http://blogs.jta.org/ENTRY_PERMALINK_HERE/going-post-partisan-on-your-mullahs/ Dialogue with Iran? Congress has gotcher back, Mr. President-elect. That’s how it seemed Tuesday evening in the Hart Senate building, when three top congressional leaders - two Democrats and a Republican - told a friendly audience that they backed President-elect Obama’s policy of outreach. The unity (with a caveat I’ll explain below) would seem to bury for now the call for further isolation that permeated the presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), as well as McCain’s Republican rivals. First, the "friendly audience:" That’s the National Iranian American Council, the domestic group that is perhaps the most outspoken advocate for greater engagement with Iran and among the most strident opponents of a strike (Israel or otherwise) as a means of containing Iran’s suspected nuclear threat. (That would seem to make NIAC the mirror image of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee; but, this is DC, and in June, AIPAC and NIAC joined at AIPAC’s new HQ to convene an off the record 2-day chat of "transpartisan dialogue" - yes, "transpartisan" spooks me too - on "the relationship between the United States, Israel and Iran and its effects on U.S. foreign policy." Go figure this town.) Back to the speakers at the NIAC event: U.S. Rep. John Tierney (D-Mass.), who chairs the foreign affairs subcommittee on the U.S. House of Representatives’ powerful Oversight Committee. en-us rkampeas@jta.org Copyright 2008 2008-11-19T;23:35:00-05:00