Ken Timmerman
Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Should the next administration reach out to the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran and open negotiations “without preconditions” on a broad array of security issues?

Would expanding ongoing diplomatic exchanges with Iran increase the chances of convincing Iran’s clerical leaders to halt nuclear weapons-related work and stop their support for international terrorist groups?

These are serious questions, worthy of a serious debate based on facts and a careful analysis of the Iranian regime’s 30-year track record as a negotiating partner. But that is not what the pro-Iranian lobby wants to happen.

Tehran‘s advocates in Washington believe they are on a roll. With a president-elect who has stated repeatedly that he would conduct negotiations “without preconditions” with the Islamic Republic of Iran, they feel the time now has come to advance Tehran’s agenda openly in Washington.

Leading the charge is a group calling itself the National Iranian American Council, NIAC, which has been lobbying Congress to win support for an agenda that mirrors the goals of the Tehran regime.

The name of this group itself is misleading. Rather than assemble a broad cross-section of Iranian-Americans, most of whom came to this country to escape the totalitarian clutches of the Islamic dictatorship, NIAC has alienated them by brazenly portraying the Tehran regime as moderate, reasonable, and misunderstood.

Victims of the regime such as Ahmed Batebi would have a hard time swallowing such a benign view of the thugs now running Iran. Mr. Batebi’s sole crime was to hold up in public the bloody T-shirt of a Tehran University student who had been pushed to his death by regime agents from a third-floor dormitory balcony.

For his audacity, Mr. Batebi was thrown in jail, tortured, threatened with death, then locked up for nearly a decade. He escaped to the United States earlier this year after being let out from prison on a furlough.

NIAC’s latest ploy has been to trot out a jolly band of “useful idiots” (to use V.I. Lenin’s term) to parrot Tehran’s line, while misleading Congress with false facts and dangerously mistaken theories.