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Sat Jun 13, 2009 at 16:36:42 PDT
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| Dennis Ross is Barack Obama's special advisor on Iran. Dennis Ross is a pro-Israel hawk. The dude made almost a million bucks last year making speeches to wingnut welfare think tanks. Last year, Ross made more than $100,000.00 for shoveling propaganda on Fox News alone. Ross's only interest in negotiations with Iran is to get them out of the way quickly in order to neutralize a public clamoring for peaceful negotiations, i.e., "alas, we tried negotiations, but that failed," so that the US can go "kinetic" and bomb the bejeezuz out of the Iranians.
By Robert Dreyfuss's account, Dennis Ross is the last guy who should be in charge of negotiations with Iran.
Widely viewed as a cog in the machine of Israel's Washington lobby, Ross was not likely to be welcomed in Tehran--and he wasn't. Iran's state radio described his appointment as "an apparent contradiction" with Obama's "announced policy to bring change in United States foreign policy." Kazem Jalali, a hardline member of the Iranian parliament's national security committee, joked that it "would have been so much better to pick Ariel Sharon or Ehud Olmert as special envoy to Iran." More seriously, a former White House official says that Ross has told colleagues that he believes the United States will ultimately have no choice but to attack Iran in response to its nuclear program.
Dennis Ross is a hardcore wingnut to the bone. Dennis Ross pals around with war-mongering wingnuts, like Paul Wolfowitz and Andrew Marshall, and helped Martin Indyk of AIPAC fame launch the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). |
| Compound F :: Dennis Ross: The short fuse on US/Iran diplomacy. |
But diplomats and Middle East watchers hoping Ross would be sidelined are wrong. He is building an empire at the State Department: hiring staff and, with his legendary flair for bureaucratic wrangling, cementing liaisons with a wide range of US officials. The Iran portfolio is his, says an insider. "Everything we've seen indicates that Ross has completely taken over the issue," says a key Iran specialist. "He's acting as if he's the guy. Wherever you go at State, they tell you, 'You've gotta go through Dennis.'"
Because Barack Obama has retained the services of Dennis Ross for this diplomatic mission, he can wrap his pretty, high-minded overtures around firecracker and shove it up his Presidential ass.
From 2001 until his appointment in February, Ross was at WINEP, where he helped to oversee a series of reports designed to ring alarm bells about Iran's nuclear research and to support closer US-Israeli ties in response. Last summer, while advising Obama, he co-chaired a task force that produced a paper titled "Strengthening the Partnership: How to Deepen U.S.-Israel Cooperation on the Iranian Nuclear Challenge." That report opted for an alarmist view of Iran's nuclear program and proposed that the next president set up a formal US-Israeli mechanism for coordinating policy toward Iran (including any future need for "preventive military action"). Along with Holbrooke, Ross also helped found United Against Nuclear Iran, a group established to publicize warnings about Iran to the American public and the media. UANI's advisory board includes former CIA director James Woolsey and Fouad Ajami, perhaps the top Middle East expert for the neoconservative movement.
Dennis Ross co-wrote another report for the Bipartisan Policy Center indicating that diplomacy with Iran would fail and require military action by the US.
Dennis Ross helped scuttle negotiations with the Palestinians in 2000, and he will scuttle any negotiations with Iran. Listen to what his brother-in-arms says about the purpose of any negotiations:
Like virtually all of his neoconservative confreres, Ross does not argue that negotiations with Iran should not proceed. Surrendering to the inevitability of a US-Iran dialogue, they insist instead that any such talks proceed according to a strict time limit, measured in weeks or, at most, a few months. In November, Iran specialist Patrick Clawson, Ross's colleague at WINEP, described any US-Iran dialogue that might emerge as mere theater. "What we've got to do is...show the world that we're doing a heck of a lot to try and engage the Iranians," he said. "Our principal target with these offers [to Iran] is not Iran. Our principal target with these offers is, in fact, American public opinion [and] world public opinion." Once that's done, he implied, the United States would have to take out its big stick.
War-mongers never sleep.
Hopey-changey-pants.
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