The next Iranian revolution is starting here, in a strip mall in McLean, next to the Jazzercise Fitness Center.

"We are going to change the regime!" pronounces the oracular Ahura Pirouz Khaleghi Yazdi. "This is going to happen very fast."

(So very fast, he adds with an insistent waggle of his heavy black eyebrows, that he worries about this article's timing. If too many days pass before publishing, it could be too late. The story may change: Mere days after the vote in neighboring Iraq, the new Iranian revolution may already have begun. Launched from McLean.)

Later this week, Yazdi persists, "I have a very important announcement to make." On the worldwide broadcast of his satellite TV show, "Dr. Yazdi," as he calls himself, will establish how to set up an "interim government" in Iran -- a country where he has never had a home.

It would be simple to write him off. To decide that blowing spitballs at the very governments President Bush railed against in his inaugural address -- those who keep "regions of the world simmer[ing] in resentment and tyranny" -- must be insane. (That's precisely what "the pro-government press in Tehran has described [Yazdi] as," the BBC posted on its Web site last September, adding that his claims are "loopy.")

But would that be snobbery? Cynicism? A sophisticate's sneer denying, as President Bush also intoned in his inaugural address, "the force of human freedom"? ...

...Today, the satellite bill comes to about $40,000 a month, they say, plus more to stream over the Internet at www.rang-a-rang.com. To run the station costs another $20,000, half of that for the rent alone. Ask about salaries, and Sehat laughs through both his nose and mouth. "What salary? Haah haaah haaaah." They have a couple of part-time employees who edit commercials and do camera work. They have electric, phone and office-supply bills. And whatever's left, "five, six thousand dollars a month, we split," Sehat says, pointing back and forth at himself at Veiseh...