But I’ve just stumbled upon something long overlooked that raises an even stronger case for the need to assess Ross’ closeness to the neoconservative movement — a group that has led U.S. foreign policy into so many disastrous undertakings, and that stands as the ideological driving force behind the dishonest campaign for war with Iraq and Iran. Now we have to ask: Just how close is Dennis Ross to the neoconservative movement?

According to the journal’s website, Ross, as he sits today in Barack Obama’s National Security Council, is a member of the board of editors of the neoconservative Middle East Quarterly. The Journal, whose editors have included AEI‘s Michael Rubin, Martin Kramer, and Efraim Karsh, is published by arch-hardliner Daniel Pipes; the journal is run out of his Middle East Forum think tank.

According to The Internet Archive’s “Way Back Machine,” which takes snapshots of webpages over time, Ross’ listing on the board of editors started sometime between July 2 and July 12, 2006. By the latter date, Ross’ affiliation is recorded as the Washington Institute for Near East Studies (WINEP), the AIPAC-formed think tank that he played a part in setting up, where he was a scholar. As of April 2008, Ross was still listed at MEQ with the WINEP affiliation.

Along with his membership on the board of the Jewish People’s Policy Institute (JPPI), a Jerusalem think tank, Ross gave up the WINEP gig when he moved to the administration.

But, as of today, he is still listed among the board of editors of MEQ. Interestingly, his affiliation has changed. Ross is now simply listed as:

Dennis Ross
Washington, D.C.

That change suggests that the site has been updated since Ross left WINEP — a departure that coincided with the formal announcement of Ross’ appointment to the Obama administration. This raises the question of why Ross is continuing his institutional affiliation with a bastion of aggressive neoconservatism such as MEQ while serving as a top administration adviser on the Middle East.

On a Middle East Forum blog, Ross’ battles within the administration have been covered by former AIPAC’s administration relations director Steve Rosen, who has never acknowledged the ties between the Forum and the Quarterly or Ross’ role in the latter.

As far as I can tell, flipping through the journal and Middle East Forum’s archives, Ross doesn’t seem to ever have contributed to either, though he was interviewed for MEQ by Pipes and Ross’s former WINEP and (apparently) current MEQ colleague Patrick Clawson.

On the board of editors of MEQ, Ross is joined by Karsh, the editor; Pipes, the publisher; Rubin and Clawson, both senior editors; James Phillips, a fellow at the neoconservative Heritage Foundation; journalist and Hudson Institute fellow Lee Smith; and WINEP executive director Robert Satloff.

As of late Friday afternoon, the NSC and MEQ, both asked for comment, haven’t yet responded. I’ve asked if Ross is paid, and what his responsibilities are or have been. When they respond, I’ll update.

Ross was out of the country today, in Israel, trying to restart peace talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Iran — also in Ross’s portfolio — met with the P5+1, including the U.S., in Turkey.

Early on in his term, Obama and his team adopted the idea that ending the Israeli-Palestinian and broader Israeli-Arab conflicts would go a long way toward helping the United States address its interests in the region — including combating extremism and terrorism, and dealing with the question of Iran’s nuclear program. The plight of the Palestinians is a consistent recruiting tool for extremists and a propaganda tool for the ethnically-Iranian Islamic Republic to make inroads in the Arab world, thereby increasing their regional clout.

Netanyahu, with all the organs of the right-wing U.S. Israel lobby behind him, publicly and vociferously battled this notion. While the Obama administration didn’t challenge Netanyahu’s rhetoric, it didn’t exactly give in either: Linkage has never been repudiated stateside and its pervasiveness in the military suggests it’s still very much the conventional wisdom in Washington’s strategic establishment.

Nonetheless, the Times gives space to Karsh to continue asserting that linkage is a bogus concept. Karsh writes, “[T]he best, indeed only, hope of peace between Arabs and Israelis lies in rejecting the spurious link between this particular issue and other regional and global problems.”

Yes, that would probably quite please Bibi. But, as Karon put it, by making that assertion, Karsh “reveals his ideological underwear,” because as Karon goes on to note, “even the U.S. military acknowledges that American support for Israel in the context of its treatment of the Palestinians is perhaps the most important determinant of Muslim attitudes towards the United States.”

Even Karsh, two paragraphs above his talk of the “spurious link,” acknowledges that there exists a never-ending “history of Arab leaders manipulating the Palestinian cause for their own ends while ignoring the fate of the Palestinians.” The important point here is that these “Arab leaders,” for whom Karsh seems to have nothing but contempt, clearly benefit from exploiting the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One of them — not Arab, but I won’t bother Karsh with the distinction now — is the Iranian president.

Can anyone doubt the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to Iran’s support of what is now being termed the “Axis of Resistance” — namely Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria? If Hezbollah, whose dangerous ceasefire-without-peace with Israel is on the verge of collapsing, was at peace with Israel, would there be posters of Iranian political figures up in Lebanon? Even the right-wing group The Israel Project never tires of mentioning that Iran supports Hamas and Hezbollah (any and all mentions of these groups seem to be prefaced with the phrase ‘Iranian-supported/supplied/funded/backed’) — but do they insist that the only connection to be had between the parties is alleged anti-Semitism?

Getting rid of “linkage” is merely a way for Israel and its right-wing U.S. backers to solidify Israeli intransigence on the moribund peace process and absolve themselves of any blame when the time comes that Bibi finally decides, as he just may, that he needs to bomb Iran.

• The Washington Times: Rep. Roscoe G. Bartlett (R-MD) and Peter Vincent Pry, president of EMPact America, float the hypothetical scenario that Iran has already acquired a nuclear weapon. The authors suggest that former IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei may have overlooked evidence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program in order to strengthen his possible candidacy for the Egyptian presidency. Bartlett and Pry also argue that Israel’s nuclear weapons program proves that nuclear weapons-possessing countries no longer need to test their weapons (accounts of a secret joint Israeli-South African nuclear test in 1979 might contradict their assertion). The op-ed concludes with a rehashing of the long-discredited, but never quite dead, myth about the dangers of an Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP) attack.

• The Washington Times: Rowan Scarborough makes his case that the military is preparing for a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. The article quotes Global Security’s John Pike who puts forward the particularly gruesome suggestion that, “Most of [the alleged nuclear facilities] have co-located staff housing. Bomb the housing, kill the staff, set back the program by a generation.” Scarborough finds very little additional evidence to support his thesis that a military strike would be easy or effective, so he turns chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen’s comments on Sunday’s Meet The Press that, “[w]e do” have a plan for attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, into conclusive evidence that, “… Pentagon strategists have updated and finalized a war plan for Iran.”

• AEI Critical Threats Project: AEI’s Charlie Szrom reports that, “Iran’s nuclear and foreign policies rely upon a worldview that takes confidence from the support lent Tehran by allies in the developing world.” The reports cites as evidence the fact that over the past two years Iran has expanded its trade relationships with Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, and Senegal. Szrom acknowledges that “a lack of American attention to West Africa” is partly to blame for the Iranian inroads.  While Szrom prefers to emphasize that Iran is fomenting anti-Israel and anti-American sentiments in the Muslim populations of West Africa, perhaps more importantly, the past two years have seen the introduction of broad sanctions against Iran. As these sanctions are implemented, it should surprise no one to see Iran searching for trading partners outside of U.S. and European spheres of influence. The economic concepts of “comparative advantage” and “gains from trade” may shed more light on why Iran insists on soliciting trading partners than an explanation predicated on Tehran’s desire to spread anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiments.