Whenever I see Ross on TV I get a mental image of a blob of pudding. Something soft and squishy. I don't know why; it may be his features, his voice, his ideas.
Put now Powerline's Paul Mirengoff has taken out after Ross and the results are not pretty.
Dennis Ross is perhaps the least successful diplomat in American history. And his lack of success isn't down to bad luck. Ross concluded that Yasser Arafat was a legitimate peace partner for Israel, and embarked on the fool's errand of trying to bring about peace between Israelis and Palestinians on that basis. Has any American diplomat ever misjudged an important matter so thoroughly?
Ross now brings his analytical powers and judgment to bear on Iraq. He accuses President Bush, who has brought about both regime change and the rise of a constitutional government that's just about holding together, of engaging in "stagecraft" to the exclusion of "statecraft." In the process, Ross has produced a column in which almost everything he says makes no sense.
For now, I'll skip over the attack on Bush and begin with his Ross's shockingly silly key recommendation. Ross proposes that the U.S. announce that we will withdraw from Iraq, and that we then start a bidding war among various Iraqi factions over the terms of our defeat. The side that presents itself as the most cooperative will be rewarded by dictating when and how we withdraw. And we'll punish any side that comes across as insufficiently cooperative by doing the opposite of what they want. Sort of like one might do with one's kids, I guess.
Read the entire Powerline article and Ross' article in the New Republic. With Ross in charge, it's a wonder that more people didn't get killed in the Middle East and that Israel survived his diplomacy.
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