The Obama administration has long been preparing for the reelection of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It would have preferred a different outcome, but barring unforeseen events, it appears that Ahmadinejad will be the man to deal with.

And the throngs of protestors marching in the streets of Tehran? Don’t their actions constitute an unforeseen event that could derail Ahmadinejad’s victory? In the short run, no. But in the long run, the clash of cultures on display in street demonstrations for Ahmadinejad and his challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi points to serious trouble in coming years.

The Guardian Council, a conservative body charged with religious oversight of Iran’s laws, is supposed to certify the results within ten days of any election. Steps designed to placate the Mousavi voters will have to be taken before then. A recount or a new election could be ordered, or a commission could be named to investigate election fraud. But any of these measures would show the Islamic Republic to be incapable of running free and fair elections.

The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is the country’s ultimate authority. He will finally decide how to handle the crisis. If he makes a misstep, Mousavi’s supporters might denounce his solution as a cover-up and keep on demonstrating. Should that happen, Khamenei has the sole constitutional authority to declare martial law. That, however, would make the failure of Iran’s political system even more evident.

Ayatollah Khamenei served as Iran’s president during the hard years of war against Iraq from 1980 to 1988. Mousavi served under him as Prime Minister. Both men are firm believers in an Islamic Republic built on the ideas of Ayatollah Khomeini, Khamenei’s teacher. Neither wants the republic to be overthrown. The report that Khamenei offered Mousavi an investigation into the election in return for Mousavi calming his supporters indicates the Supreme Leader’s desire to see a peaceful return to civil order.

Even if the protests die down over the next week, however, the crisis will only have been postponed. A confrontation is looming that is as inevitable as was the generational upheaval that swept the United States during the Vietnam era. Both countries have a Greatest Generation that is pitted against a baby boomer generation.

Iranians born between 1955 and 1970 bore the brunt of the fighting during the war that began with Saddam Hossein’s invasion in 1980. With so many of Iran’s elite families in exile after the 1979 revolution, the soldiers who fought the war came disproportionately from the country’s lower social strata. They passed their childhood under the Shah, saw their lives transformed by the revolution, and enjoyed the postwar benefits granted to veterans.

Since American troops did not capture Saddam until fifteen years after the war’s end, Iran’s veterans never knew the exhilaration of a true victory. Yet they know in their hearts that theirs is the Greatest Generation, and for most of them Ahmadinejad is their leader and spokesman.

Iran’s baby boomers are wartime children born when the clerical leadership dreamed of breeding a vast army of holy warriors. When the war ended in 1988, so did the baby boom. They have no memory of the Shah’s autocracy or of the revolutionary movement that brought him down.

In Iran, the time gap between the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boomers is ten years as opposed to twenty in the U.S. The election of President Ahmadinejad, a veteran of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, confirmed the rise to power of the Greatest Generation and set the stage for today’s clash with the youth counterculture.

Today the baby boomers, now in their twenties, are taking their political cause to the streets. America’s boomers did the same thing to protest the Vietnam War. But just as our flower children faced grim opposition from their parents, Iran’s Greatest Generation will not go down without a fight. In their eyes, after all, the boomers neither made the revolution nor fought to defend it. They see them as whiny, luxury-loving, me-firsters with questionable religious commitments and a degrading love of American pop culture.

The boomers themselves, and particularly the women among them, chafe under the behavioral restrictions enforced by Ahmadinejad’s regime. They long to connect with the world and hate seeing their country humiliated by Ahmadinejad’s outrageous public pronouncements.

The jury is still out over whether last week’s election was fair, and the truth of the matter may never be known. In a fair election the baby boomers may already have the numbers to win. But if not, their share of the electorate is bound to grow in coming years.

So the Greatest Generation faces a challenge. Either persuade the boomers to accept their leadership, which would require loosening restrictions and increasing access to the outside world, or restructure the republic along authoritarian lines to solidify domination by Ahmadinejad’s supporters. If Khamenei and Ahmadinejad decide on the latter course, as may become evident during the coming weeks, the immediate crisis may be successfully suppressed. But the Islamic Republic will be in for a more serious clash in a few years time

The commitment to freedom that fueled the 1979 revolution began with the rage and tears that followed the U.S.-engineered coup against Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. Restored to his throne by CIA intervention, the Shah presided over an oppressive absolute monarchy. But the seeds of his overthrow were growing. If a new oppression grows out of the current crisis, the clash of generations will take far less than twenty-six years to turn today’s political frustration into a successful movement for fundamental change.

Iran’s Culture Clash by Richard Bulliet