Gary Sick, Portrait of an American Architect of Khomeinism
July 8, 2019 Admin
By John Amirteymour
Most Iranians today are aware that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s rise to power in 1979, and the survival of his Islamist regime over the next four decades, was the result of Western, primarily American, foreign policies. Yet, few Americans realize that a cabal of elite academics, bureaucrats, and businesspersons, influencing US government policies from behind the scenes, have taken the destiny of an entire country into their hands, depriving them of liberty and human rights, while at the same time harming the security of America via their failed ideas. One of these Americans is Gary Sick, a professor at Columbia University, and the director of a think tank headquartered at that university, the Gulf/2000 project.
Described as the “predominant email list for Gulf State policy experts,†the Gulf/2000 project’s online forum membership reads like a comprehensive list of the Khomeiniist regime’s U.S. based lobbyists. They include: Trita Parsi, head of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), Tehran’s main US lobbying organization; Laura Rozen, an Al-Monitor reporter who was very close to the Obama administration, Joe Cirincione; head of the Ploughshares Fund, an institution ostensibly dedicated to promoting peace that has long been one of NIAC’s main sources of funding; Puneet Talwar, a former State Department official and advisor to Joe Biden; John Limbert, Obama’s former deputy assistant secretary of state for Iran; and Tamara Cofman Wittes, Obama’s former deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs.
The Gulf/2000 project, and Sick himself, received some media attention in 2016 for their role in promoting the Obama nuclear deal with the regime. That year, Obama’s deputy national security advisor for communications, Ben Rhodes, admitted in a New York Times interview that the Obama administration, using various liberal/Democratic party-aligned foundations as middlemen, had paid for media airtime to promote the Iran deal, using false and skewed information. One of the foundations utilized by the administration was the Ploughshares Fund. Since 2010, Ploughshares had been the primary funder of Sick’s Gulf/2000 project, to the tune of $75,000 annually. A Washington Free Beacon reporter, who managed to gain access to members of Sick’s private, invitation-only, online forum, wrote that a “member…compared the group to a pro-Iran ‘info-op’—military jargon for a campaign to influence policy decisions. ‘The most significant forum for scholars of Iranian studies to exchange ideas and views was dominated by apologists for the Iranian regime and was dominated by people who would reflexively push back on any argument that the Iranian regime was involved in what we would call ‘malign activities’ or ‘illicit activities.’†As the group’s moderator, Sick had final say over what was allowed to be posted; and while he had no issue with bizarre, Tehran-originating conspiracy theories about “Jews†or “neocons,†he deleted any post that was critical of Tehran.
Read more at: http://isicrc.org/articles-and-reports/the-case-of-the-american-architect-of-khomeinism
Gary Sick! Sheesh! This rings such bells but, so many names do when they were ones you heard, 20 years ago or so. I'd like a Classic Comics version of the article though, looks good. Anyone remember him?
New website for me, could be connected to MEK who long ago in the '70s probably did conduct some actual terrorist acts and then again, maybe they aren't connected to that organization.
Courtesy of
Wendy Acho who seems to post good conservative articles on twitter. She is an Iraqi Christian, whatever, she's a big help and I think pretty much American.
Ooops, article is from July. Relevant still.
