Why Obama Should Fire Dennis Ross

Some of his best friends are Israeli prime ministers: Dennis Ross in January 2008, passing on an annual report to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on the "situation and dynamics of the Jewish people." The report is prepared by a think tank Ross chaired, the Jewish Policy Planning Institute. (Israeli government photo)

Obama may well be doing just that, and not a moment too soon.

The Israeli daily Haaretz is reporting that "Ross, who most recently served as a special State Department envoy to Iran, will abruptly be relieved of his duties" and shifted to the White House to "deal primarily with regional issues related to the peace process." That means his expertise, which is not little, would be put to use where it belongs: as a negotiator, not a policy-maker.

Dennis Ross was lead negotiator for the State Department in the Palestinian-Israeli peace process under Bill Clinton and George Bush--two administrations that distinguished themselves for the nullity of their achievements in Palestinian-Israeli peace, but that richly endorsed Israeli gains by the host and heist (in settlement building and expropriation of Palestinian lands) while using the peace process for cover.

In the past several years, before joining the Barack Obama campaign as a Middle East adviser (and writing Obama's speech to Aipac, the Likudist pro-Israel lobby), Ross was an ardent supporter of war in Iraq and worked through the Aipac-funded Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which he co-founded in 1985. He also chaired, between 2002 and 2009, the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute, which "in professional strategic thinking and planning on short and long-term issues of primary concern to the Jewish People." At the Aipac institute, writes Robert Dreyfuss, Ross "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."

Ross's approach is the embodiment of America's pro-Israel bias in all negotiations and all situations involving the Middle East--a bias codified into official State Department policy by Henry Kissinger (who is a member of the board at Aipac's institute), and unchallenged since. That's not going to fly, either with Iranians or with Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world, if Obama intends to get anywhere. American policy in the Middle East has to stop being subsurvient to Israeli presumptions. That was part of Obama's "new beginning" message in Cairo earlier this month, when he pointedly noted that "if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth."

Which is why appointing Ross to head up Iranian overtures made no sense.

Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, both former National Security Council staffers, summed up the issue in a candid op-ed in The Times on May 24:

Mr. Ross has long been an advocate of what he describes as an “engagement with pressure” strategy toward Tehran, meaning that the United States should project a willingness to negotiate with Iran largely to elicit broader regional and international support for intensifying economic pressure on the Islamic Republic.

In conversations with Mr. Ross before Mr. Obama’s election, we asked him if he really believed that engage-with-pressure would bring concessions from Iran. He forthrightly acknowledged that this was unlikely. Why, then, was he advocating a diplomatic course that, in his judgment, would probably fail? Because, he told us, if Iran continued to expand its nuclear fuel program, at some point in the next couple of years President Bush’s successor would need to order military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets. Citing past “diplomacy” would be necessary for that president to claim any military action was legitimate.

Iranian officials are fully aware of Mr. Ross’s views — and are increasingly suspicious that he is determined that the Obama administration make, as one senior Iranian diplomat said to us, “an offer we can’t accept,” simply to gain international support for coercive action.

Understandably, given that much of Mr. Obama’s national security team doesn’t share his vision of rapprochement with Iran, America’s overall policy is incoherent.

Ross' unapologetically belligerent approach is laid out in a rather atrociously written (but also candid) new book he's just published with another Aipac institute fellow, David Makovsky (brought between the hardcovers to give Ross' English some coherence: Makovsky, who has weirdly Orwellian ideas of his own regarding Palestinians, was the executive editor of the Jerusalem Post).

Example: "[W]e are better positioned to use force if we are seen as having first exhausted all other options." Cynicism in American policy has rarely been so honest. Then again, Ross learned from George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice, too.

Ross is a good fit with Hillary Clinton's sort of subservience to all policies Israeli. He's not a good fit with Obama's "new beginning" approach.

Ross should go. Or be given a loftily innocuous post giving him White House stationery.

While other Ross colleagues at the Aipac institute were busy penning apoplexies about Ross' firing, the Department of State was busy denying it, though not, as anything Ross touches these days, very coherently. That lends credence to Time's attempt to lend credence to Haaretz's scoop. Let's hope Haaretz has it right. It usually does. It's Ross who usually doesn't.

See Also:

• America's Pro-Israel Bias: Why the United States Takes Israel's Side
• Taking Sides in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflicts: Don't Do It
• Balance Needed in Palestinian-Israeli Mediation
• How Should Obama Deal With Iran?
• Is Iran a Nuclear Threat to Israel?
• What If Iran Had Nuclear Weapons?

And Elsewhere:

• Problems With the Ross Effect
• Robert Dreyfuss: Dennis Ross's Iran Plan
• Time: Dennis Ross Moves to White House
• The Leveretts: Have We Laready Lost Iran?