ISTANBUL, Aug. 2 -- A sudden surge in momentum for reform inside Iran was reversed last month by President Bush's public expression of support for the cause, according to Iranian analysts and foreign diplomats there.
Bush's July 12 statement, in which he urged Iran toward "a future defined by greater freedom, greater tolerance," was framed as a direct appeal to the people of Iran to press for the political and social changes that elected reformers within the government, especially President Mohammad Khatami, have been trying to achieve. But observers in Iran said Bush's message enabled religious conservatives who hold powerful, appointive positions in the government to link their reformist foes with the United States, still regarded as "the Great Satan" by many Iranians. The emboldened hard-line clerics immediately launched a wave of repression, closing newspapers and jailing intellectuals.
"The authorities here -- even some of the reformists -- interpreted that as interference in Iran's internal affairs and condemned it," said an Iranian analyst who asked not to be identified.
A foreign diplomat in Tehran said "the consensus here" was that the timing of Bush's statement "was not very well chosen. At the moment when reformers were coming out stronger, it allowed the regime to concentrate on the 'external threat.' "
Bush's statement closely followed an extraordinary condemnation of Iran's unelected religious leadership leveled by a widely respected contemporary of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who engineered the 1979 revolution that brought Islamic clerics to power.
Ayatollah Jalaleddin Taheri, 76, lambasted Khomeini's successors for "crookedness, negligence, weakness . . . Genghis-like behavior" and for treating Iran as "their private, hereditary property."
"Now the shah and America are not in control of this country, we don't have them to blame," Taheri observed, referring to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who was put in place by the CIA in 1953 and toppled in 1979.
The three-page statement, which announced Taheri's July 8 resignation as a leader of the mosque in the central city of Isfahan, reinvigorated a reform movement that had been stymied by the resilient hard-line clerics who control the country's most powerful institutions.
In the days following, several thousand students defied government agents to march in favor of reforms. The country's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who presides over a government denounced by Taheri as "the unruly camel of power . . . galloping wildly in the political arena," issued a statement both warning Taheri and expressing sympathy with some of his views.
Then Bush weighed in. His statement echoed reformers' complaints and urged the overthrow of the clerics, promising that afterward Iran "will have no better friend than the United States of America."
In Iran, however, the focus was on neither the substance nor the form of Bush's remarks. Rather Bush's statement had the immediate effect of shifting public debate abruptly to terms favoring the conservatives.
The reformist agenda fell away again. In the new atmosphere, even Taheri was obliged to issue a call for anti-American demonstrations.
"The whole internal debate was heating up," said a Western diplomat in Tehran, the Iranian capital. "The last thing anybody needed was some heavyweight comment coming in from overseas."
In the weeks since, conservatives have used the mantle of national unity to launch a crackdown. The prominent reformist newspaper Norooz was the most obvious casualty of the changed atmosphere. It abided by the conservatives' order not to report on Taheri's remarks, but left conspicuously blank the spaces where articles would have been. The newspaper was ordered shut.
The following week an Islamic court closely allied with the conservative clerics banned the Iran Freedom Movement, a nationalist party of long standing, and sentenced 33 of its members to jail.
Another opposition figure, Hashem Aghajari, already facing charges of offending clergy, this week was also charged with insulting the prophet Muhammad, an offense punishable by death. Six music schools were shuttered for teaching "Western" music. Tehran shopkeepers were ordered to close their stores at midnight in the name of "social discipline."
"Unfortunately the government of the United States usually chooses action that benefits the conservatives," said Saeed Laylaz, an editor of Norooz. "I don't know why, and I can't explain to you how, but every response by the United States on internal Iran issues is to the benefit of the conservatives."
Analysts and diplomats said that in the current case, conservatives found strength in widespread apprehension that the United States is going to attack Iraq, which borders Iran to the west.
"The question of Iraq now occupies everybody's mind, there's no doubt about that," said Davoud Hermidas Bavand, a law professor at Tehran's Supreme National Defense University. "It's the dominant issue in the region, and in Iran."
Iran fought an eight-year war against Iraq in the 1980s, and relations between the two countries remain hostile. But the prospect of U.S. troops on its border is especially unsettling to Iran, given the sudden U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, one of its eastern neighbors.
"The conservatives are basically scared that they'll be next in line after Iraq," said a Western diplomat.
Those fears were stoked in recent days by U.S. officials complaining publicly that Iran was building a nuclear power plant at Bushehr, on the Persian Gulf, with Russian assistance. A Russian promise to help build six more reactors "infuriated" U.S. officials, according to one report.
Administration officials said the nuclear program could assist Iran in developing weapons of mass destruction. They have pointedly declined to rule out a military strike on the plant by the United States or Israel, which has suggested it would not allow it to open.
Iran's weapons program qualified it for a place along Bush's "axis of evil," with Iraq and North Korea. That label resonated more inside Iran than Bush's recent expression of solidarity with the country's democratic forces.
"This factor is working to the benefit of the conservatives so far," said the Iranian analyst.
Analysts and diplomats cautioned that the gain by conservatives might be temporary. Public support for reform remains widespread, as reflected by national elections that twice gave Khatami landslide victories in the presidential vote and seated a parliament supportive of his agenda.
"I think, broadly speaking, reform is a bit of a juggernaut," one diplomat said. "There's not much an international power can do but affect the edges of it."