By
Kenneth R.
Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com |
February 23, 2007
Iran’s ruling clerics
have a new unofficial spokesman in Washington, who can talk circles
around their official ambassadors.
His name is Trita Parsi, and he is a protégé of Francis
Fukayama, the policy heavy-weight who has now turned against the Bush
agenda of promoting freedom in the Middle East as an antidote to
terror.
In a remarkable round-up of official Iranian government views,
presented as “objective” analysis on C-SPAN this past
Saturday, Feb. 17, Parsi urged the United States government to “open
up diplomacy and dialogue” with Iran’s rulers and to give
them a leading role in resolving the sectarian war in Iraq – a
war that the Iranians themselves have fueled.
He repeated as evidence of how helpful the Iranians can be a favorite
myth of the Left, claiming that Iran helped the United States in
Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. In fact, however, Iran set up a “rat
line” for al Qaeda members seeking to flee the U.S. bombing in
Afghanistan, and has been sheltering al Qaeda operatives ever since.
Flights of Iranian army helicopters and fixed wing aircraft to
evacuate Bin Laden family members and senior al Qaeda leadership to
Mashad were observed at the time by U.S. intelligence, as I reported
in Countdown
to Crisis.
Parsi also attempted to downplay Iran’s involvement in Iraq,
arguing that Iranian-made Explosively Formed Penetrators (EFP’s)
were “only” responsible for killing a “small number”
of American troops (170!), and that Shia militias “are not
responsible” for American casualties.
Then he dismissed the evidence
unveiled recently in Baghdad
of Iran’s involvement with the insurgents with an argument that
only a mullah could have invented. The U.S. claim that it had found
Iranian weapons in the hands of insurgents was “not a very
serious accusation,” he said, because “a lot of American
weapons are in the hands of Sunni insurgents.”
Small wonder that the first question Mr. Parsi was asked when
listeners phoned into the early Saturday morning show was whether he
was being paid by the Iranian government.
No, he said. His organization, the National Iranian American Council
(NIAC), was a “grass-roots lobbying” group funded 80% by
private donations, with additional money coming from foundation
grants. “We get no money from government sources,” he
added, either from Iran or from the United States.
Of course, if the Iranian regime wanted an organization to promote
its views in Washington, the last thing it would do is to provide
direct grant money to the group. Besides, the Iranian equivalent of
our National Endowment for Democracy is the Qods Force, the special
branch of the Islamic Republic Guards corps that funds, trains, and
commands overseas terrorists – er, “freedom fighters.”
But Mr. Parsi’s quick declaration that his “grass roots”
lobbying group is free from government funding is not even true on
its face. According to his group’s own annual report for
2003-2004, available
from its website, they
have received grants from the National Endowment for Democracy, which
is a private foundation established by the U.S. government and funded
by Congress.
On its website, NED
lists a $25,000 grant to NIAC
in 2002, “to design and implement a two-day media training
workshop in Iran& [to] guage participants general
receptiveness to civic activities.” NIAC received a second NED
grant in 2005, this time for $64,000, “to strengthen the
capacity of civic organizations in Iran.”
NIAC does not describe these activities in its annual reports.
However, failed efforts to hold “training workshops” with
Iranians in Dubai by another U.S. non-profit group, the Iran Human
Rights Documentation Center at Yale
University,
led to the arrest of
several student pro-democracy activists last year. Under pressure by
the Iranian authorities, they then denounced U.S. efforts to promote
democracy in Iran.
Iranian student activists have complained for years that their
movements have been infiltrated by pro-regime elements masquerading
as regime opponents. Last year’s mishap over the training
workshops in the methods of non-violent conflict would appear to be a
case in point.
NIAC acknowledges that it has received funding from the Open Society
Institute and the Tides Foundation, both of which have close ties to
radical leftwing billion George Soros, who is actively opposing the
Bush administration’s crackdown on Iranian meddling in
Iraq.
Frontpage magazine editor Ben Johnson reveals in
his
2004 study of the Tides Foundation
that Tides also funds groups as the Council for American-Islamic
Relations, Moveon.org, the Arab-American Action Network, and the
National Lawyers Guild, a group founded by the Communist Party
USA.)
Is NIAC an authentic grass roots organization, as Parsi claims? It’s
hard to know. Its 2004 annual report shows that approximately 29% of
NIAC’s funding came from “membership dues.” But
without itemization or lists of donors and members, it is impossible
to determine whether NIAC is the pet project of a handful of wealthy
Iranian donors, who may be promoting their own business interest in
resumed trade with Iran, or whether it relies on larger numbers of
small donors.
The overwhelming majority of the two million-plus Iranian community
in America came to this country to escape the tyranny of the Islamic
revolution in Iran. There was strong support within this community
for the re-election of President Bush in 2004, and a great deal of
deception since then that the president has not lived up to the
expectations he had created of helping the Iranian people to free
themselves of the yoke of absolute clerical rule.
But this is not NIAC’s agenda. By its own account and by Mr.
Parsi’s voluminous public statements, NIAC’s agenda
dovetails quite nicely with the agenda of so-called “reformers”
in Tehran such as Hojjat-ol eslam Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, who
is attempting to paint a happy face on the regime as a reliable
partner to stabilize Iraq.
But Rafsanjani is also the man who presided over the buildup of Iran’s
clandestine nuclear weapons program and the murder of thousands of
Iranian dissidents, at home and abroad.
In a speech at Tehran University on Dec. 14, 2001, the “moderate
reformer” Rafsanjani raised the possibility that the Islamic
Republic of Iran might be willing to endure “millions” of
casualties if it could annihilate Israel in a nuclear exchange. “Such
a scenario is not inconceivable,” he said. So much for
moderation.
Item number one on the agenda NIAC shares to Tehran’s leaders
is to clip the wings of the Bush administration, to prevent a U.S.
military attack on Iranian nuclear and missile sites. On Feb. 16, for
example,
the NIAC website proudly announced that
it had joined forces with other left-wing activist groups to buy a
full page ad on the back cover of the Congressional Quarterly, “warning
against war with Iran.”
Item number two is to promote a “grand bargain” with Iran’s
clerical leadership. To legitimize this position, which also was
promoted by the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, NIAC turns to “former
neoconservative theorist” Dr. Francis Fukuyama, who famously
denounced his former allies in a the New York Times oped last year
and now says that the Bush pro-democracy agenda is “in a
shambles.”
In NIAC’s account, Fukuyama described the Iranian regime at a
recent Capitol Hill conference as a “cautious regional actor,”
and “described Iranian foreign policy as pragmatic and
rational,” while urging the Bush administration to hold its
nose and cut a deal.
To further credit this thesis, Parsi has been feeding the press with
information about a much-hyped Iranian offer to “negotiate”
with the United States in May 2003. His
latest, breathless claim
is that he acquired a
copy of the Iranian offer while in Iran and gave it to Rep. Robert
Ney (recently sentenced to prison for his role in the Jack Abramoff
lobbying scandal), and that Ney hand-delivered it to Karl Rove in the
White House. Says Rove-hunter Steve Clemons, “the revelation
that Rove is involved is huge.”
So let’s get this straight. An organization that has received
funding from the National Endowment for Democracy to promote
democracy in Iran is actually promoting the views of the Tehran
regime in Washington, seeking to sabotage U.S. policy, and actually
boasts of playing an intermediary role for Tehran’s mullahs
in
apparent violation of the Logan Act.
Hmmn.
Other items on the NIAC agenda that dovetail nicely with the
desiderata of Tehran were on display at the conference the group
co-sponsored last week on Capitol Hill with Clemons’ New
America Foundation.
Former IAEA deputy director Bruno Pellaud made
the
unbelievable claim that
the IAEA has found “no evidence of a nuclear weapons program”
in Iran. That, of course, is just what the regime wants us to
believe.
Pellaud’s statement non-plussed even Clintonista Joe
Cirincirone, formerly in charge of non-proliferation programs at the
Carnegie Endowment, who has made a profession of mocking the Bush
administration for swallowing intelligence community claims on Iraqi
WMD for years.
Cirincirone gently reminded Pellaud of multiple findings of
clandestine nuclear weapons research by the IAEA in Iran, including
documents and equipment for producing “hemispheres” of
highly-enriched uranium, which have “no other use” than
for nuclear weapons. (To understand Pellaud’s thinking, it’s
necessary to recall that he was the top deputy to Hans Blix when the
blind Swede headed the IAEA and for 18 years fail to detect Iran’s
clandestine nuclear programs.)
Beyond that, NIAC and Tehran would both like to see U.S. and UN
sanctions on Iran lifted, so that U.S. capital and oil drilling
technology can rescue Iran’s ageing oil fields from
extinction.
Want to know what Tehran’s thinking? There’s no need to
turn to the Islamic Republic News Agency, or to watch Supreme leader
Ayatollah Khamenei or Ahmadinejad. Just listen to the Mullah’s
voice in Washington.
Trita Parsi makes the Iranian regime sound so reasonable. So
pragmatic. So – well, just like us. The kind of folks we
can do a deal with.
And as the mullahs take home that agreement with our signature on it
with a smile, the Qods force continues to murder U.S. soldiers in
Iraq. And those uranium enrichment centrifuges continue to spin,
somewhere inside an unknown mountain in Iran.
Click
Here to
support Frontpagemag.com.