ROS-LEHTINEN FOREIGN AFFAIRS CHARIWOMAN PUTS IRAN AS PRIORITY
http://mobile.thehill.com//news-by-subject/foreign-policy/134423-incoming-foreign-affairs-chairwoman-has-iran-no-1-no-2-and-no-3-on-to-do-list….BRIDGET JOHNSON
A senior House Republican is putting Iran and its nuclear program at the top of her aggressive agenda in the next Congress.
Taking the helm of the House Foreign Affairs Committee next month, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen said Iran is “No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3” on the panel’s to-do list.
Oversight will be stepped up, she said, while noting the limitations of legislation that passes her committee.
“The bills that we pass become interesting historical documents but not really bills that have been implemented,” the Florida Republican said, referring to bipartisan congressional efforts to pass tough Iran sanctions. “And so we want to put an end to that. Can we do it? We can’t force the administration to do it.
“But we hope to have oversight hearings that will ask the administration, ‘Why aren’t you sanctioning more banks and companies and countries? What are we doing and what are you waiting for?’” Ros-Lehtinen said.
The congresswoman said she is “absolutely” intending hearings into the arms sale and nuclear proliferation ties between Iran, Venezuela and Russia.
“The ties of Iran to Venezuela are ever-growing,” she said. They’re serious, expanding all the time and increasingly worrisome to democratic interests inside Venezuela and throughout the region including the United States.”
Probing that web will be critical both at the subcommittee and full panel levels, Ros-Lehtinen said.
“The Iranian nexus into Latin America is often overlooked and we overlook it at our own peril,” she said. “The Russians and the arms sales and the way that they’re facilitating the arms buildup for Iran, the dual-use technology that they’re sending them so that it allows Iran to continue to say, ‘Oh, it’s just for peaceful purposes.’”
Such hearings could irk the Obama administration, which has made pressing the “reset button” with Russia a priority, but Ros-Lehtinen said the reset has to be “a two-way switch,” particularly as Moscow is still going around the Iran sanctions legislation.”
“Same ol’, same ol’ for them as we push restart,” she said. “And I think that we need to look at Russia as what it is — that’s it’s a potential good ally but not quite there. And wishing and hoping and praying doesn’t make it.”
In a sit-down interview with The Hill, Ros-Lehtinen reflected on her freshman start on the committee, where the incoming chairwoman just had a chair, not a desk space. “I’ve been in the Foreign Affairs Committee since the day I got here and 21 years later I get to chair the committee,” she said. “It’s unbelievable.”
The ranking Republican not only credits fleeing Fidel Castro’s Cuba as an 8-year-old as the reason she has a “great appreciation for the democratic form government,” but proudly shows a collection of framed photos sent to her by the Coast Guard when they encounter inventive ways in which Cubans hit the seas in a risky mission to make it from the communist island to America. They include a boat made of Styrofoam, a classic Woody trying to navigate the surf, and more.
“I always look at that and remember from whence I came and give thanks,” she said.
Among the photos that liberally decorate the walls featuring the congresswoman with world leaders from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the Dalai Lama is a black-and-white photo of Che Guevara taken a few minutes before he was killed by Bolivian forces in 1967. When Castro began calling Ros-Lehtinen a “loba feroz” – “ferocious she-wolf” — she promptly, proudly got it on a personalized license plate.
“Castro doesn’t realize every time he calls me that it’s a badge of honor,” she said. “I said, call me some more names!”
Still, Ros-Lehtinen’s focus as the next Foreign Affairs chairwoman extends beyond her homeland.
“I hope to advance in our committee the ideas that I strongly believe in and that’s the advancement of freedom and human rights…
Comments are closed.
