IRGC to its list of banned terrorist groups, but dropped the idea in 2007 -- a bad decision that should now be revisited.)While many opposition figures make a public show of rejecting sanctions, they often express very different views when speaking in private and off the record.

A particularly promising idea -- now attracting bipartisan support in Washington -- would be an international campaign to cut off the gasoline imports upon which Iran's motorists depend. (Though the country produces more than 4 million barrels of oil per day, its gasoline processing infrastructure is a shambles.) Ahmadinejad has responded by moving forward with a plan -- bitterly opposed by many in the government -- to cut gasoline subsidies, which make Iranian gasoline prices some of the lowest in the world. Iranians consider these low prices a birthright, and any move to cut the subsidies is fraught with significant political risk.

"Gasoline sanctions are not a silver bullet," said FDD Executive Director Mark Dubowitz. "They may, however, be silver shrapnel, and shrapnel also wounds. Any decision to cut gasoline subsidies is likely to drive up inflation, compound Iran's enormous economic difficulties and further inflame a population that is simmering with deep resentment for a regime that has lost all political legitimacy ... The chest-thumping from Iranian regime officials about the regime's ability to withstand refined petroleum sanctions is a sign that they are deeply worried."

In 2007, large riots broke out in Iran when the government tried to ration gasoline -- and a full-scale boycott by the international community could create an even larger upheaval. "Prior to June 12, if an Iranian cab driver couldn't buy gas, he might shake his fist and blame the Americans," said Gerecht. "After June 12, he might very well blame his own government."

On a more basic level, everyone agreed, the United States and other Western nations should do more to express moral support for Iran's reform movement, and for the basic principle of human rights in the country -- something that, until now, Barack Obama hasn't always done.

"Iranian political culture can be highly conspiratorial," Sadjadpour said. "Many people still believe that great powers benefit by keeping this regime in place. If U.S. engagement with Iran is focused solely on the nuclear issue, and neglects issues like democracy and human rights, people will believe that the United States cynically seeks to do a deal at their expense, and this could pour cold water on the momentum of the opposition."

Overall, the conference captured the odd mix of optimism and pessimism that now animates Iranian exiles and experts. On one hand, the repression and brutality meted out by the government has never been worse. On the other hand, there is a feeling that popular disgust with the regime can be bottled up for only so long -- and that, in the long term, it will eventually explode again, as it did after the June 12 election, and perhaps bring down the country's corrupt theocracy for good.

Expediting the fall of the Khamanei/Ahmadinejad regime should be the mission of all civilized societies -- including Russia, China and the European Union, all of which have cynically done business with Iran despite the country's nuclear program and massive human-rights violations.

And then there's Brazil, which played host to Ahmadinejad last week -- despite the fact that members of the current Iranian government personally orchestrated a wholesale terrorist massacre in neighbouring Argentina just 15 years ago. It is the moral equivalent of Canada playing host to a Taliban leader 15 years after 9/11.

It has now been seven years since revelations about Iran's nuclear ambitions were made public in 2002, and five years since the United States agreed to support a fruitless Europeanled negotiation effort aimed at bribing Tehran to end its enrichment activities. All the while, we have treated Iran delicately, worried that any sort of aggressive sanctions or rhetoric would further radicalize the regime.

But you can't get much more radical than the current IRGC-dominated government. And its popularity has dipped so low that it may not be able to withstand the next big domestic economic crisis. If ever there a time for the world community to join together in applying a set of truly crippling sanctions against Iran -- especially its gas industry --it is now.

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it - Jonathan Kay is a visiting fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.