Dennis the pro-Israel menace

The Washington Post focuses on the diplomat in charge of running policy on Iran, with a feature titled: Dennis Ross Faces Big Task on Iran Policy, Including Overcoming Pro-Israel Label. Now this isn’t the actual title in the print edition, but if you view the report in a browser, this is the title that appears at the top. It is also a fair description of the content of the article.

The Washington Post, in contrast, didn’t ever portray Chaz Freeman as pro-Saudi or pro-Chinese. We did have this description of Freeman’s activities in the Post:

Since 1997, he has presided over the Middle East Policy Council, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that is funded in part by Saudi money. In that role, Freeman has occasionally criticized the Israeli government’s positions and U.S. support for those policies. In 2007, for example, he said, “The brutal oppression of the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation shows no sign of ending,” adding, “American identification with Israel has become total.”

Here’s a comparable paragraph in today’s story about Ross.

Before joining the Obama administration, Ross co-founded a not-for-profit group called United Against Nuclear Iran, whose executive director is Mark Wallace, a Bush administration official. Wallace said the group grew out of discussions with Holbrooke and former CIA director R. James Woolsey about how to achieve bipartisan consensus on the dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran. Wallace declined to reveal the contributors to the group’s $2 million budget last year, but two people familiar with the organization said many are pro-Israel advocates.

“Funded in part by Saudi money” is a lot less specific than “$2 million budget.” But a sinister element is added by noting that one of the principals wouldn’t reveal his organization’s donors. Did anyone specifically ask Freeman how much of MEPC’s money came from the Kingdom? Was the reporter even curious?

The report about Ross’s group is followed up by this:

Ross has “a lot of baggage from the past, but his portfolio is different in his new role so it may not matter,” said one Arab diplomat, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing personalities. “We don’t trust the Iranians either.”

Frankly this is character assassination. There was nothing of value in that statement that warranted anonymity. Earlier in the article, the reporter, Glenn Kessler wrote:

Ross is undertaking this assignment amid questions in Washington about whether he has sufficient clout in the nascent Obama administration. And in the Middle East, many officials view him as too pro-Israel, raising concerns about whether he is the right person for the job of coaxing the Islamic Republic of Iran.

and

Ross’s most visible action thus far was a trip to the Persian Gulf in late April to reassure anxious Arab officials that the United States would not cut a deal with Iran and abandon them. Many Arab officials are skeptical of Ross because of the perception that he tilted heavily toward Israel during the Clinton years.

The only reason to quote the anonymous official was to confirm a point that was already presented as common knowledge and give some weight to the “pro-Israel charge.” But to argue that Ross is pro-Israel, isn’t accurate either. Yes Kessler quotes Aaron David Miller to that effect.

Even a former colleague, Aaron David Miller, wrote last year that “Dennis, like myself, had an inherent tendency to see the world of Arab-Israeli politics first from Israel’s vantage point.” Ross has written that his admiration for Israel has not hurt his effectiveness as a negotiator.

Of the four notorious “Baker Boys” – Ross, Miller, Martin Indyk and Daniel Kurtzer – Ross may be the least anti-Israel, but to claim that he’s pro-Israel isn’t borne out by what happened. Here’s Danielle Pletka summarizing from Ross’s book:

The PLO’s terrorist acts should have brought an immediate end to U.S. assistance, but instead they brought Ross to Capitol Hill in an effort to control the damage. An unlikely advocate for the PLO, Ross tried in numerous closed briefings to put the Palestinians’ actions in context, explaining that while Arafat was head of the PLO, he wasn’t directly involved in terrorism, and noting that the Palestinian Authority had condemned the atrocities. After years of this painful exercise, which was greeted with increasing bipartisan skepticism, Ross abandoned Hill briefings.

To be fair, Ross’s aim was to draw the Palestinians closer to an agreement with Israel that would, theoretically, obviate the need for suicide bombers, rocket attacks and snipers. In turn, the Israeli crackdowns and closures that resulted from Palestinian violations of their commitments made U.S. aid more critical to keeping the process going — or so it was argued.

But the process had become a trap, and to perpetuate it, the Clinton administration needed to obfuscate the truth about Palestinian violations of U.S. law. The more it fudged, the more difficult it became to deliver a credible message about the perils of terrorism to the Palestinians. As Ross noted in “The Missing Peace,” his memoir of those years: “Too often we shied away from putting the onus on one side or the other because we feared we would disrupt a process that had great promise.” But the Clinton officials didn’t just shy away, they covered up: “The security breaches, especially the releases from jail of those involved in terrorist activities, were handled in private for fear of giving those in the U.S. Congress and in Israel who sought to break ties with the PLO a basis on which to do so,” he wrote.

Think about that. Ross, by his own admission, covered for PLO terrorism against Israel and yet the Washington Post – in a news story no less – labels him “pro-Israel.”

Kessler describes Ross in the opening paragraph like this:

Diplomatic troubleshooter Dennis Ross is a legendary talker, a specialist in developing peace processes — long ones. For 12 years, in the first Bush presidency and both terms of the Clinton presidency, he was at the center of the seemingly endless effort to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Ross isn’t pro-Israel. I don’t for certain that he’s anti-Israel. However he is, first and foremost, a peace processor. I suppose that is an area expertise sort of one who keeps on quitting smoking. But does he have any success to show for his years of peace processing? It isn’t as Kessler intimates that he prolonged the peace process, it’s that the conditions for peace didn’t exist. Ross’s own actions, covering for Arafat, confirm that.

And yet the Post suggests that Ross’s biggest weakness is that he’s pro-Israel and subjects to a scrutiny its reporters never applied to Chaz Freeman, who actually worked directly for Saudi money. The Post’s reporting on the two shows a remarkable tendency towards trying to confirm the “Israel lobby” thesis.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.