Discredited Ohio Congressman Ney's Iran links almost mattered

[Algorem]

http://www.cleveland.com/plaindealer/stories/index.ssf?/base/opinion/1197106626143840.xml&coll=2

Sunday, December 09, 2007

Thomas Suddes
Plain Dealer Columnist

...

Trita Parsi's book, "Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States" (Yale University Press) is timely beyond words. Last week, a National Intelligence Estimate said Iran in 2003 had stopped trying to build atomic weapons. President Bush had previously suggested the United States would be entitled to attack an Iran building such weapons.

... According to Parsi, not long after Baghdad fell to coalition troops in 2003, Iranian officials channeled a peace feeler to Washington. That has been known for a while, but not this (except for a February interview Parsi gave Inter Press Service):

Iran feared Washington's inner-circle war hawks might keep the feeler from Bush, so the Iranians sent a copy of their offer to Ney. Ney, Parsi wrote, had one of his U.S. House employees hand-deliver the Iranian message to Karl Rove, Bush's White House Rasputin. Rove -- according to Parsi -- vowed to deliver the "intriguing" message to the president. To State Department officials, the Iranian offer, according to Parsi, "was a no-brainer" because Iran was offering the United States, then at high tide militarily, big concessions. But nothing ever happened at the Washington end. Why? Long story short, according to Parsi, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld slapped the Iranian feeler away. "Their argument was simple but devastating. We don't speak to evil,' they said."...





POLITICS-US: Rove Said to Have Received 2003 Iranian Proposal
By Gareth Porter*

WASHINGTON,

Feb 16

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=36609

(IPS) - Karl Rove, then White House senior political advisor for President George W. Bush, received a copy of the secret Iranian proposal for negotiations with the United States from former Republican Congressman Bob Ney in early May 2003, according to an Iranian-American scholar who was then on his Congressional staff.

Ney, who pleaded guilty last year and was sentenced to prison in January for his role in the Jack Abramov lobbying scandal, was named by former aide Trita Parsi as an intermediary who took a copy of the Iranian proposal to the White House.

Parsi is now a specialist on Iranian national security policy and president of the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC), a non-partisan organisation that supports a negotiated settlement of the conflict between Iran and the United States.

Parsi revealed that the document was delivered specifically to Rove, in an exclusive interview with IPS. Within two hours of the delivery of the document, according to Parsi, Ney received a phone call from Rove confirming his receipt of the document. Parsi said the proposal was delivered to Rove the same week that the State Department received it by fax, which was on or about May 4, 2003, according to the cover letter accompanying it...