Bush's conference in Jerusalem
Pres. Bush is scheduled to arrive in Jerusalem on Wednesday. Once there he'll be the guest of honor at a big international conference that Israeli Pres. (and former war-launcher) Shimon Peres is holding under the blah, catch-all title Facing Tomorrow. (Conference organizers are said to be keeping their fingers crossed that all the unseemly news about the latest probe into PM Olmert's alleged improprieties doesn't take the gloss off the conference.)
The conference has its own, extremely lame English-language blog. You can read the schedule either there or in this PDF file, available on the official conference website.
Though the conference is headlined by Peres, I guess his office doesn't have the budgetary or administrative capability to put on something as big and glitzy as this. So the funding has come from the ever-controversial Sheldon Adelson, who made himself the third-richest man in the US by buying and developing casinos in the USA and worldwide. Adelson is a big financial backer of, among many other organizations, the rabidly pro-war "Freedom's Watch" organization in the US, and the strongly pro-settler Shalem Center in Israel.
He and his wife have been named as "Honorary Chairs" of the conference.
But they do not, it seems, have the intellectual clout to pull together a world-class set of conferees for this gathering. So that job has been left to-- guess who? ... None other than our old friend Dennis Ross, who for 12 years there was the chief US official in charge of the Israeli-Arab "peace process."
But now, Ross has reinvented himself as the head of the Board of Directors of the Jerusalem-based "Jewish People Policy Planning Institute". And it is JPPPI that has been paid, presumably by Adelson, to provide the "content" for the conference.
On p.6 of that PDF file about the conference, Dennis has a letter in which, on behalf of JPPPI, he "welcomes" all the conference participants to Jerusalem.
Dennis has also been described as a leading foreign policy advisor to both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
Are you confused enough yet?
Is he a US citizen, or an Israeli, or both at this point? The extremely deep intermingling of the two countries' political elites continues.
Dennis Ross has always been a bit of a political chameleon. He was secretary of State Baker's chief implementer when Baker (and Bush I) Organized the Madrid Arab-Israeli peace conference in October 1991. Then in 1992, as Bush's re-election chances started diving along with the US economy, Bush drafted in Baker-- a supremely accomplished political operator-- to run his campaign. And Dennis went with him into the GOP campaign. But that one lost to Clinton, as we know. And who should pop up as Clinton's Arab-Israeli negotiations chief but-- Dennis Ross!
Quite a feat. Proving, perhaps (as with all the more recent Obama and Clinton buzz) that in some elite political circles in the US a proven commitment to Israel is more important than, and can sometimes transcend, "mere" party-political differences.
While working for Clinton, Dennis was the strongest advocate of the incrementalist, process-fixated approach that allowed Israel to drag its feet in signing anything at all throughout the whole of the 1990s, while it also stepped up its drive to build Israeli settlements in the West Bank-- while incurring no penalty whatsoever for that from its superpower patron. In 2000, he and Clinton, working totally in cahoots with Ehud Barak, inveigled first Pres. Hafez al-Asad then Yasser Arafat into renewed negotiations with Israel under false pretences; and both those coercive, very-last-minute negotiations failed miserably.
So we can certainly expect Dennis Ross to be in the receiving line when Pres. George W. Bush arrives at the conference, Wednesday. "Welcome to Israel, Mr. President!"