From the New York Times on Michael Burrow, this is the Daily.

Today, after eight days, the protests in Iran seemed to be dying down, snuffed out in part by the government.

But a closer look at what ignited the outrage in the first place

suggests that it may have been the country's president who lit the match.

It's Friday, January 5th.

Iranians protested outside the UN last night against what they believed was a fraudulent election victory by Iran's president Ahmadinejah.

He is against the whole world. He is against everything.

There was stone scrolls, there was garbage cans set on fire, and the people were shouting death to dictatorship.

They were shouting, Moussavi, get my vote back for me.

These are the Moussavi.

My election was a great victory, one completely fairly.

The words of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejah, then his first public appearance since his resounding re-election.

He was speaking at the end of a day of unprecedented protests in parts of the capital Tehran.

Thousands of young opposition protestors spilled out onto the streets in ace spontaneous outburst of anger against what they said was a rigged election.

The Iranian government has been in the country for the past three years.

Okay, so picture this. It's 2013, and the Iranians have just come through eight years of Mahmoud Ahmadinejah.

This almost evil hard line, er, that in Tehran at least really everybody was sick and tired of in the end.

Tehran is the Tehran bureau chief at the times.

And there suddenly out of the blue comes this new candidate, a cleric, but a cleric with new promises and fresh ideas.

Hussain Rohan, now he is actually more of a politician than a cleric. He calls himself a moderate and okay, we can debate about what that means inside the Islamic Republic to be a moderate.

But he is someone who is constantly at least promising his people that he will give them more freedom, a better life. He really starts reaching out to Iran's urban middle classes.

People who want to see change, who want to see a new Iran, people who want to engage with the world. And those are exactly the slogans that Hussain Rohan is picking.

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