World


Powerful Iran Lobby Helped Infl uence U.S. Policy


Democrat presidents wooed by false hope of “grand bargain” with Tehran, writes Kenneth Timmerman in new bestseller.


F


or decades, there has been a policy tug-of-war in Washington between appeas- ers and hard-liners toward


the Islamic regime in Iran. The appeasers, at times abetted by


Big Oil, wanted America to return to Iran. They wanted big contracts with state-run oil companies and indus- trial conglomerates, and to beat the Germans, the Brits, and the French to the punch. They would dress up their argu-


ments for dealing with terrorist Teh- ran much as Silicon Valley argued for “normalizing” trade relations with Communist China: Trade brings Western infl uence, Western values, and eventually, greater freedom. I have been tracking the appeasers


and apologists for decades. When I lived in Paris in the 1980s and early 1990s, they ran several European gov- ernments and made a killing (pun intended) on selling the Iranian regime what they needed to make bombs, bullets, missiles, and poison gas.


In Washington, they captured both Democrats and Republicans with promises of big campaign donations. An early iteration of the pro-Teh-


ran lobby was run by Hooshang Ami- rahmadi. His group, the American Iranian Council, AIC, was launched in the mid-1990s and funded by CON- OCO and Chamber of Commerce


50 NEWSMAX | DECEMBER 2024


Republicans in the hopes they could convince President Bill Clinton to allow them to develop the massive oil and gas fi elds in Iran. In 2002, I wrote about a Califor-


nia fundraiser hosted by Sadegh Namazikhah, who was so notorious within the Iranian-American commu- nity that protesters showed up at his home as he was introducing the chair- man of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. Joe Biden. Namazikhah and his buddies


ponied up $30,000 for Biden’s reelec- tion campaign and told me that the future president was gushing in his support for Tehran.


When millions of Iranians took to the streets of Tehran in May 2009 following the disputed reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama remained silent for well over three weeks.


“The senator said that Iran always


wanted to be an ally of the United States and to have good relations with the U.S.,” one participant said. Biden had reached out to Namazi-


khah to set up the fundraiser for his Senate reelection campaign after the two met at a gala hosted by Ami- rahmadi in New York a few months earlier.


TERROR SUPPORT Occasionally, U.S. government offi - cials would speak truth to these lobby- ists when they least expected it. At a one-day conference on Capitol


Hill organized by AIC just two weeks after the Biden fundraiser, White House adviser Zalmay Khalilzad deliv- ered a blistering condemnation of the Iranian regime. He had just returned from Afghani-


stan and told the group that the Iranian government was sheltering al-Qaida ter- rorists, despite U.S. requests that it stop. “We had hoped that after the Sept.


11 attacks, the Iranian regime would end its support for terrorists,” he said. “But Iran did not stop its support for terror.” He also blasted the regime for its


ongoing pursuit of nuclear weapons, its human rights abuses, and repression of women. Earlier that day, Biden made an appearance, telling the group, “I believe that an improved relationship


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