TEHRAN, Iran

There were bright balloons at the 30th anniversary celebration of Iran’s Islamic revolution. Their vivid colors - blue, orange, yellow - shocked me. After two weeks here, I’d grown used to the swarms of women in black hijabs, the gray cars, the drabness offset only by the snowy peaks of the Alborz Mountains.

The revolution freed Iranians from the brutality of the shah’s secret police, the Savak, and delivered a homegrown society in place of one pliant to America’s whim. But like all revolutions, it has disappointed. Freedom has ebbed and flowed since 1979, but more often it has ebbed. Beneath the hijab, that is to say beneath the surface of things, frustrations multiply. Women sometimes raise their hands to their necks to express a feeling of suffocation.

Yet the revolution has survived. This strange attempt, in the 21st century, to regulate a society through the literal application of the tenets of Islam has proved more resilient than seemed possible three decades ago. An odd constitutional alchemy marrying elements of dictatorship and democracy has proved flexible enough, and ruthless enough, to accommodate, at a price, Iran’s development.

The message of an Islamic Iran has reverberated across the Muslim world, particularly in the Middle East, where the fight between Arabs and Israelis has in some ways broadened into a more intractable one between Islam and Zionism.

Iran has just fired a satellite into space. It is mastering the nuclear fuel cycle, to the West’s consternation, though it has no reactors to power. Nobody is expecting the revolution’s edifice to fall any time soon, certainly not before the conflict over the real purpose of that nuclear program comes either to military crisis or diplomatic resolution.

Revolutions - at least for young Iranians hooked on the Internet, blogs and cell phones - are yesterday’s story. Nobody will rise up. Modern technology provides repressive governments with a safety net: resentments seldom boil over because people feel just connected enough to cool rebellious adrenaline.

These are realities. It is time for the United States and the West to face them. I sometimes feel, when it comes to the Middle East, that“Green Zone politics”has infected the corridors of western power. The Green Zone in Baghdad is the walled fortress of an imaginary society that America created in Iraq as bloody mayhem prevailed outside. It no more reflected what Iraq is than Cleveland.

In the same way, America has tried to wish Hamas away and cause Hezbollah to disappear. It has also attempted to reduce Iran, a sophisticated society, to the axis-of-evil refuge of a bunch of crazy mullahs bent on nuking Israel.

Only when the West returns to dealing with the Middle East as it is, rather than as it dreams it might be, will the reduction of tensions become possible. That will also involve having the courage to see Israel for what it is: a nation that resorts too often to military force, as in Gaza, in a vain attempt to bend an ever better-informed Middle East to its will.

The other day, I asked Hussein Shariatmadari, the editor of the pro-government Kayhan newspaper, whether Iran had links to terrorist organizations.“If we had any links to the United States,”he shot back,“we could claim that we were linked to the largest terrorist organization in the world.”

I know, braggadocio, but after the Bush years, not an uncommon form of it in the Middle East. It’s time for a reality check. The West has been chasing bright balloons of illusion across this region. They will lead nowhere.