Former Sen. George Mitchell to be special envoy to the Middle East?

[Thrill]

People close to Secretary of State-designate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Sunday that George J. Mitchell, a former Senate majority leader and the chairman of a Middle East peace commission in 2001, was a leading candidate to be the Obama administration’s special envoy to the Middle East.

The appointment of Mr. Mitchell, a seasoned and well-regarded negotiator, would signal that President-elect Barack Obama was attaching a high priority to the Middle East and the current Gaza crisis from his first days in office. Obama transition officials declined to comment on Mr. Mitchell, but David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior adviser, told CNN on Sunday that Mr. Obama would move quickly to address the instability in the Middle East and hoped that the new cease-fires in Gaza would last.

Mr. Mitchell, 75, was appointed in 2000, in the waning days of the Clinton administration, to lead an international commission to investigate the causes of violence in the Middle East. He released a report in the spring of 2001, during the early days of the Bush administration, that called for a freeze on Israeli settlements in the West Bank and a Palestinian crackdown on terrorism.

Other Middle East specialists said Sunday that if Mr. Mitchell was named to the job, he would be seen by both sides as a tougher but more balanced negotiator than recent envoys, which could make some Israelis nervous. Mr. Mitchell has Lebanese as well as Irish roots: his father, Joseph Kilroy, was an orphan adopted by a Lebanese family whose Arabic name had been anglicized to Mitchell, and Mr. Mitchell was raised a Maronite Catholic by his Lebanese mother.

The appointment of Mr. Mitchell would be a strong suggestion “that Obama is going to free himself of the exclusive relationship that we’ve had with the Israelis,” said Aaron David Miller, a public policy analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Center.

“This is the clearest indication to me that they’re trying to inject more balance into the Israeli-U.S. relationship,” he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/19/washington/19diplo.html?_r=1&ref=politics

[dionysus]

1. cool. Mainers represent

:)