Addressing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) today, Republican presidential nominee John McCain called for a global campaign of divestment from Iran. He might want to start with his own campaign manager, Rick Davis, whose work on behalf of Ukrainian mogul Rinat Akhmetov included business dealings with Tehran. As it turns out, John McCain is following Mitt Romney and Dick Cheney as just the latest hard-line Republican to run afoul of his own plans for Iranian disinvestment.
McCain used his wide-ranging address to target Iran for the kind of worldwide sanctions regime applied to apartheid-era South Africa. (Unsurprisingly, the self-proclaimed "foot soldier in the Reagan revolution" neglected to mention his hero's opposition to South African divestment.) Monday morning, McCain declared:

"We should privatize the sanctions against Iran by launching a worldwide divestment campaign. As more people, businesses, pension funds, and financial institutions across the world divest from companies doing business with Iran, the radical elite who run that country will become even more unpopular than they are already."

Sadly for McCain, that sweep would net his long-time adviser and campaign manager Rick Davis. As Talking Points Memo detailed just this past Friday, Davis' extensive lobbying operation prominently features clients doing deals with the Iranian regime. At the same Davis was heading up John McCain's so-called Reform Institute, his firm was representing the Ukrainian oligarch Akmetov and its businesses in Tehran:

Davis Manafort was helping Akhmetov's conglomerate, System Capital Management Holdings, to develop a "corporate communications strategy" between the beginging of 2005 through the end of summer 2005, the company said.
The company's subsidiary, Metinvest, a steel company, has one of its 11 offices in Tehran. And another subsidiary, Khartsyzsk Pipe Plant, sells large pipes to Iran.

As of Friday, the McCain camp was pleading ignorance. According to TPM, "a McCain aide told us Davis did not work on that account while he was heading up the firm. And he was unaware of the company's ties to Iran."
Of course, McCain's looming discomfort over his team's ties to Tehran pales in comparison to Mitt Romney's divestment fiasco in 2007. His high-profile crusade lasted about three days, or about as long as it took for revelations that his former employer was in deep in Iran.
In his much hyped - and short lived - effort in early 2007, the former Massachusetts Governor and GOP White House hopeful called on state pension funds (in Democratic states) to divest their holdings in companies doing business with Iran. On February 22, Romney sent letters to Democratic leaders including New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, Senators Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton as well as state comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli urging a policy of "strategic disinvestment from companies linked to the Iranian regime." But as the AP quickly discovered, Romney's former employer (Bain & Co.) and the company he founded (Bain Capital) have extensive links to recent Iranian business deals.

Bain & Co. Italy, described in company literature as "the Italian branch of Bain & Co.," received a $2.3 million contract from the National Iranian Oil Co., in September 2004. Its task was to develop a master plan so NIOC -- the state oil company of Iran -- could become one of the world's top oil companies, according to Iranian and U.S. news accounts of the deal.
Bain Capital, the venture capital firm that Romney started and made him a multimillionaire, teamed up with the Haier Group, a Chinese appliance maker that has a factory in Iran, in an unsuccessful 2005 buyout effort.

Apparently missing the irony, Romney responded by comically saying that his Iran disinvestment PR scheme did not apply to him:

"This is something for now-forward. I wouldn't begin to say that people who, in the past, have been doing business with Iran, are subject to the same scrutiny as that which is going on from a prospective basis."

Still, that embarrassment did not prevent Romney from six months later calling on the UN to indict Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on charges of genocide when the Iranian president came to address the world body in New York last September.)
Of course, the Iranian divestment follies of John McCain and Mitt Romney are mere footnotes compared those of Vice President Dick Cheney. His former company Halliburton only ended its Iran sanction-busting business in April 2007, five years after the Vice President and one-time CEO denounced Tehran as "the world's leading exporter of terror."
That's a far cry from Cheney's attitude towards his Iran in the 1990's when he ran Halliburton and Bill Clinton ran the United States. As I noted last year, Cheney strenuously argued against Clinton's sanctions regime and expanded Halliburton's business with Tehran. But in 1998, he complained that U.S. firms were "cut out of the action." And back in 1996, Cheney railed against the Clinton prohibitions on Iranian trade and financial activity for American firms:

"We seem to be sanction-happy as a government. The problem is that the good Lord didn't see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments."

In 2004, the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes detailed the Iranian business dealings of Cheney's former company, Halliburton. Despite the prohibitions signed into law by President Clinton with his 1995 executive order and the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996, Halliburton continued to reap the profits of business with Iran through its non-U.S. subsidiaries. While U.S. law bans virtually all commerce with the rogue nations, Halliburton was able to jump through its major loophole: the rules do not apply to any foreign or offshore subsidiary so long as it is run by non-Americans. As CBS documented:

That subsidiary, Halliburton Products and Services, Ltd., is wholly owned by the U.S.-based Halliburton and is registered in a building in the capital of the Cayman Islands -- a building owned by the local Calidonian Bank. Halliburton and other companies set up in this Caribbean Island, because of tax and secrecy laws that are corporate friendly.
Halliburton is the company that Vice President Dick Cheney used to run. He was CEO from 1995 to 2000, during which time Halliburton Products and Services set up shop in Iran. Today, it sells about $40 million a year worth of oil field services to the Iranian government.

Ultimately, Cheney's former company completed its Iranian divestiture in April 2007. Of course, he was no longer running for office.
John McCain, on the other, wants to be President of the United States. The only question now is whether he'll obey his own call for action against organizations doing business with Iran and divest his own campaign manager.
UPDATE: Huffington Post reports that McCain senior adviser and GOP uber-lobbyist Charlie Black's firm represented CNOOC, the Chinese national oil conglomerate, which also happens to have business dealings with Iran. Meanwhile, the Obama campaign notes that John McCain failed to support Iran sanctions legislation sponsored by Obama in 2007, a bill currently rumored to be "on hold" by Alabama Republican, Richard Shelby.