Michael Oren to Represent Israel in Washington?

Via Dylan Matthews, Laura Rozen reports that neocon think tanker Michael Oren is receiving very strong consideration to be Bibi Netanyahu’s ambassador in Washington. Noting Oren’s “piece for The New Republic in 2007 explicitly advocating an Israeli attack to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon,” Matthews argues that “given how well-connected he is to the American policy and journalism world, he’s the ideal person to sell an Israeli airstrike on the enrichment facilities at Natanz to DC elites.”

I’m not really so sure. Oren is just a pretty forthright and well-known opponent of the Obama approach to the region. Typical Israeli strategy is to try to ingratiate itself with the leadership in Washington, present itself as sympathetic to the administration’s aims, and then plead for Washington to exercise forebearance in terms of actually pressing Israel to do anything. An Oren-led Israeli embassy would be more like preparation to just abandon the idea of persuading the administration of anything, and instead to try to play an “outside” game based on ties to neocons and hawkish Democrats on the Hill.

At any rate, Oren’s book on the Six Days War is very good but his punditry is pretty abysmal. Here’s a piece I recall from back during the Lebanon War in July 2006 when Oren argued that Israel ought to initiate a large-scale regional conflict by broadening their military campaign to include Syria and Iran. There’s nothing unusual about blood-minded neocon pundits throughtlessly calling for war and then just kind of forgetting what they said when, 18 months later, they want to issue a new call for war. But this would be a curious way to present yourself to the Obama administration as a credible prognosticator on present-day security concerns.