Soccer Dad

Dennis anyone?

via memeorandum

Time Magazine reports on the Middle East expert who will be accompanying Sen. Obama to the Middle East next week Obama's Conservative Mideast Pick: Dennis Ross.

Though he served under James Baker in the Bush 41 administration I'd hardly characterize Ross as conservative.

As a practical matter the article recommends Ross because:

In one way, the message is simple: Ross, a career foreign service officer, was lead negotiator on Israeli-Palestinian issues for Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and he got the two sides as close as they've come to a peace deal before stepping down after the 2000 election.

And was the Middle East safer after the 2000 election? The Clinton administration's failure to hold Arafat to any of his commitments was undoubtedly one of the factors that gave Arafat confidence that he could get away with launching an intifada after the Camp David talks collapsed.

"[C]lose as they've come..." simply means that Israel conceded a lot more territory and history at Camp David before Arafat - with the backing of even Arab "moderates" - rejected the offer.

The choice of Ross is being played as a sop to the Jewish (or pro-Israel) community and the reporter notes:

After he left government, the 59-year-old diplomat headed up a hawkish pro-Israel think tank in Washington, and signed on as a Fox News foreign affairs analyst. A former colleague, Dan Kurtzer (an Orthodox Jew and former U.S. ambassador to Israel who also supports Obama), published a think-tank monograph containing anonymous complaints from Arab and American negotiators saying Ross was seen as biased towards Israel and not "an honest broker". Ross has been hawkish on Iran, but he agrees with Obama's pledge to start talks. "We need to work hard to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear state," Ross says, "but the Bush approach isn't working."

Not an honest broker because he was biased towards Israel? What baloney! Ross wasn't pro-Israel. He is a peace processor, which means that he's genetically disposed to believe that if Israeli cedes just enough territory he might get a Palestinian leader to say insincerely that he'll accept the deal and stop the terror.

And yet he went to work for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy but not everyone there is "hawkish" (or realistic, in my view) and Ross is clearly on the "unrealistically dovish" end of the spectrum among those at the Washington Institute.

Still, it is somewhat surprising to see Ross emerge as an official member of Obama's team. (Neither Ross nor the campaign would comment on his role in the still-unannounced trip, but several sources in the campaign confirmed details for TIME.). When Ross left the State department in 2000, he was so critical of Yasser Arafat
that some friends thought he was considering working for George W. Bush, who cut ties with the late Palestinian leader. "At the beginning of the Administration he hadn't excluded the possibility of working for a Republican again," says one. Ross supported the Iraq war, though he opposed some of the Bush Administration's policies for post-war
reconstruction.

Ross was so critical of Arafat because he saw Arafat turn down an overly generous offer (though Ross probably didn't consider Barak's offer overly generous) from Israel and subsequently launch a terrorist campaign against Israel. In any case, Bush didn't cut ties with Arafat until some time later, so this paragraph is more than a little misleading. In fact Bush's first major pronouncement on the Middle East was that he supported the idea of a Palestinian state. So Ross's aversion to Arafat, likely put him at odds at President Bush at the start of his term.

At the end Time's reporter writes:

After all, the process orchestrated by Ross for the Clinton Administration failed

Well, duh. But did it fail for the lack of Ross's efforts? Or because the premise that the Palestinians had changed to the point that they'd accept Israel's right to exist is false.

Crossposted on Yourish.

Posted by SoccerDad at July 17, 2008 6:17 AM | TrackBack