Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Obama's Neocon in Residence


"The grip that the Israeli lobby has over both political parties means that any real shift in U.S. Middle Eastern policy is unlikely, whoever is elected president today. It might also be argued that no change in policy outside the Middle East is likely either, except that Obama might talk before he bombs. Given Joe Biden's warning that Obama will respond decisively to a foreign policy test in his first six months, it might even be suggested that a new regime could prove more trigger-happy than the current one......

But what is really scary about a possible Obama administration is Dennis Ross......

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 American Enterprise Institute (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 the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israeli think-tank that was founded by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (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........."

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