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Elliott Abrams
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 Deputy National Security Adviser
 Project for the New American Century:
Founding Member
 Ethics and Public Policy Center: Former
President
Right Web News
last updated: April 18, 2007
Shortly after the United States agreed in early 2007 to a deal
with North Korea aimed at shutting down Kim Jong Il's nuclear
weapons program, part of which included taking Pyongyang off
Washington's list of state sponsors of terrorism, Deputy
National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams sent a series of emails to administration officials deriding the agreement.
According to the Washington Post, Abrams expressed
"bewilderment over the agreement and [demanded] to know
why North Korea would not have to first prove it had stopped
sponsoring terrorism before being rewarded with removal from
the list, according to officials who reviewed the messages"
(Washington Post, February 15, 2007).
Affiliations
 Council on Foreign Relations: Former
Member
 Beliefnet: Former Columnist
 American Committee for Peace in
Chechnya: Former Member
 Ethics and Public Policy Center:
President, 1996-2002
 Middle East Forum: Signatory of 2000
report urging military action against Syria
 Project for the New American Century:
Founding Member
For observers of Abrams, a well-known figure from the Reagan
 American Jewish Committee: Former
era who was convicted (and later pardoned) on charges
Member, National Advisory Council
related to the Iran-Contra scandal, the e-mails were part of a
 Hudson Institute: Senior Fellow, 1990typical strategy, an effort to impact policy using behind-the1996
scenes tactics that don't reveal his role. It is a tactic that
 Center for Security Policy: Former
Abrams, described by the Washington Post as "a legendary
Member, National Security Advisory Council
bureaucratic infighter and outspoken neoconservative," has
 Committee for U.S. Interests in the
often used since his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair.
During that affair, Abrams fought a rearguard effort within the Middle East: Former Member
 Committee for Peace and Security in the
Gulf: Former Member (1998)
 Francisco Marroquin Foundation: Former
Chairman
 Nicaraguan Resistance Foundation:
Former Chairman
 Social Democrats, USA: Former Member
Although his portfolio in President George W. Bush's National  Committee for the Free World: Member of
Security Council (NSC) involves democracy promotion abroad, 1985 Conference on Reagan-Gorbachev
Abrams is widely regarded as being one of the key champions Summit in Geneva
of the neoconservative line on foreign affairs, shunning
 Heritage Foundation: Alumnus of Heritage
negotiations in favor of confrontational, militaristic U.S.
Foundation Resource Bank
policies. One of his major targets has been Middle East policy,  National Review: Former Contributing
serving as a point person for policies related to the IsraeliEditor
Palestinian conflict, and pushing a hardline stance on Iran,
Syria, and Iraq. And just as he did during the Contra wars,
Government Service
Abrams seemed to use his perch in the NSC to fight efforts by
some administration officials and members of Congress aimed
 National Security Council: Special
at pushing diplomatic approaches to Middle East issues. As
Assistant to the President and Senior Director
the Inter Press Service reported in early April 2007: "Just as
for Near East and North African Affairs, 2002[Abrams] worked with Reagan hardliners to undermine the
Arias Plan [for Central America] 20 years ago, so he appears present ; Senior Director for Democracy,
to be doing what he can to undermine recent efforts by Saudi Human Rights, and International Operations,
King Abdullah to initiate an Arab-Israeli peace process and, for 2001-2002
 U.S. Commission on International
that matter, by Republican realists, and even Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice, to push it forward" (see Jim Lobe, " Religious Freedom: Chairman, 2000-2001;
Commissioner, 1999-2001
Elliott Abrams' Repeat Performance," Right Web, April 17,
 State Department: Assistant Secretary of
2007).
State for Inter-American Affairs, 1985-1989;
When he was appointed to the NSC during President George Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights
W. Bush's first term, first as chief human rights officer and then and Humanitarian Affairs, 1981-1985;
Assistant Secretary of State for International
as senior director of Near East and North African Affairs, the
White House told the media that Abrams was unavailable for Organization Affairs, 1981
interviews. Yet his gusto for the post was clear: "Iran and Iraq  U.S. Senate: Chief of Staff for Sen. Daniel
were part of his portfolio—'I have two-thirds of the axis of evil!' P. Moynihan, Special Counsel, 1977-1979;
he enthused to one well-wisher" (New Yorker, December 15, Office of Sen. Henry M. Jackson,
Staffer/Special Counsel, 1975-1976
2003).
 Senate Permanent Subcommittee on
Investigations: Assistant Counsel, 1975
Hours before Bush's second inauguration in January 2005, the
White House announced that Abrams would serve as Bush's
Private Sector
deputy assistant and as the deputy national security adviser
for global democracy strategy under NSC Adviser Stephen
Hadley, who had been Condoleezza Rice's deputy at the NSC  Verner, Lipfert, Bernhard, & McPherson:
when she was adviser. In his announcement of Abrams's new Associate, 1979-1981
position, Hadley called Abrams one of the administration's
 Breed, Abbott, & Morgan: Attorney, 1973strongest and most consistent advocates of American strength 1975
and the expansion of freedom worldwide.
Education
Abrams is a key proponent of the "freedom and democracy"
policy that Bush highlighted during his 2005 State of the Union  Harvard University: B.A., 1969
Address, and has been an important figure in dealings with
 London School of Economics: M.Sc.,
Israel. Prior to Rice's first trip to Israel as secretary of state,
1970
Abrams met with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's top adviser,
 Harvard Law School: J.D., 1973
Dov Weisglass, to establish the parameters of the Rice-Sharon
Reagan administration aimed at blocking peace initiatives in
Nicaragua that were supported by some Reagan officials.
"He's very careful about not leaving fingerprints," said an
unnamed State Department official in an interview with the
Inter Press Service (April 9, 2007).
meetings.
In November 2004, Abrams participated in a meeting in the
Oval Office with Bush and Natan Sharansky, Israel's minister
for Jerusalem and diaspora affairs. The meeting was arranged
by the president after he read galleys of Sharansky's book,
The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome
Tyranny & Terror, in which Sharansky argues that "a neighbor
who tramples the rights of its own people will eventually
threaten the security of my people" (cited in Tom Barry, "The
Foreign Policy Diaspora"). Sharansky subsequently met with
Rice. According to some, Bush and Rice have used language
that overlaps with Sharansky's in their pronouncements on the
U.S. government's new commitment to spreading democracy
(JTA, November 30, 2004). The Israeli minister's connection to
Abrams and other neoconservatives dates back to the mid1970s, when Sharansky worked closely with Sen. Henry
"Scoop" Jackson (D-WA), who employed Abrams, Richard
Perle, Douglas Feith, and other nascent neoconservatives.
After Jackson's failure to win the Democratic Party's
presidential nomination, Abrams joined the staff of Sen. Daniel
Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) and later became his chief of staff.
Abrams later switched to the Republican Party and went to
work for the Reagan administration.
In November 2005, Abrams led conference calls with the
leaders of the major Jewish-American organizations in
advance of formal meetings with Rice. According to reports
from one meeting that included representatives from such
organizations as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC), Rice assured the Jewish-American leaders that more
assertive U.S. diplomacy regarding Israeli-Palestinian conflict
during the second Bush administration should by no means be
interpreted as a sign that the U.S. government would back
away from its previous commitments to Israeli security.
Outside Washington, it often seems that the U.S. government
is unified around its support for Israel's military campaigns in
Gaza and Lebanon. But traditional fissures between the
militarists and the neoconservatives on one side and the
diplomats and the realists on the other belie the apparent unity
in U.S. support for Israel.
This divide cut directly through the administration's threeperson team that managed the U.S. response to the summer
2006 Israel-Hezbollah crisis. A New York Times article, "Rice's
Hurdles on Middle East Begin at Home," noted that the
secretary of state was accompanied on her mediating trips in
the Middle East "by two men with very different outlooks on the
conflict"—namely Abrams and the State Department's C.
David Welch. According to the Times, "Abrams, a
neoconservative with strong ties to [Vice President Dick]
Cheney , has pushed the administration to throw its support
behind Israel. During Ms. Rice's travels, he kept in direct
contact with Mr. Cheney's office" (August 10, 2006).
While Bush's supporters are generally pleased with the
administration's strong backing of Israel, many criticize the
State Department and Rice. Leading the attack has been
Perle, who along with Feith, a former Pentagon undersecretary
for policy, has worked with Abrams since the mid-1970s, when
both worked for Jackson. In a Washington Post op-ed that
coalesced conservative forces against Rice, Perle wrote that,
having moved from the NSC to State, Rice is "now in the midst
of—and increasingly represents—a diplomatic establishment
that is driven to accommodate its allies even when (or, it
seems, especially when) such allies counsel the appeasement
of our adversaries" (June 25, 2006).
A month later an editorial titled "Dump Condi" appeared in the
right-wing Insight Magazine, opining: "Conservative national
security allies of President Bush are in revolt against Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice, saying she is incompetent and has
reversed the administration's national security and foreign
policy agenda" (July 25, 2006). Rice's main critics, including
Newt Gingrich and William Kristol, charge that Iran is taking
advantage of Rice's inexperience, as well as the State
Department's purported tradition of "appeasement."
Abrams' close association with Rice—when he worked under
her at the NSC during Bush's first term and more recently as
one of her top Mideast advisers—has raised questions among
conservatives about his ideological integrity. When Israeli
Prime Minister Sharon advocated unilateral disengagement
from the Gaza Strip in late 2003, many neoconservatives,
Christian Zionists, and national security hardliners were
critical, but Abrams voiced support for Sharon's initiatives.
Abrams' involvement in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict is unclear.
According to an unnamed U.S. government consultant "with
close ties to Israel" interviewed by Seymour Hersh, Israel had
put together bombing plans long before Hezbollah kidnapped
two Israeli soldiers, which set off the conflict. As they
developed their plans early this summer, according to the
consultant, Israeli officials went to Washington "to get a green
light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the
United States would bear ... Israel began with Cheney. It
wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his
office and the Middle East desk [where Abrams is ensconced]
of the National Security Council" (New Yorker, August 21,
2006).
Although an NSC spokesman who talked with Hersh denied
that Abrams had any role in supporting Israel's plan, a second
unnamed U.S. official, a former intelligence officer, claimed,
"We told Israel, 'Look, if you guys have to go, we're behind you
all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—
the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan
for Iran before Bush gets out of office.'"
Working inside government during the Reagan and Bush II
administrations, Abrams has proved adept at advancing his
own radical policy agendas through key departments of the
executive branch. With his own neoconservative, pro-Israel
credentials well established, Abrams has focused on the
pragmatic implementation of policy agendas rather than
holding fast to ideological positions. It is this knack—being
able to flaunt exceptional neoconservative credentials while
pushing for policies that might not be doctrinaire—that has
served Rice and the administration. According to the New York
Times: "State Department officials say that Mr. Abrams serves
as a buffer for Ms. Rice with some neoconservatives who are
critical of her policies. 'The genius of Elliott Abrams is that he's
Elliott Abrams,' one senior administration official said. 'How
can he be accused of not sufficiently supporting Israel?'"
(August 10, 2006).
When Rice was Bush's national security adviser, she relied on
Abrams for his unambiguous view. A friend of Rice told the
New Yorker that she saw Abrams "not just as a good manager
but a good strategist. As an NSC administrator, you want
someone who can think several moves ahead, who has a
peripheral vision and an instinct to get where you want to go—
someone who can really play the high-stakes game"
(December 15, 2003).
Richard John Neuhaus, a longtime Abrams acquaintance and
fellow neoconservative, told the New Yorker: "What runs
through Elliott's thinking is a deep, almost quasi-religious
devotion to democracy. He thinks real democratic change can
happen in the Middle East. It's breathtaking, in a way"
(December 15, 2003).
Abrams has moved back and forth between government and
the right-wing web of think tanks and policy institutes, holding
positions as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, president
of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), advisory
council member of the American Jewish Committee, and
charter member of the Project for the New American Century
(PNAC). Abrams has maintained close ties with the Social
Democrats/USA, the network of right-wing social democrats
and former Trotskyists who became the most vocal of the selfdescribed "democratic globalists" within the neoconservative
camp in the 1990s.
Abrams' family ties have helped propel him into the center of
neoconservatism's inner circles over the past few decades. In
1980, he joined one of the two families at the core of
neoconservatism through his marriage to Rachel Decter, one
of Midge Decter's two daughters from her first marriage.
Abrams became a frequent contributor to the American Jewish
Committee's Commentary magazine, edited by Decter's
husband Norman Podhoretz. As a member of the PodhoretzDecter clan (the other key family is the Kristol clan), Abrams
was Podhoretz's choice to direct the magazine's symposiums
on foreign policy (Alternet.com, March 27, 2003). As one of the
leading neocons in the Reagan administration, Abrams also
served as a liaison between government and the right-wing
network, as exemplified by his appearances at the forums
organized by Decter's Committee for the Free World in the
1980s.
Emblematic of Abrams' visceral right-wing politics was his
statement following the murder of John Lennon in December
1980. Setting the tone for the cultural and political backlash
that would soon dominate U.S. politics, Abrams complained
publicly about all the media attention given the famous singer:
"I'm sorry, but John Lennon was not that important a figure in
our times. Why is his death getting more attention than Elvis
Presley's? Because Lennon is perceived as a left-wing figure
politically, anti-establishment, a man of social conscience with
concern for the poor. And, therefore, he is being made into a
great figure. Too much has been made of his life. It does not
deserve a full day's television and radio coverage. I'm sick of
it" (Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment:
From Conservative Ideology to Political Power, pp. 161-162).
As an aide to Senator Jackson in the 1970s, Abrams began
his political career mixing the soft and hard sides of the
neoconservative agenda as both a proponent of Jackson's
strategically driven human rights policies and as an advocate
of his proposals to boost the military-industrial complex.
Through Jackson, Abrams became involved with a group of
Cold Warriors called the Coalition for a Democratic Majority,
which was associated with the Democratic Party but led by the
neoconservatives.
Among former members of Jackson's staff that later received
posts in the Reagan administration's foreign policy team were
such neoconservative operatives as Feith, Perle, Frank
Gaffney, Charles Horner, and Ben Wattenberg. Another upand-coming neoconservative who was close to Jackson and
later joined the Reagan administration was Paul Wolfowitz,
who together with his mentor, Albert Wohlstetter, advised the
senator on arms issues. Other Jackson Democrats who
secured appointments in the Reagan administration included
Jeane Kirkpatrick, as UN ambassador, and neoconservatives
on her staff, such as Joshua Muravchik, Steven Munson, Carl
Gershman, and Kenneth Adelman.
Abrams joined the neocon exodus from the Democratic Party
in the late 1970s, which was led by members of the Committee
on the Present Danger and the Coalition for a Democratic
Majority. His first position in the Reagan administration was as
director of the State Department's Office for Human Rights and
Humanitarian Affairs, though he was appointed only after
Reagan's first choice came under fire in the Senate. During the
Reagan years, the neocon human rights program was a velvet
glove tailored for the iron fist of U.S. foreign and military policy.
Reagan's first nominee was Ernest Lefever, a founding
member of the second Committee on the Present Danger who
was known as a fierce critic of Jimmy Carter's human rights
policy. But Lefever's credentials as a human rights advocate
came into question in part due to his article, "The Trivialization
of Human Rights," published in 1978 by the neoconservative
EPPC. (Abrams was also closely associated with the EPPC at
the time, and much later, in 1996, served as its president.)
The Senate instead confirmed Abrams, Reagan's second
nominee for the human rights position, who espoused the
same instrumentalist position on human rights as Lefever.
During the Reagan administration, Abrams was at once a
human rights advocate, a manager of clandestine operations,
and a bagman for the Nicaraguan Contras, calling himself "a
gladiator" in the cause of freedom.
Although Abrams entered the Reagan administration scandalfree, he left as a convicted criminal. He was indicted by the
Iran-Contra special prosecutor for intentionally deceiving
Congress about the administration's role in supporting the
Contras, including his own central role in the Iran-Contra arms
deal. The U.S.-backed and -organized Contras were
spearheading a counterrevolution against the Sandinista
government in Nicaragua. Congress had prohibited U.S.
government military support for the Contras because of their
pattern of human rights abuses.
Abrams pleaded guilty to two lesser offenses (including
withholding information from Congress) to avoid a trial and a
possible jail term. Abrams and five other Iran-Contra figures
were pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas
Eve 1992, shortly before he left office. By pardoning Abrams,
John Poindexter, and other former Reagan officials, Bush was
in effect protecting himself. At that time media and
congressional investigations of the Iran-Contra scandal were
threatening to expose the role of Bush, who was Reagan's vice
president during the executive branch's illegal support to the
Contras.
Throughout the proceedings, Abrams continually denied his
knowledge of the NSC and CIA programs to support the
Contras. He even had the temerity to blame Congress for the
deaths of two U.S. military members who were shot down by
the Sandinistas in an illegal and clandestine arms supply
operation over Nicaragua. He described the legal proceedings
against him as "Kafkaesque" and called his prosecutors "filthy
bastards" and "vipers" (The Nation, July 2, 2001).
In his book Reagan, Bush, and Right-Wing Politics, Philip
Burch underscores Abrams' unapologetic attitude regarding
the excesses of the war in Nicaragua: "A few years after he
stepped down as assistant secretary of state for InterAmerican Affairs, Abrams, once the State Department's top
human rights official, wrote an article on El Salvador in the
National Review titled 'An American Victory;' at the end of this
piece he proudly proclaimed that 'El Salvador's decade of
guerilla war cost thousands of Salvadoran lives, and those of
eight Americans. The violence is ending now in part because
of the collapse of Communism throughout the world, but more
because Communist efforts to take power by force were
resisted and defeated. In this small corner of the Cold War,
American policy was right, and it was successful.' Perhaps Mr.
Abrams should read Mark Danner's The Massacre at El
Mozote (which contains an appendix giving name, age, and
gender for almost every one of the 784 people killed in this
grizzly episode [perpetrated by the Salvadoran Army's Atacatl
Battalion, a U.S.-trained counterinsurgency force])."
During the Reagan administration, Abrams also served as the
government's nexus between the militarists in the NSC and the
public diplomacy operatives in the State Department, White
House, and National Endowment for Democracy (NED). The
NED supported the creation of a series of neoconservativecontrolled front groups that sought bipartisan and U.S. public
support for an interventionist policy in Central America, which
was part of the larger rollback policy advocated by groups
such as the Committee on the Present Danger and the
Coalition for Peace through Strength. One of the most
prominent of these NED-financed front groups was the Project
for Democracy in Central America (PRODEMCA), which
merged the hard (military) and soft (political aid and public
diplomacy) sides of the neoconservative agenda in Central
America. On the one hand, PRODEMCA received clandestine
support from the NSC's unofficial "Project Democracy,"
operated by Oliver North and supervised by Abrams. On the
other, it received USAID and U.S. Information Agency funding
through NED for public diplomacy efforts.
After Reagan left office in 1989, Abrams, like a number of
other prominent neoconservatives, was not invited to serve in
the George H.W. Bush administration. Instead, he worked for a
number of think tanks and in 1996 became president of the
Ethics and Public Policy Center. With EPCC as his new base,
Abrams wrote widely on foreign policy issues, especially
Mideast policy, and on cultural issues, including on what he
saw as the threats posed by U.S. secular society to Jewish
identity.
Created in 1976, EPPC was the first neoconservative institute
to break ground in the frontal attack on secular humanists.
EPPC has functioned as the cutting edge of the
neoconservative-driven culture war against progressive
theology and secularism, and the associated effort to ensure
right-wing control of the Republican Party. It explicitly sought to
unify the Christian right with the neoconservative religious
right, which was mostly made up of agnostics back then. A
central part of its political project was to "clarify and reinforce
the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the
public debate over domestic and foreign policy." Directed by
Abrams from 1996 to 2001, EPPC counts among its board
members well-connected figures in the neocon matrix
including Richard Neuhaus, Bill Kristol, and Mary Ann
Glendon.
Throughout the 1990s, Abrams remained an integral part of
the tight-knit neoconservative foreign policy community in
Washington that revolved around Perle, one of his early
mentors, and Kirkpatrick, of the American Enterprise Institute
(AEI). In the early 1990s, Abrams and several AEI associates
formed the Committee on the U.S. Interests in the Middle East,
which denounced land concessions as part of any deal with
the Palestinians and opposed efforts to engage Israel in the
Madrid peace conference (New Yorker, December 15, 2003).
Abrams was also a charter member of PNAC, which issued its
statement of principles about the need for a "neo-Reaganite"
foreign policy in 1997.
While serving as EPCC president, Abrams advocated using
human rights as a U.S. "policy tool." Working closely with Newt
Gingrich and the Republican Congress, EPCC together with
the Christian Coalition and Family Research Council lobbied
for the creation of a new permanent commission that focused
on religious persecution. The main countries of concern listed
in the congressional deliberations were China, Sudan, North
Korea, Cuba, Laos, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia, as well as
general condemnation of Muslim nations. Abrams became a
founding member of the U.S. Commission on International
Religious Freedom in 1998 and was appointed chairman, in
which capacity he served until mid-2001, when he joined the
George W. Bush administration. Like the right-wing social
conservative networks that argued for its creation, the
commission has served to shift the primary consideration of
U.S. human rights policy from a respect for political rights to
the treatment of religious minorities, especially in countries that
have long captured the attention of social conservatives such
as China and Sudan.
Abrams' efforts to push for pro-Israel policies in the 1990s
dovetailed with his appointment to the NSC. When Abrams
was appointed the Reagan administration point man on Latin
America, he came to the State Department with no expertise in
the region and did not speak Spanish. Similarly, Abrams
became the NSC's Middle East specialist without any real
expertise in the region—other than his family ties to Israel, his
polemical writings for neoconservative publications, his rightwing Zionism, and his experience overseeing the Iran-Contra
arms trade, in which Israel functioned as the major broker.
In 1992 Abrams helped form the Committee for U.S. Interests
in the Middle East, which was actually a committee to ensure
that U.S. policy was aligned with the Likud Party in Israel.
Other members included Perle, Feith, Gaffney, and John
Lehman, among dozens of other neoconservatives and proIsrael hawks. The committee spoke out against what it
perceived as a dangerous distancing between the Bush Senior
administration and Israel seen in the administration's pressure
for Israel to pull out of some occupied territories and halt its
campaign to expand settlements in these zones.
Abrams has long voiced his strong support for Likud positions
on the Oslo peace process and "land for peace" negotiations.
After the launch of the Al Aqsa Intifada in late September
2000, Abrams lambasted mainstream Jewish groups for their
continued support for peace talks between the Palestinian
Authority and for their call to Israel to halt its attacks (see Jim
Lobe, "Neoconservatives Consolidate Control Over Middle
East Policy," Foreign Policy In Focus, December 6, 2002).
Abrams has also established strong Likudnik positions in
articles for Commentary and in various books. Abrams
authored the chapter on the Middle East in the 2000 blueprint
for U.S. foreign policy by the Project for the New American
Century. Edited by PNAC founders William Kristol and Robert
Kagan, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American
Foreign and Defense Policy is a playbook on how to deal with
America's adversaries.
In his chapter, Abrams laid out the "peace through strength"
credo that has become the operating principle of the Bush
Junior administration. "Our military strength and willingness to
use it will remain a key factor in our ability to promote peace,"
wrote Abrams. "Strengthening Israel, our major ally in the
region, should be the central core of U.S. Middle East policy,
and we should not permit the establishment of a Palestinian
state that does not explicitly uphold U.S. policy in the region."
Presaging the Mideast policy of the Bush administration,
Abrams wrote: U.S. interests "do not lie in strengthening
Palestinians at the expense of Israelis, abandoning our overall
policy of supporting the expansion of democracy and human
rights, or subordinating all other political and security goals to
the 'success' of the Arab-Israel 'peace process'." Like other
right-wing Zionists, Abrams refers to the conflict between the
Palestinians and Israelis not for what it is—a conflict over
occupied Palestinian land—but rather as an "Arab-Israel"
conflict, implying that U.S. support of Israel necessitates a
foreign policy that confronts all the Arab countries.
Abrams' December 2002 appointment to be Bush's NSC
director of Near East and Northern African Affairs succeeded
Zalmay Khalilzad, another charter PNAC signatory, who
became the president's special envoy to Afghanistan (Foreign
Policy In Focus, December 6, 2002).
Working closely with Feith, Abrams quickly became the
leading behind-the-scenes actor in managing the
administration's policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. In
the process, he sidelined the Mideast experts in the NSC, CIA,
and State Department regarded by the neoconservatives as
"Arabists." Robert Leverett, an Arabic speaking Mideast
specialist on loan to the NSC, was forced out after expressing
his opinion that the administration should stick by its proposed
"road map" for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations rather than
yielding to the hardline positions of Prime Minister Sharon,
AIPAC, and Abrams.
In one of the many oddities of the Christian Rightneoconservative alliance that bolsters the Republican Party
and forms a backbone of the George W. Bush administration,
many neoconservative government officials are radical
separatists, indeed segregationists. As Abrams, who has
argued against Jews dating or attending elementary schools
with non-Jews, put it in his book Faith or Fear: How Jews Can
Survive in a Christian America: "Outside the land of Israel,
there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant
between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation
in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be
apart—except in Israel—from the rest of the population" (Free
Press, 1997). Judaism, according to Abrams, demands
"apartness"—not in the sense of confining oneself to a physical
ghetto, but all necessary measures should be taken to prevent
"prolonged and intimate exposure to non-Jewish culture."
Abrams takes care to insist that his positions imply no
"disloyalty" to the United States, but at the same times insists
that Jews must be loyal to Israel because they "are in a
permanent covenant with God and with the land of Israel and
its people. Their commitment will not weaken if the Israeli
government pursues unpopular policies."
Abrams' other books include Undue Process and Security and
Sacrifice. He has also contributed articles to Commentary,
Weekly Standard, National Interest, Public Interest, and
National Review.
Sources
Glenn Kessler, "Conservatives Assail North Korea Accord," Washington Post, February 15, 2007.
Jim Lobe, " Elliott Abrams' Repeat Performance," Right Web, April 17, 2007.
White House Office of the Press Secretary, Personnel Announcement, "The Appointment of Elliott Abrams as
Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser for Global Democracy Strategy,"
February 2, 2005, www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/02/20050202-10.html.
Tom Barry, " The Foreign Policy Diaspora—From Jerusalem to Washington," Right Web Analysis, February
8, 2005.
Connie Bruck, "Back Roads: How Serious Is the Bush Administration about Creating a Palestinian State?"
New Yorker, December 15, 2003.
Ron Kampeas, "Bush Reaches Out to Europe," JTA, November 30, 2004.
Richard Perle, "Why Did Bush Blink on Iran? (Ask Condi)," Washington Post, June 25, 2006, p. B1.
"Dump Condi: Foreign Policy Conservatives Charge State Dept. Has Hijacked Bush Agenda," Insight
Magazine, July 25, 2006.
Seymour Hersh, "Watching Lebanon," New Yorker, August 21, 2006.
"Bush and Condi Clash over Israel; President Overrules Her for the First Time," Insight Magazine, August 8,
2006.
Jim Lobe, "All in the Neocon Family," Alternet.com, March 27, 2003.
Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From Conservative Ideology to Political Power
(New York: Times Books, 1986), pp. 161-162.
Jerry Sanders, Peddlers of Crisis (Boston: South End Press, 1983).
David Corn, "Elliott Abrams: It's Back!" The Nation, July 2, 2001.
Philip Burch, Reagan, Bush, and Right-Wing Politics: Elites, Think Tanks, Power, and Policy, Part A, "The
American Right Wing Takes Command: Key Executive Appointments" (Greenwich, CT: Jai Press, 1997), p.
219.
Jim Lobe, "Neoconservatives Consolidate Control Over Middle East Policy," Foreign Policy In Focus,
December 6, 2002.
For media inquiries, email media@irc-online.org or call (505) 388-0208.
Published by the International Relations Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org). Copyright © 2007,
International Relations Center. All rights reserved.
Recommended citation:
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Elliott Abrams' Repeat
Performance
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Jim Lobe | April 17, 2007
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It has an all too familiar ring to it. A crisis area—in this case, the Middle East—finds itself in
desperate need of a peace process capable of tamping down the forces of violence and
destabilization that the United States itself has played a central role in unleashing.
Regional efforts at diplomacy—in this case, led by Saudi Arabia—gain some momentum but are
frustrated by diehard hawks in a U.S. administration. While increasingly on the defensive both at
home and abroad, the hawks are determined to carry through their strategy of isolating and
destabilizing a hostile target—in this case, Syria—despite its oft-repeated eagerness to engage
Washington and its regional allies.
Sensing an increasingly dangerous impasse, the Democratic Speaker of the House of
Representatives—in this case, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), backed by a growing bipartisan consensus
that the administration's intransigence will further reduce already-waning U.S. influence in the
region—tries to encourage regional peace efforts by engaging the target directly.
But worried that the quest might actually gain momentum, administration hawks—in this case, led by
Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams and Vice President Dick Cheney—accuse the
Speaker of undermining the president. Working through obliging editorial writers at the Washington
Post, among other sympathetic media including the Wall Street Journal , they attack the Speaker for
"substitut[ing] her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president."
If that scenario sounds familiar, your foreign policy memory dates back at least to 1987, when,
despite intensified regional peace-making efforts for which Costa Rican President Oscar Arias won
that year's Nobel Peace Prize, the Ronald Reagan administration was persisting in its efforts to
isolate and overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
It was then-House Speaker Jim Wright who, with the quiet encouragement of Republican realists,
notably Reagan's White House chief of staff, Howard Baker, Secretary of State George Shultz, and
his special Central America envoy, Philip Habib, sought to promote Arias' plan.
Like today's Republican realists on the Iraq Study Group (ISG), who have urged the Bush
administration to engage rather than continue to isolate Syria, they understood that popular and
congressional support for a "regime change" policy in Nicaragua was not sustainable and that
Washington should seek a regional settlement on the most favorable terms available.
But Abrams, then assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, worked assiduously with
fellow hardliners in the White House and the Pentagon—just as he works today with Cheney's
office—to torpedo both the Arias plan and Wright's efforts to advance it throughout the latter half of
1987.
As Abrams' then-assistant, Robert Kagan, the future neoconservative heavy thinker, put it later:
"Arias, more than any other Latin leader, single-handedly undid U.S. policy in Nicaragua." And when
he won the Nobel Prize, "All us of who thought it was important to get aid for the contras reacted with
disgust, unbridled disgust."
As part of their strategy, hardliners led by Abrams rejected appeals by Nicaragua for high-level talks,
thus forcing Habib to resign by late summer and insisting—as they now do with Syria—that direct
negotiations would serve only to legitimate Sandinistas and demoralize the contras.
In November 1987, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega came to Washington with a proposal for a
ceasefire with the contras. After the administration refused to receive him, Wright, seeing an
opportunity to jump-start a stalled peace process, attended a meeting at the Vatican Embassy in
Washington at which Ortega asked his main domestic foe, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo, to
mediate between the Sandinista government and the contras.
Wright's participation in the talks was seized by Abrams as the launching pad for a public attack on
the Speaker. Interviewed by the Washington Post under the guise of an unnamed "senior
administration official," Abrams charged Wright with engaging in "guerrilla theater" and "an
unbelievable melodrama" that had dealt a "serious setback" to the administration's policy.
"This was not forward movement; this was screwing up the process," the "senior official" complained
to the Post, which, as in its criticism last Friday of Pelosi's meeting with Syrian President Bashar alAssad, obligingly followed up with its own editorial, entitled "What is Jim Wright Doing?", charging the
Speaker with having acted "as though the actual conduct of diplomacy in this delicate passage were
his responsibility."
The Wall Street Journal's neoconservative editorial writers swiftly joined in, accusing Wright of a
"compulsion for running off-the-shelf foreign-policy operations," just as last week they charged Pelosi
and Democrats of seeking "to conduct their own independent diplomacy."
Within just a few months of his meeting with Ortega, however, the Democratic-led Congress rejected
Reagan's request to fund the contras, a step that Abrams incorrectly predicted at the time would
result in "the dissolution of Central America."
According to Banana Diplomacy, Roy Gutman's aptly named 1988 book about Reagan's Central
America policy, Washington soon found itself "at the margins of the region's diplomacy."
Unlike his high-profile role as assistant secretary 20 years ago, Abrams, who now presides over
Middle East policy at the National Security Council, is today far more discreet, no doubt in part
because his 1991 conviction for lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-contra scandal has made
him an easy target for Democrats.
"He's very careful about not leaving fingerprints," one State Department official told the Inter Press
Service earlier this year.
But there is little doubt among Middle East analysts in Washington that Abrams is playing a lead role
in White House efforts to discredit Pelosi for meeting with Assad, just as he did with Wright for
meeting with Ortega in 1987.
And just as he worked with Reagan hardliners to undermine the Arias plan 20 years ago, so too he
appears to be doing what he can to undermine recent efforts by Saudi King Abdullah to initiate an
Arab-Israeli peace process and, for that matter, by Republican realists, and even Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, to push it forward.
Jim Lobe is the Washington bureau chief of the Inter Press Service and a contributor to Right Web
(rightweb.irc-online.org).
For media inquiries, email media@irc-online.org or call (505) 388-0208.
Inter Press Service Republished by the International Relations Center (IRC, online at www.irconline.org). Copyright © 2007, International Relations Center. All rights reserved.
Published by the International Relations Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org). Copyright ©
2007, International Relations Center. All rights reserved.
Recommended citation:
Jim Lobe, "Elliott Abrams' Repeat Performance," Right Web Analysis (Silver City, NM: International
Relations Center, April 17, 2007).
Web location:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/rw/4152
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Elliot Abrams: defender of death squads to direct US "democracy"
crusadeWorld
Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org
WSWS : News & Analysis : North America
Elliot Abrams: defender of death squads to direct US “democracy”
crusade
By Bill Van Auken
10 February 2005
Back to screen version | Send this link by email | Email the author
On February 2, the same day he delivered his State of the Union speech
vowing to
“stand with the allies of freedom” in “ending tyranny in our world,”
George W.
Bush named Elliot Abrams as his deputy national security advisor.
Nothing could
more clearly expose the real aims of the US president’s worldwide
crusade for
“democracy” than this appointment.
Perhaps more than any other political figure, Abrams personifies the
criminal,
deceitful and thuggish character of the current US administration. He
has been
tapped to serve as Bush’s principal advisor on democracy and human
rights.
A senior State Department official during the Reagan administration,
Abrams was
infamous for his lying on behalf of US-backed military dictatorships
and his
zealotry in attacking any regime that failed to submit to Washington
dictates,
as well as in defaming any individual who dared question the
administration’s
policies.
In 1991, he pleaded guilty to two counts of lying to Congress under
oath in
relation to the secret and illegal operation mounted by the Reagan
administration to fund the CIA-organized contra mercenaries’ war on
Nicaragua.
Abrams entered the plea agreement in order to avoid a felony
prosecution and
potential jail time. Within little more than a year, Bush senior
pardoned him
together with others convicted in relation to the Iran-Contra
conspiracy.
After he spent a decade as a fixture within right-wing Republican think
tanks,
the Bush administration called Abrams back into government, placing him
on the
National Security Council. In June 2002, he was given the NSC portfolio
for the
“Near East and North Africa,” including the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
That choice was also a revealing one, as Abrams is an avowed right-wing
Zionist
and supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the Likud
bloc. Before
his appointment, he had insisted that the US reject the “land-forpeace” formula
that was the basis for previous Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. In a
document
drafted for the Project on the New American Century, he declared that
Washington
“should not permit the establishment of a Palestinian state that did
not
explicitly uphold US policy in the region.” He was also a key proponent
of
currying support among the Christian fundamentalists for Israel.
Naming Abrams as the key advisor on the Middle East was widely seen as
a signal
of unconditional US support for Israel’s military repression of the
Palestinians
and seizure of land in the occupied territories.
Abrams is a self-declared neo-conservative, part of a coterie of
anticommunist
and pro-Zionist Democrats—among them, current Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul
Wolfowitz and Pentagon advisor Richard Perle—who came into politics as
aides to
US Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson in the 1970s, and then followed their
right-wing political trajectory into the Republican Party under Reagan
in the
1980s.
Reagan named Abrams as director of the State Department’s Office for
Human
Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. He was the Republican president’s
second
choice, after the nomination of Ernest Lefever, a hard-line cold
warrior, was
rejected in the Senate. Lefever had voiced open contempt for the idea
that
Washington should consider human rights abuses in its relations with
anticommunist regimes and expressed sympathy in particular for the
Chilean
military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Abrams was a protégé of Lefever, who was the founder of the Ethics and
Public
Policy Center, a right-wing think tank devoted to portraying US
multinationals
as ethical institutions. After his conviction for lying to Congress,
Abrams
became president of the center.
As the State Department official in charge of human rights, and later
as
assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, Abrams’s main
activity
centered on the US organization of a counterrevolutionary army to carry
out
terrorist attacks against Nicaragua and the support of right-wing
dictatorships
in neighboring El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.
He specialized in grossly exaggerating human rights abuses in
Nicaragua—most
particularly in a trumped-up campaign to portray the Sandinista
government as a
persecutor of the Miskito Indians—in order to justify support for the
contra
army, which killed some 10,000 Nicaraguans.
Meanwhile, Abrams contemptuously dismissed substantiated reports of
massive
atrocities by the US-backed dictatorships.
This was the case with the massacre of nearly 1,000 unarmed Salvadoran
civilians
by the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion in December 1981. When Raymond
Bonner of
the New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post
published
accounts of the mass killings, Abrams dismissed them as “nothing but
communist
propaganda.”
A day after the newspaper reports appeared, the State Department filed
a report
officially certifying that the Salvadoran regime was making “a
concerted and
significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human
rights” and
working “to bring an end to the indiscriminate torture and murder of
Salvadoran
citizens.” Congress required the document as a condition for approving
additional aid. Reagan later vetoed legislation extending the
certification
requirement.
The United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission published a documented
account of
the massacre in 1992, complete with the identities of over 500 of the
victims
and the results of forensic examinations of their remains. Many others
were
never identified. The summary of the report stated:
“On 10 December 1981, in the village of El Mozote in the Department of
Morazan,
units of the Atlacatl Battalion detained, without resistance, all the
men, women
and children who were in the place. The following day, 11 December,
after
spending the night locked in their homes, they were deliberately and
systematically executed in groups. First, the men were tortured and
executed,
then the women were executed and, lastly, the children, in the place
where they
had been locked up....”
It has since emerged that the US State Department was fully informed
about this
slaughter at the time that Abrams was claiming it never happened and
slandering
journalists as communist “dupes.”
Similarly, Abrams had heatedly denied that Salvadoran rightist and
death squad
leader Roberto D’Aubuisson was involved in the assassination of
Archbishop Oscar
Arnulfo Romero, who had called for an end to the repression in El
Salvador. He
denounced human rights critics who accused the administration of a
cover-up.
“Anybody who thinks you’re going to find a cable that says that Roberto
D’Aubuisson murdered the archbishop is a fool,” he said. At the time,
the State
Department was in possession of two such cables from its embassy in San
Salvador
detailing the death squad leader’s role in organizing the killing.
Similarly, Abrams brushed off reports of massacres in Guatemala that
the
Catholic Church there described as “genocidal.” In one particularly
grotesque
incident, he dismissed the 1985 abduction, torture and murder of
Guatemalan
human rights activist Maria Rosario Godoy, who was killed together with
her
21-year-old brother and her 2-year-old son. Their mutilated bodies were
found in
a ravine. It was evident that the young mother had been brutally raped
and the
child’s fingernails had been ripped off. Abrams insisted that there was
no
reason to disbelieve the Guatemalan regime’s official story that the
three died
in an auto accident.
Abrams made no effort to conceal his contempt for the ineffectual
efforts of the
US Congress to impose some restraint on the dirty wars Washington was
waging in
Central America. He described US legislators as “pious clowns” and
“abysmally
stupid.”
While he knew nothing of Latin America and did not even speak Spanish,
he
reveled in the covert operations surrounding the illegal war in
Nicaragua. He
played a direct and central role in creating a covert network for
funding the
CIA-organized contras after Congress had passed the so-called Boland
amendment
barring US military support for the mercenaries.
Working with Lt. Col. Oliver North, who was then a member of the
National
Security Council, he personally participated in obtaining illegal
sources of
funding, including making a flight to London and using the alias of
“Mr.
Kenilworth” to obtain $10 million from the Sultan of Brunei.
All the while, Abrams was testifying before Congress that the Reagan
administration had no connection whatsoever to the supposedly private
efforts to
support the contras. He specifically claimed he had no knowledge that
North had
directed illegal arms sales to Iran and diverted the proceeds to the
Nicaraguan
contras.
The Bush administration brushed off questions concerning Abrams’s
guilty pleas
on the lying to Congress charges, claiming that they had been “dealt
with.”
After joining the National Security Council, Abrams was implicated in
the
abortive coup attempt against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in April
2002. It
was widely reported that he and Otto Reich, another veteran of the
illegal
contra operation appointed by Bush to the State Department, had met
with the
coup plotters and held detailed discussions on their prospects for
success.
He was likewise tied to the Valerie Plame affair. A covert CIA agent,
Plame was
exposed to the press in an act of retaliation for the debunking of the
administration’s claims on Iraq’s nonexistent nuclear weapons program
by her
husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson. Abrams has been named as a
prime suspect
in providing the illegal leak.
This individual is the standard-bearer of Washington’s worldwide
crusade for
“democracy.” His appointment only underscores that the Bush
administration’s
vacuous rhetoric about “freedom” and “liberty” are merely window
dressing for a
global campaign of military aggression in pursuit of US imperialism’s
strategic
aims
Illegal wars, right-wing coups, death-squad terror and torture are the
means
associated with Abrams’s previous “democratic” crusade—combined with
riding
roughshod over democratic processes at home. These methods are now
being revived
on an even more horrific scale.
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