I remained in Iran for a while after the 1979 elections, but as revolutionary ardor cooled, there was less and less news to report. By summer, most foreign journalists departed.

Many Iranian revolutionaries found it hard to put down their guns and pick up their tools, hoes and books again. A sort of post-partum depression set in: For years, Iranians had dreamed of a revolution that would transform their lives. Now they had had their revolution and their lives were not transformed -- except women would have to hide themselves under chadors and it was more dangerous than ever to say out loud what you were thinking.

So in the autumn, a group of about 400 of Khomeini's young followers - Ahmadinejad may have been among them -- invaded the American embassy, took the diplomats hostage, bound them, blindfolded them, beat them, subjected them to mock executions and, in other way, tormented them.

Khomeini realized this could fuel the flickering revolutionary flames while also showing the world that infidels are a feckless lot, or, as he phrased it: "America cannot do a damn thing."

America was "held hostage" for 444 days. As the scholar Matthias Kuntzel has pointed out: "The more assiduously President Carter sought compromise, the more contemptuously he was mocked by Khomeini." It required a more hardnosed president to persuade the Supreme Leader to let the Americans go.

Over the years that followed, Khomeini's revolution failed, and not only by liberal democratic standards - more people executed, imprisoned and driven into exile than under the Shah, egregious violations of human rights, sponsorship of terrorism, Holocaust denial and genocidal threats. It failed also by Khomeini's standards.

Just as the Russian Revolution and the social engineering of Lenin and Stalin did not create a "New Soviet Man," so Iran's Islamic Revolution has not succeeded in creating a new Islamist Man -- one who wants nothing more than to obey Iran's religious ruling class and fight for the imposition of Islamic law around the world.

This is what Iran's demonstrators are demonstrating. They are waging a revolution for hope that has been denied and change that, it seemed, would never come. President Obama's moral support should be loud and clear.

Whether this revolution will prevail or be crushed, I'm not competent to predict.

I do wonder whatever happened to Bijan, and which side he's on today.