Professor Raymond Tanter, who served as a senior member of the National Security Council staff in the Reagan administration called the scheduled testimony of Maryam Rajavi, the Paris based President of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) a necessary outside-the-box perspective amidst major discussions about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and ways to stop it.
The NCRI is the coalition of Iranian opposition groups. The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (MeK) is its principal constituent.
Rajavi is scheduled to testify via videoconference on Wednesday before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, chaired by Rep. Ted Poe (R-TX).
In a commentary that appeared on TownHall.org on Monday, Professor Tanter said: “Official Washington is in a box and needs help in escaping from it. Being stuck in the acceptable view, officials did not foresee rise of ISIS, have scant awareness why it grew so fast, much less how to stop it. Congressional hearings are a fresh breeze to blow the lid off orthodoxy…. And if Congress shakes off the accepted view in a bipartisan way, it reinforces Washington’s leverage over Tehran.”
According to Tanter who was a personal representative of the Secretary of Defense to arms control talks in Madrid, Helsinki, Stockholm, and Vienna, the way forward for US policymakers is to “recognize past and current value of a multiplicity of sources, including dissidents, as lead information for all-source creation of new insights that stem from congressional hearings that incorporate witness evidence contrary to orthodoxy and preferred outcomes,” And to note contributions NCRI made to security of U.S. armed forces in Iraq; provision of ‘boots under and on the ground’ in Iran, [and to] enhancing the quality of assessments of the Iranian nuclear threat.”
In addition to Maryam Rajavi, a pro-democracy woman with a moderate view of Islam, Robert Ford, former US ambassador to Syria who resigned last year in protest over the Obama administration’s lackluster policy on Syria, and Dr. Walid Phares, Co-Secretary General of Transatlantic Parliamentary Group on Counter-terrorism will take part in Wednesday’s congressional panel.
It is rare fpr foreign dignitaries to testify before the US Congress.
In a statement issued on Sunday, the Organization of Iranian American Communities (OIAC-US), a non-profit organization representing the network of Iranian-American organizations in 40 states, lauded the U.S. Congress for inviting Mrs. Rajavi to speak.