Give Someone An Excuse

And they'll take it.

They say Obama is considering Dennis Ross for Special Envoy to Iran. According to that link, Ross has spent the past I don't know how many years lobbying Washington for Israel. He's currently backing a paper on "Iranian Nuclear Development" that's being billed as bipartisan but was in fact written by a couple of people who were instrumental in ginning up war with Iraq: Michael Makovsky (in the Pentagon) and Michael Rubin (with Don Rumsfeld). Ross has also been implicated in sabotaging our previous talks with Iran at Camp David II and the 2000 talks in Geneva.

If we want to soothe relations with Iran, appointing an Israel-flogging lobbyist who obviously doesn't want peace in the Middle East is not the way to go about it.

I can understand Obama having to walk big and wave the stick around during the elections; Iran has been a perennial bugbear and they still attacked him with lies about "no preconditions."

But is it wise to appoint someone who's looking for a fight as a special envoy to a country with whom our relations are strained? Isn't that like sending pugnacious emails to someone you've had lots of arguments with recently?