Keith Ellison's Life as NIAC Cheerleader: The Would-be Head of the DNC's Cozy History with the Tehran Lobby
July of 2009 was not the most obvious time to argue against sanctioning Iran. In June, the regime violently suppressed a widespread protest movement that emerged in response to the alleged rigging of the country’s presidential election. Mir Hossein Moussavi, who the regime had declared the election’s loser, was under house arrest, securing the belligerent Holocaust denier Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a second term in office. Iran was also operating 3,800 uranium enrichment centrifuges and stonewalling international nuclear monitors, in violation of international law. As a result, even President Obama and members of his administration who favored dialogue were suggesting the need for more intensive U.S. sanctions against a country that leaders of both parties agreed posed a potential nuclear threat.
But for Keith Ellison, then a freshman congressman from Minnesota, mid-2009 was an ideal time for the U.S. to try something radically different in its relations with Tehran. “I haven’t been persuaded that the best thing for us to do is to rush to crippling sanctions,” said Ellison during a July 22, 2009 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing covering recent developments in Iran. Although Ellison clarified he was “not in principle against sanctions,” he argued that Washington could not shape Iranian behavior without broader international cooperation: “We have sanctioned ourselves out of sanctions unilaterally,” Ellison said, years before many of the most restrictive U.S. measures had even been introduced.