extracted from Phil Giraldi, AntiWar.com, Nov 4 2008
[…] what is really scary about a possible Obama administration is Dennis Ross. Ross claims that he believes in diplomacy and has even written a book on the subject, though his one major foray in that area, Camp David in 2000, demonstrated that he was more interested in advancing Israeli interests than he was in creating a viable peace with the Palestinians. He was the architect of so-called “no surprises” negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis, in which all positions supported by the US had to be cleared by Israel before they were even placed on the table. If the Israelis said “no,” the US would back down. Ross was also one of the most vocal critics of former Democratic President Jimmy Carter after Carter wrote Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
Ross has most recently been in the news for his participation on a task force organized by the Washington-based Bipartisan Policy Center, headed by ex-senators George Mitchell, Daniel Coats, and Charles Robb. In this case, bipartisan most definitely does not mean objective. The task force included Ross; Steve Rademaker, husband of Danielle Pletka of the AEI; Michael Rubin, also of AEI; Kenneth Weinstein of the Hudson Institute; Kenneth Katzmann of the Congressional Research Service; as well as two generals, an admiral, two former Defense Department officials who worked for Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, and a Lehman Brothers economist. Rubin drafted the report, assisted by the project director Michael Makovsky, who is the brother of David Makovsky, senior fellow at WINEP, a pro-Israeli think-tank that was founded by AIPAC. No one on the task force was an independent expert on Iran, who might have been willing or able to express Iran’s concerns or point of view. Indeed, apart from Rubin, no one on the task force knew anything about Iran at all, except possibly that it was part of the axis of evil.
Not surprisingly, the task force’s report, “Meeting the Challenge: US Policy Toward Iranian Nuclear Development” [.pdf], issued in September, concluded that Iran has no right to enrich nuclear fuel for any purpose. It advocated talking to Tehran, to give it a chance to surrender on all key issues before attacking it, urging the next president to build up forces for the assault from day one of the new administration. The task force recommended that US forces should remain in the area after Iran is bombed into submission, vigilant and ready to react to any possible resurgence by the mullahs. On Oct 23 an op-ed appeared in the WaPo by Coats and Robb that summarized the ‘bipartisan’ conclusions, without identifying the members of the task force itself, as many readers would certainly have realized from the names that the report was the latest neocon snow job. The WaPo apparently did not care that it was being exploited to promote a bad policy wrapped in a deceptive fog of bipartisanship.
Ross is a commentator for Fox News and the Ziegler distinguished fellow at WINEP, which he helped found in the 1980s. He is also chairman of the Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Planning Institute. He would only be a spear-carrier in the latest neocon absurdity, if it weren’t for the fact that he is a major player in the Obama campaign, as Obama’s top adviser on the Middle East and a key link to AIPAC. Ross reportedly has been helping the Obama campaign formulate positions that AIPAC would be comfortable with. It has been reported that Ross has aspirations to become secretary of state, but he lacks the seniority for that position, and may instead focus on the Middle East, either at State or at the NSC. Ross-watchers believe that if he is put in charge of Middle Eastern policy, he will guarantee that only Israeli security concerns will matter to the new administration, because that is the position he has always taken in the past. If the bipartisan report is any indication, he will be particularly interested in defanging Iran, a position that he has made clear in speeches to Israeli audiences. […]
Niqnaq 