The taboo of regret: Iranian reflections on the seizure of the US embassy in 1979

Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri has been part of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s furniture for nearly half a century: government minister, speaker of parliament, presidential contender, advisor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and fixture of the country’s conservative clerical establishment. Few figures are as woven into the political DNA of Iran’s Islamist system as this 81-year-old from Mazandaran, a province on the shores of the Caspian Sea. That is precisely why his latest remark, seemingly mild, almost academic, landed like a bomb in Tehran. “The seizure of the U.S. Embassy [on November 4, 1979] was a major mistake,” he told Eco Iran this October, “and many of our troubles began there.” For a regime built on the sanctity of 1979, that was more than an opinion; it was a breach of canon.

Reconsidering the “Second Revolution”

Nateq-Nouri anchored his argument on two simple points. First, every embassy in the world has intelligence functions; the United States’ diplomatic compound in Tehran was no exception. Seizing it in the name of counter-espionage, he said, was an unnecessary and reckless act.

Second, he argued that the Iranian revolutionaries’ 444-day occupation predictably invited retaliation: frozen assets, diplomatic rupture, and an enduring hostility that reshaped Iran’s global isolation. He did not frame his critique as apostasy but as self-diagnosis, an acknowledgment that the early revolutionaries, fired by zeal and inexperience, mistook improvisation for strategy.

It was a rare moment of candor from someone who has stood near the center of power for four decades. Nateq-Nouri’s broader message was that the Islamic Republic’s missteps were not fate but choice — that the state’s permanent confrontation with the US was not inevitable but constructed and, therefore, could one day be reversed.

The loyal insider

To call Nateq-Nouri “anti-regime” would be absurd. He is a child of the Islamic Revolution’s first generation: a disciple of the revolution’s spiritual head and Iran’s first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, since 1960; jailed under the shah; an early member of the Islamist movement Motalefeh; and later one of the Islamic Republic’s bureaucratic architects. As Khomeini’s representative in various state organs, interior minister during the Iran-Iraq War, five-term Majlis lawmaker, and two-term speaker of the national legislature, he personifies institutional continuity. For years, he ran the supreme leader’s inspection office and sat on the Expediency Council, the highest arbitration body inside the regime.

Politically, he has long embodied the “traditional right”: conservative in creed, bureaucratic in temperament, and pragmatic in practice. Even in his later years, he has argued for a more measured foreign policy, institutional restraint, and improved civil discourse. That pedigree makes it difficult for hardliners to smear him as a closet liberal or Western sympathizer. His critique, then, is all the more dangerous precisely because it comes from within the house, not outside it.

The backlash

The reaction was immediate and coordinated. Kayhan, the regime’s ideological flagship, called his words “unscientific” and “illogical.” In the piece, Editor-in-chief Hossein Shariatmadari accuses him of ignoring the “Den of Espionage” documents — reconstructed cables that allegedly proved the embassy was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations hub plotting coups and sabotage against the nascent Islamic Republic. “It is impossible,” Shariatmadari writes, “that a man of his rank could be unaware of these facts.”

Others took a more personal tone. The bombastic cleric Ahmad Alamolhoda, a Friday-prayer heavyweight, chastised those who claimed the embassy seizure caused Iran’s troubles. “Were you not there?” he asked from the pulpit. “Did you not see what the Americans were doing from 1963 to 1979?” Majlis deputy Abbas Moqtadaei dismissed Nateq-Nouri’s view as “the product of age and forgetfulness.” Saeed Jalili, a hardline senior member of the Expediency Council and former nuclear negotiator, added on X that “the Iranian nation understood decades ago that the US embassy was a base of subversion.”

Kayhan and its allies reframed the debate as one about fortitude. Dissent from the official line, they argued, signals za’f (weakness), the very quality Khamenei has long warned could destroy revolutions. To admit having made an error in 1979 would not only tarnish a foundational myth, it would call into question the logic of 46 years of “resistance,” economic endurance, and securitized rule. Hence the invocation of Khamenei’s own words, repeated this year and again this week: the embassy takeover “was one of the best actions of the revolution.”

The stakes behind the fury

The anger is less about the past than the present. The Islamic Republic stands in a precarious moment after the June 2025 12-day war with Israel and the US, a conflict that tested Iran’s deterrence and exposed its vulnerabilities. In such times, revisiting the revolution’s sacred episodes feels perilous. 

If even insiders start labeling those acts “mistakes,” the intellectual scaffolding of the system weakens. For decades, the embassy takeover has symbolized the righteousness of revolutionary defiance and the legitimacy of “resistance” as state ideology. To question it is to pry open the logic of the entire enterprise.

Admitting it was a miscalculation would invite a chain reaction: Were later confrontations — in Lebanon, Iraq, or nuclear brinkmanship — also errors of judgment? Could relations with Washington, long frozen in moral absolutism, be reconsidered on pragmatic grounds? The specter of that debate explains why Kayhan insists US hostility toward Iran predates 1979, why radical clerics repeat that “America remains the Great Satan,” and why dissenters are labeled soft or senile. The battle is not about history; it is about political survival through narrative control.

The counter-current: Calls for reflection

Yet not everyone in Tehran’s power structure sees reflection as betrayal. Reformist and centrist outlets such as Ham-Mihan and Etemad, along with moderate conservatives like Mohammad Mohajeri and Gholamhossein Karbaschi, have defended Nateq-Nouri’s right to reassess. Their argument is simple: More than four decades on, Iran must measure costs and benefits, not recite slogans.

Mohajeri, himself a principlist (hardliner), writes that one may disagree with Nateq-Nouri’s judgment yet still admire his courage. “Even if he is wrong,” the piece continues, “there is no excuse for insults.” Karbaschi, in turn, reminds readers that senior clerics such as Morteza Mottahari and Mohammad Reza Mahdavi-Kani once warned against occupying diplomatic property. “It was not only Nouri,” he notes, “who thought the act dangerous; many others did but kept silent.”

Abbas Mousai of the National Development Party calls Nouri’s remarks “a rational evaluation from a national-interest standpoint.” In an Instagram post, he argues that the hardline sacralization of 1979 reflects ideological paralysis — a refusal to adapt to changing realities. “Some of the very students who seized the embassy,” he points out, “now express regret. Why should introspection be forbidden to others?”

Beyond Nateq-Nouri: Cracks in the consensus

Nateq-Nouri’s remarks follow a broader pattern of establishment figures breaking taboos once deemed untouchable. This autumn alone, former Majlis Deputy Speaker Mohammad-Reza Bahonar declared that “compulsory hijab is not legally binding,” prompting clerical outrage. 

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s refusal to attend the US-led Sharm el-Sheikh cease-fire summit drew criticism from moderates who argued Iran should engage diplomatically even without recognition of Israel. Embassy seizures, hijab enforcement, foreign isolation: the common thread in this cross-section of various issues is a generational reckoning inside the system. Veterans who helped build the Islamic Republic now question whether its founding dogmas still serve its survival.

For the ruling elite, this is both a warning and an opportunity. The warning: that suppressing dissenting memory only deepens alienation between the state and its own historical custodians. The opportunity: that admitting error need not mean renouncing the revolution but rather updating its logic for endurance.

Those defending Nateq-Nouri frame his statement not as heresy but as realism. The revolution’s early excesses, they say, were products of youth and fervor, not divine decree. To learn from them is to strengthen, not weaken, the Islamic Republic. By this logic, acknowledging strategic mistakes, whether embassy seizures or isolationist policies, does not betray 1979’s ideals of independence and dignity but recalibrates them for present conditions.

They point to the new regional landscape: the Abraham Accords’ potential expansion, Iran’s limited participation in multilateral diplomacy, its economic fatigue, and a population weary of permanent mobilization. “Resistance,” they argue, cannot substitute for statecraft forever. In this context, Nateq-Nouri’s introspection is a survival instinct, a reminder that ideological rigidity, not foreign conspiracy, may pose the greater long-term threat.

The controversy around the recent remarks from Nateq-Nouri thus exposes a deeper fault line within Iran’s power structure: not moderates or reformists versus hardliners, but strategists versus absolutists. The former — pragmatic clergy, bureaucrats, and veterans — see the regime’s continuity depending on adaptation. The latter — media tribunes, security hawks, and ideological clergy — contend that continuity depends on purity. Each camp claims to defend the revolution, yet they diverge on what survival means.

For the absolutists, survival lies in unbroken defiance, even at the cost of isolation. For the strategists, survival demands recalibration, acknowledging that some of yesterday’s purported victories became today’s burdens. That is why a simple sentence from an old revolutionary could set off a national debate — because it questioned not only a fateful act taken in 1979 but also the logic that demands defending that same act in the year 2025.

Alex Vatanka is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC.

Photo credit BEHROUZ MEHRI/AFP via Getty Images