Democratic silence on the Iran war is John Kiriakou’s characterisation of the domestic opposition to the 2026 Iran war: the loudest and, in his telling, effectively the only front-facing critics came from the more isolationist right, while the Democratic Party said nothing. “Where in the world are the Democrats? They are utterly silent.”[1]
Cory Booker
He named Cory Booker as the case that angered him most. On an occasion before Benjamin Netanyahu’s most recent Washington visit, Kiriakou says Booker “literally ran through the halls of Congress to get to a photo op so he could stand behind Benjamin Netanyahu with his big stupid grin on his face” — an image he compared to O.J. Simpson running through an airport in the old Hertz commercial.[2][3] That it had happened after Gaza and after the start of the Iran war was the part he could not account for.[2]
The mechanism
Kiriakou’s explanation is electoral rather than ideological. “Some of them are afraid of being primaried. And God knows that AIPAC, if you are not 100% pro-Israel in your voting record, they will primary you and they will spend millions of dollars to defeat you. That scares most members of Congress. And so they’re just not willing to challenge anybody.”[3]
He treats the fear as comparable in kind to congressional deference toward the CIA — an analogy put to him in the same exchange, which he accepted with a correction: not fear so much as control.[1] His own encounter with the lobby’s daily presence on Capitol Hill is recorded at the AIPAC “Holy Land” trip offer.