dennis ross

Ben Smith at Politico has a good piece attempting to shed light on one of the most opaque aspects of Obama administration Kremlinology: what in the world the appointment of Dennis Ross as a National Security Council senior director heralds for Obama’s Mideast policy. As a reporter, it’s been frustrating how few people, inside and [...]

Just released from Mike Hammer, spokesman for the National Security Council:
“National Security Advisor General James Jones is pleased to announce an addition to our already strong National Security Staff. The addition is in the important Central Region that encompasses the Middle East, the Gulf, Afghanistan, Pakistan and South Asia. Gen. Jones is in the midst [...]

It is not a question I can answer. Ever since the not-quite-State-Department-Iran-envoy got scheduled to move over to the White House, all I’ve heard is that… he was moving to the White House, taking a position of some undefined scope. Pretty much every State Department briefing for the last week has had an element of [...]

I didn’t see today’s State Department presser, but Ben Smith did, and he passes on word that spokesman Ian Kelly “would not confirm or deny” today’s Ha’aretz report that Iran troubleshooter Dennis Ross has been ousted. It reads to me from the quotes that Ben provides (”He has not been fired. He is not being [...]

If this Ha’aretz report is to be believed, Dennis Ross, a not-quite-special envoy in the Obama administration with responsibilities for Iran, is getting reassigned from the State Department. Last week saw the publication of a book Ross co-authored with David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy that floated the prospect of attacking [...]

Hmm, so it appears that Richard Holbrooke, the administration’s special envoy to Af-Pak, is going to be the first administration figure to explore the ever-controversial negotiation with Iran. At a NATO meeting today, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proposed convening an international conclave about stabilizing Afghanistan, under United Nations auspices. The hand is outstretched:

We all had a good laugh yesterday when State Department spokesman Robert Wood refused to say which countries fell under the purview of Dennis Ross, the Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for — ahem — The Gulf and Southwest Asia. But superfun happytime is over, judging from today’s briefing:
QUESTION: Have your ace geographers [...]

Earlier today I wrote that Dennis Ross was finally getting made an Obama administration “envoy” to… uh… a country with a name that rhymes with Gee-Dan. (Or, if you’re fancy, Gee-DAWN.) Not so, says acting State Department spokesman Robert Wood! But what will his job actually be, then? Hard to say. You really have to [...]

This took pretty much forever. Rumor has it — and it’s pure rumor, but blog-worthy rumor — that there was friction over making former Clinton administration peace-processor Dennis Ross essentially an envoy to Iran under a different name. (His official title: Special Advisor to the Secretary of State for The Gulf and Southwest Asia.) Then [...]

A host of U.S. officials, led by Vice President Joe Biden, traveled to Munich for a prestigious annual security conference over the weekend, where they’re transparently pushing NATO allies to go hard into Afghanistan, a place they’ve typically not been willing to go very hard. One of the interesting subplots, report the Wall Street Journal’s [...]