It has been three decades since Iranian college students overran and occupied the American Embassy in Tehran, and we are still dealing with that country’s revolution.

Americans at the time were understandably preoccupied with the fate of 66 countrymen who were held captive, accused of being spies, and threatened with prosecution and punishment—which in the Iran of those days tended to mean firing squads or the noose. We still refer to this outrage as the Iran Hostage Crisis. Yet this way of remembering the episode ignores its larger significance in Iran, and impedes our understanding of the political drama unfolding there today.

The movement to oust the Shah was primarily a nationalist one, albeit colored by the religious rhetoric of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Many of those who took to the streets in 1978 and 1979 were motivated not by a desire to establish a theocracy but by the same thing that stirs the reform movement there today—a desire to cast off authoritarianism and establish democracy. The seizure of the U.S. Embassy was the pivotal event in the takeover of the revolution by the mullahs of Qom.

The seizure of the embassy and the kidnapping of the American mission was not only a crime against it and the U.S.: It was a crime against international diplomacy. The pretense for the embassy takeover was false. The presence of a working U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 was not evidence that the U.S. was plotting to overthrow the revolution, as the hostage-takers claimed. It was evidence of America’s acceptance of the revolution, and of its willingness to work with Iran’s new leaders, whoever they turned out to be.

I say “whoever,” because nine months after Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled it was still unclear what kind of government Iran was going to have. Religion did play a big part in the Iranian revolution and Khomeini was its galvanizing figure. But the ayatollah was ambivalent about the idea of clerical rule.