As Ilan Berman of the American Foreign Policy Council wrote this week in The Washington Times, since 1979, Iran’s economy has dropped from 17th to 27th place in the world, “one of the steepest declines in modern history. ... Iranian citizens are now 30 percent poorer than they were in 1979.”

All of this makes me remember that, soon after Khomeini came to power in February 1979, I interviewed Yasser Arafat, then leader of the P.L.O., in his hideaway in Beirut. This usually inscrutable and often incoherent man was almost delirious with joy that night.

“I sat up there, I sat up there,” he kept saying, “with him! We reviewed the troops together, and I ... was ... up there!” Translated that means he had just been in Tehran with the ayatollah and they had been together, up on the reviewing stand, overseeing the marching, shouting, fanaticized troops of the Islamic revolution.

But a too-often ignored rule of history that these men never seem to learn is that the ego gratification and demagogic fervor of reviewing troops does not a nation build.