Democrats’ decades of bargaining have only empowered Iran’s tyrannical leaders — and made us less safe

From Bill Clinton to Barack Obama to Joe Biden, Democratic presidents have been wooed by the false hope of a “grand bargain” with Iran. It has done nothing but embolden the mullahs and make Americans less safe, Kenneth R. Timmerman writes in his new book, “The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue,” out now. Here, the senior fellow at the America First Policy Institute, explains how things have gone wrong. 

For decades, Democrat Party power brokers have believed in the misguided dream that peace with Iran’s tyrannical leaders is possible — and instead made the world a more dangerous place. 

An early iteration of the pro-Tehran lobby was run by a former communist named Hooshang Amirahmadi. His group, the American Iranian Congress, AIC, was launched in the mid-1990s and funded by energy company Conoco in the hopes they could convince President Bill Clinton to allow them to develop the massive oil and gas fields in Iran. 

Despite the imposition of US sanctions on trade with Iran since the hostage crisis of the 1970s, AIC and like-minded groups continued to lobby in favor of doing business with Tehran. 

Clinton tried to negotiate a back-door deal with Tehran just before the 2000 election. 

If it had been successful, the pact not only would have lifted sanctions and reopened US trade with Iran, but would have paid Iran billions of dollars as “reimbursements.” 

The deal died, but the dream didn’t. 

While George W. Bush was in power, Iranian groups continued to cultivate Democrats with an eye on a grand bargain. 

In 2002, a doctor named Sadegh Namazi-khah hosted a fundraiser in California that raised $30,000 for then-Sen. Joe Biden’s re-election campaign. Biden was then chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. 

“The senator said that Iran always wanted to be an ally of the United States and to have good relations with the US,” one participant said. 

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) was another prominent supporter of the Iranian regime. Kerry came out squarely in favor of “engaging” the Islamic Republic, helping the regime to join the World Trade Organization, and of removing visa restrictions on Iranians that were imposed after Sept. 11. 

Kerry’s daughter Vanessa went on to marry an Iranian American and spent her honeymoon visiting his relatives in Iran when Kerry was secretary of state, not long before he initiated secret talks with the regime that led to the infamous 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. 

Amirahmadi, the founder and chairman of AIC, was soon surpassed by a former aide named Trita Parsi, who came to America from Sweden in 2001. 

The following year, Parsi set up the National Iranian American Council, NIAC. 

Appeasement 

Instead of Big Oil, NIAC’s backers were the left-wing Ploughshares Fund, the Open Society Institute of George Soros and the Tides Foundation, funded in part by John Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz. 

NIAC claimed to have thousands of members across the United States who were appalled at the human suffering sanctions allegedly were imposing on ordinary Iranians. 

And while their numbers were undoubtedly much smaller, they were tremendously savvy in pushing those claims on witting and unwitting members of Congress.

Its goals were to prevent a US military strike on Iran, to get US and international sanctions lifted and to promote a “grand bargain” with Iran’s clerical leadership. 

With the election of Barack Obama and his pro-Iranian regime vice president, Joe Biden, NIAC felt the wind in its sails. 

Trita Parsi visited the Obama White House more than 30 times, and felt he had the ear of the new president.

When millions of Iranians took to the streets of Tehran in May 2009 following the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama remained silent for well over three weeks, even as Iranians held up signs in English asking, “Obama, are you with us?” 

Trita Parsi went on to become a semi-official adjunct to the Iranian regime negotiating team during talks that led to the 2015 nuclear deal.

Later, the State Department dispatched Trita Parsi on a speaking tour to Saudi Arabia and hired Sahar Nowrouzzadeh, a former NIAC employee, as the national security director for Iran. 

The idea pushed by NIAC officials, and embraced by the Obama and Biden administrations, is that the only people suffering from sanctions are the Iranian people, that the mullahs of Iran can be bribed to abandon nuclear weapons and that Iran is a more natural American ally than Saudi Arabia. 

They cling to this belief in spite of all the evidence: Over years of appeasement, Iran has not abandoned its nuclear program (evidence shows it kept moving forward, even under the supposed Obama “deal”), and has funded proxies in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and elsewhere to harass Americans and our allies. 

You would think the sneak attack on Oct. 7, 2023 by Hamas — a group funded, backed and encouraged by Iran — would have finally put an end to such illusions. 

Not so. NIAC supporter Philip Gordon advised Sen. Kerry during the Iran nuclear deal negotiations and became Vice President Kamala Harris’ national security advisor in 2021. 

He has been touted as a potential secretary of state nominee should Harris win the presidency. 

Next in line 

Gordon was not merely a cheering bystander to the Washington, DC, pro-Tehran lobby. He authored three op-eds with Ariane Tabatabai “blatantly promoting the Iranian regime’s perspective and interests,” according to a letter to Harris from Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and New York Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik. 

Tabatabai was a senior defense department official who was “reportedly involved in an Iranian government operation to expand Tehran’s soft power in the United States,” the lawmakers wrote. “Mr. Gordon was also closely associated with the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), another Iranian influence organization that allegedly collaborates with Tehran. He spoke at the NIAC’s Leadership Conference in both 2014 and 2016.” 

All signs point to a Harris presidency continuing this dangerous pursuit of a bargain, which Iran uses to shake us down for money even as it continues to attack us. 

Israel has shown how standing up to Iran and its proxies works, exposing the regime as a paper tiger and encouraging the people to stand up to the ayatollahs. The US should be standing with the women throwing off their head scarves, not making deals with their oppressors. 

Adapted from “The Iran House: Tales of Revolution, Persecution, War, and Intrigue,” published by Bombardier Books, out now.