The Iran–Contra affair, often referred to as the Iran–Contra scandal, or simply Iran–Contra, was a political scandal in the United States that occurred during the second term of the Reagan administration. Between 1981 and 1986, senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo. The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras, a right-wing rebel group, in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by government appropriations had been prohibited by Congress, but the loophole was to use non-appropriated funds.
Max Boot is an American author, editorialist, lecturer, and military historian. He worked as a writer and editor for Christian Science Monitor and then for The Wall Street Journal in the 1990s. Since then, he has been the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributor to The Washington Post. He has also written for numerous publications such as The Weekly Standard, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times, and he has authored books of military history. In 2018, Boot published The Road Not Taken, a biography of Edward Lansdale, and The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right, which details Boot's "ideological journey from a 'movement' conservative to a man without a party", in the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Eliot Asher Cohen is an American political scientist. He was a counselor in the United States Department of State under Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009. In 2019, Cohen was named the 9th Dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, succeeding the former dean, Vali Nasr. Before his time as dean, he directed the Strategic Studies Program at SAIS. Cohen "is one of the few teachers in the American academy to treat military history as a serious field", according to international law scholar Ruth Wedgwood. Cohen is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is also, with former U.S. diplomat Eric Edelman, the cohost of the Shield of the Republic podcast, published by The Bulwark.
Stephen John Hadley is an American attorney and senior government official who served as the 20th United States National Security Advisor from 2005 to 2009. He served under President George W. Bush during the second term of his administration. Hadley was Deputy National Security Advisor during Bush's first term. Before that Hadley served in a variety of capacities in the defense and national security fields. He has also worked as a lawyer and consultant in private practice.
Danielle Pletka is an American conservative commentator. She is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank, and the former vice president for foreign and defense policy at AEI. She concurrently holds the Andrew H. Siegal Professorship in American Middle Eastern Foreign Policy at Georgetown University's Center for Jewish Civilization. From 1992 to 2002, Pletka was a senior professional staff member at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, working for Republican Jesse Helms.
Dennis B. Ross is an American diplomat and author. He has served as the Director of Policy Planning in the State Department under President George H. W. Bush, the special Middle East coordinator under President Bill Clinton, and was a special adviser for the Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia to the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Hushang Ansary is an Iranian-American former diplomat, businessman, and philanthropist. He served for eighteen years in the Iranian government prior to the Iranian Revolution including as Minister of Economic Affairs and Finance and Iran's Ambassador to the United States from 1967 to 1969. He has been chairman or director of companies both in Iran and in the United States.
Lawrence B.Wilkerson is a retired United States Army Colonel and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Since the end of his military career, Wilkerson has criticized many aspects of the Iraq War, including his own preparation of Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council, as well as other aspects of American policy in the Middle East. He is a lifelong Republican and firmly on the political right.
Abbas Malekzadeh Milani is an Iranian-American historian, educator, and author. Milani is a visiting professor of political science, and the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of the Iranian Studies program at Stanford University. He is also a research fellow and co-director of the Iran Democracy Project at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. In Milani's book, Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Modernity in Iran, he has found evidence that Persian modernism dates back to more than 1,000 years ago.
Paul R. Pillar is an academic and 28-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), serving from 1977 to 2005. He is now a non-resident senior fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security Studies, as well as a nonresident senior fellow in the Brookings Institution's Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence. He was a visiting professor at Georgetown University from 2005 to 2012. He is a contributor to The National Interest.
Roger Cohen is a journalist and author. He was a reporter, editor and columnist for The New York Times, and the International Herald Tribune . He has worked as a foreign correspondent in fifteen countries.
Michael Joseph Morell is an American former career intelligence analyst. He served as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2010 to 2013 and twice as its acting director, first in 2011 and then from 2012 to 2013. He also serves as a professor at the George Mason University - Schar School of Policy and Government.
Richard Lee Armitage is an American former diplomat and government official.
The Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) was an American think tank that operated from 2009 to 2017.
On 30 December 2009, pro-government rallies, also known as the "Dey 9 epic", took place in various Iranian cities, including Tehran, Shiraz, Arak, Qom and Isfahan. The rallies were hold in response to the Ashura protests, where protesters on that day did acts including "applauding, whistling, and engaging in other cheerful displays," which was viewed as violation of a "red line" and targeting Husayn ibn Ali and Ashura commemoration itself. The demonstrations and counter-demonstrations were connected to the disputed 2009 Iranian presidential election.
Nico Pitney is an American journalist, editor and media executive who has helped lead several prominent left-leaning media outlets, including HuffPost and NowThis.
Alex Vatanka is a senior fellow and the founding director of the Iran program at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C. He specializes in Iranian domestic and regional policies. Born in Tehran and also raised in Denmark, he joined the Middle East Institute in 2007. He was formerly an analyst with Jane’s Information Group in London (UK) before moving to Washington D.C. He is also a senior fellow in Middle East Studies at the US Air Force Special Operations School at Hurlburt Field and teaches as an adjunct professor at Wright-Patterson AFB. Alex maintains an official website at https://www.vatanka.com/.
Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic is a book by Flynt Leverett, former senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., and his wife Hillary Mann Leverett. It was first published in 2013. The premise of Going to Tehran is that the United States must develop its relationship with Iran in a similar manner to that of its relationship with China in the early 1970s at the time of Nixon and Kissinger.
Mohsen Milani is a political scientist, foreign policy analyst, public commentator and professor of politics. He has been the executive founding director for the Center for Strategic & Diplomatic Studies at the University of South Florida, since 2013.
