I was watching Fox News the other day when that oh-so-provocative blonde anchorwoman with the puffy lips announced, "Next up on Fox News, our Middle East expert Dennis Ross." I nearly fell off my lazychair and spilled my domestic beer all over the dog.
Dennis Ross? Middle East Expert? Really? Is there no such thing as shame in America?
I remember talking with Dennis Ross in 1994 at an uppity Washington Institute cocktail reception. He was busy singing the praises of Yasser Arafat as a "reliable and credible negotiating partner." In smooth, diplomatic jargon he advocated the Orwellian idea that Israel should grant territory to Arafat and his army on the outskirts of Israel?s major population centers, and arm his "security apparatus" to act as Israel?s security surrogate in areas evacuated. He argued that we should all extend trust to a man who had proven himself for decades to be an untrustworthy pioneer of international terror and cold-blooded murder. This all seemed like a bizarre scheme bordering on insanity for less sophisticated folk like me.
Anyway, that in a nutshell was "Middle East Expert" Dennis Ross? solution for Middle East Peace. He later became the most recognized American promoter of the failed Oslo Accords, which have predictably brought death, mayhem, terror and destruction to the heart of Israel, and instability to the entire region. An incredible display of an inability to anticipate the obvious. A moral and diplomatic blunder of the first order.
Now, normally, when someone makes a mistake of such magnitude, when someone stumbles on the world stage with a miscalculation of such historic proportions, he should have the common decency, as General MacArthur put it, to "simply fade away." But since there are bills to pay, a cocktail-circuit lifestyle to maintain, and a few more naive people to con, there will be no fading away in the case of Citizen Ross.
Instead, for his ineptitude, this disarmingly Chuncy-Gardner-like, soft-spoken "expert", who is rarely publicly challenged, was given a prize of sorts. He was hired as Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. I?m not quite sure who was passing out the hallucinatory drugs on that day, but whoever came up with the brilliant idea to hire Ross as a figure capable of bringing credibility to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy needs to have their judgment questioned and their head examined.
Given the track record, I can?t imagine somebody like Ross having influence on the current Bush administration or on any serious policy thinker, for that matter. The cotton candy fairy tails, the smoke and mirrors, the Clintonesque house-of-cards, the pretend paper-peace for seven blood-soaked years speaks for itself. I would argue that Mr. Ross has done more damage to Israel, and by extension US security, than any high-level diplomat in US history. He has certainly, almost single-handedly, done more damage to Israel than entire Arab armies have managed since 1973.
It?s not surprising that Ross? sidekick and junior partner in the competition for starry-eyed Middle East incompetence, Martin Indyk, ended up at foggy-bottom over at the liberal and now largely irrelevant Brookings Institute. Indyk, who helped establish the Washington Institute, and was its original Director, can?t be thrilled that Ross is now sitting in his old chair, while he?s been relegated to intellectual Siberia.
What particularly rubs me the wrong way about Dennis Ross is the slippery way that he changes. Yesterday he was Arafat?s biggest promoter; conveniently and predictably, today, he is his insincere critic. Now, being slightly familiar with the Middle East myself, not from the rich-Jew cocktail circuit, but from having lived there and fought in the trenches under Shaul Mofaz, my former commander and Israel?s current Defense Minister, I know that it wasn?t Arafat who changed in the past seven years. Arafat is the same old snake that he was well before Ross worked so hard to promote his virtue. Even well before my buddies and I had him corned in West Beirut in 1982.
No, it is not Arafat, but Ross, who has metamorphosed; not out of conviction, but out of expediency. Middle East mumbo-jumbo is his meal ticket and his past brand of Arafat-hugging is no longer in style.
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Joe Gelman is a former Israeli paratrooper, who served as senior advisor to a past President and Chairman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
Dennis Ross? Middle East Expert? Really? Is there no such thing as shame in America?
I remember talking with Dennis Ross in 1994 at an uppity Washington Institute cocktail reception. He was busy singing the praises of Yasser Arafat as a "reliable and credible negotiating partner." In smooth, diplomatic jargon he advocated the Orwellian idea that Israel should grant territory to Arafat and his army on the outskirts of Israel?s major population centers, and arm his "security apparatus" to act as Israel?s security surrogate in areas evacuated. He argued that we should all extend trust to a man who had proven himself for decades to be an untrustworthy pioneer of international terror and cold-blooded murder. This all seemed like a bizarre scheme bordering on insanity for less sophisticated folk like me.
Anyway, that in a nutshell was "Middle East Expert" Dennis Ross? solution for Middle East Peace. He later became the most recognized American promoter of the failed Oslo Accords, which have predictably brought death, mayhem, terror and destruction to the heart of Israel, and instability to the entire region. An incredible display of an inability to anticipate the obvious. A moral and diplomatic blunder of the first order.
Now, normally, when someone makes a mistake of such magnitude, when someone stumbles on the world stage with a miscalculation of such historic proportions, he should have the common decency, as General MacArthur put it, to "simply fade away." But since there are bills to pay, a cocktail-circuit lifestyle to maintain, and a few more naive people to con, there will be no fading away in the case of Citizen Ross.
Instead, for his ineptitude, this disarmingly Chuncy-Gardner-like, soft-spoken "expert", who is rarely publicly challenged, was given a prize of sorts. He was hired as Director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. I?m not quite sure who was passing out the hallucinatory drugs on that day, but whoever came up with the brilliant idea to hire Ross as a figure capable of bringing credibility to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy needs to have their judgment questioned and their head examined.
Given the track record, I can?t imagine somebody like Ross having influence on the current Bush administration or on any serious policy thinker, for that matter. The cotton candy fairy tails, the smoke and mirrors, the Clintonesque house-of-cards, the pretend paper-peace for seven blood-soaked years speaks for itself. I would argue that Mr. Ross has done more damage to Israel, and by extension US security, than any high-level diplomat in US history. He has certainly, almost single-handedly, done more damage to Israel than entire Arab armies have managed since 1973.
It?s not surprising that Ross? sidekick and junior partner in the competition for starry-eyed Middle East incompetence, Martin Indyk, ended up at foggy-bottom over at the liberal and now largely irrelevant Brookings Institute. Indyk, who helped establish the Washington Institute, and was its original Director, can?t be thrilled that Ross is now sitting in his old chair, while he?s been relegated to intellectual Siberia.
What particularly rubs me the wrong way about Dennis Ross is the slippery way that he changes. Yesterday he was Arafat?s biggest promoter; conveniently and predictably, today, he is his insincere critic. Now, being slightly familiar with the Middle East myself, not from the rich-Jew cocktail circuit, but from having lived there and fought in the trenches under Shaul Mofaz, my former commander and Israel?s current Defense Minister, I know that it wasn?t Arafat who changed in the past seven years. Arafat is the same old snake that he was well before Ross worked so hard to promote his virtue. Even well before my buddies and I had him corned in West Beirut in 1982.
No, it is not Arafat, but Ross, who has metamorphosed; not out of conviction, but out of expediency. Middle East mumbo-jumbo is his meal ticket and his past brand of Arafat-hugging is no longer in style.
--------------------------------------------------------
Joe Gelman is a former Israeli paratrooper, who served as senior advisor to a past President and Chairman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).