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Romney and the MEK

Zack Beauchamp comments on the MEK rally in Washington today: When was the last time you could remember any other terrorist organization that killed Americans demonstrating outside the White House and lobbying influential American politicians? What’s next, HezbollahPAC? I suppose other organizations could try to do this, but no one would want to have anything […]

Zack Beauchamp comments on the MEK rally in Washington today:

When was the last time you could remember any other terrorist organization that killed Americans demonstrating outside the White House and lobbying influential American politicians? What’s next, HezbollahPAC?

I suppose other organizations could try to do this, but no one would want to have anything to do with them. The surprising thing is not that the MEK is trying to mislead Americans into lending it support, but that many Americans now seem more than happy to provide that aid. Whether they do this because they don’t actually know what the group is, or because they know exactly what it is and see it as a useful instrument against Tehran, the effect is the same. Unfortunately, the MEK and its advocates are not receiving the sort of criticism they should receive because they happen to have the “right” enemy.

This is why virtually no one cares that both Perry and Romney have vocally pro-MEK advisers connected to their campaigns. In Romney’s case, this isn’t just some tangential, informal adviser. Mitchell Reiss is reportedly one of Romney’s main advisers on foreign policy. As Jim Antle’s article in the new issue explains, Reiss is considered to be Romney’s relatively less hawkish adviser:

In the New Republic, Eli Lake has reported that Romney’s foreign-policy advisers are divided. Lake described Reiss—who ironically was the man dispatched to convince Jennifer Rubin of Romney’s hawkishness—as a surge skeptic, while Dan Senor, a former spokesman for the Coalition Provisional
Authority in Iraq who later sent a distress signal to Republican hawks about the dovishness of senate candidate Rand Paul, was pro-surge. Reiss and Senor
still advise Romney today and are similarly at odds over Afghanistan.

It hardly bodes well for a future Romney administration that the more skeptical, less hawkish member of his team has been actively advocating on behalf of a terrorist organization. What’s worse, Reiss isn’t on the margins of these advocacy efforts, but has been very involved in them.

Like many other pro-MEK advocates, Reiss has confused the issues of the treatment of the population of Camp Ashraf with the question of whether the MEK should remain on the FTO list. The people at Ashraf should be relocated outside Iraq, and they should not be sent to Iran against their will, but this has nothing to do with the MEK’s designation by the U.S. as a terrorist organization. It ought to be possible to address what is properly a political refugee problem left over from the Iraq war without legitimizing a terrorist group.

P.S. Of course, Bachmann is even worse on this issue than the other two candidates, since she has personally spoken in support of removing the MEK from the list.

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