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Bush's trusty new Mideast point
man
By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON -
This month's surprise - some in the State Department
might say shocking - appointment of Iran-contra veteran
Elliott Abrams as the top White House Mideast adviser
has bolstered the notion that President George W Bush
sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict very differently
from his father.
 The appointment, announced by Bush's national
security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, two weeks ago,
places a dyed-in-the-wool neo-conservative, whose views
on the region have long been close to those of the
Israel's Likud Party, in one of the most sensitive and
powerful posts in the foreign policy apparatus. Although
he has never been known as an Arab-Israeli specialist,
what he has written on the subject is consistent with
the positions of a number of prominent neo-cons such as
Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle.
Abrams, 54, who first came to national
prominence as a controversial political appointee in the
Ronald Reagan administration and who later pleaded
guilty to lying to Congress regarding his role in the
Iran-Contra scandal, has been a staunch critic of the
Oslo peace process, and he has even opposed the "Land
for Peace" formula that has guided US policy in the
Arab-Israeli conflict since the 1967 war.
"Yet
another Likudnik is moving to a position where they
control Washington's agenda on the Mideast," said Rashid
Khalidi, a Mideast historian at the University of
Chicago. "This is a tragedy for the Israeli and American
people."
Supporters of Likud were naturally more
enthusiastic. "I believe Abrams understands that this is
a not a war over borders, but over Israel's existence,
something that almost no one in the State Department
acknowledges," Morton Klein, president of the Zionist
Organization of America, told the Jewish weekly Forward
last week.
Abrams has also been hawkish on Iraq, for
which he will also have responsibility as senior
director for Near East and North African affairs on the
National Security Council (NSC) staff. Not only has he
consistently backed Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz (who helped him get his first Bush job as
senior staff director for Democracy, Human Rights and
International Operations), but he also led an NSC task
force on Iraq that calls for Washington to take direct
control of Iraq's oil fields after an invasion.
"This is a very major move, both for Iraq and
the Mideast peace process," according to Joseph Wilson,
a retired US diplomat who served as charge d'affaires in
Baghdad during the Gulf War. "Abrams serves his
constituency's interest," he added, referring to the
pro-Likud neo-conservatives such as Perle, Wolfowitz and
the Pentagon's Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith.
Abrams replaces Zalmay Khalilzad who has been
consumed since shortly after his appointment in early
2002 with sorting out his native Afghanistan, to which
he serves as Bush's special envoy. Khalilzad, a
prominent national security strategist with greater
experience in South Asia and the Gulf than in the
Mideast, has now added the new post of
"ambassador-at-large for Free Iraqis" to his portfolio.
He spent the last few days in London herding the
fractious Iraqi opposition toward some semblance of
unity. Khalilzad's predecessor in the Mideast post,
Bruce Reidel, was a Clinton holdover. As a result,
Abram's appointment marks the first time that a person
with a keen interest - albeit little expertise - in the
Arab-Israeli conflict has been assigned the White House
post, and the neo-cons are jubilant.
Abrams'
influence on policy is already clear, particularly
vis-a-vis the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Ten
days ago, Washington voted for the first time ever
against a UN General Assembly resolution that called on
Israel to repeal the "Jerusalem Law" that declares that
"Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of
Israel". In the past, Washington has abstained on the
issue, consistent with its long-held stand that
Jerusalem's status must be determined by negotiations
between the parties. Abrams has in the past publicly
assailed that position, arguing that Washington's
refusal to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital
"tantalizes the Palestinians with the prospect of
forcing the Jews to abandon Jerusalem".
More
important, efforts by "the Quartet" - the European
Union, the UN, Russia and the United States - to produce
a "road map" leading to the creation of a viable and
independent Palestinian state in 2005 have come to a
screeching halt since Abrams' appointment. Over the
strenuous objections of the State Department, as well as
other Quartet members, the White House has decreed that
work on the roadmap will remain frozen until at least
after the elections in Israel January 28. The decision
represents a total caving in to demands by Sharon, who
stands to profit tremendously by the fact that
international pressure on him to move toward renewed
peace talks or accept a peace plan will now be nil, at
least until the elections are finished.
"This
represents a signal victory for those who have argued
that the road to peace in the Middle East runs through
Baghdad, rather than Jerusalem," said one State
Department official who warned that the absence of
pressure on Israel at a time when Washington is
preparing for war with Iraq will exacerbate resentment
against the US in Arab public opinion.
Along
with William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard,
founder of the Project for the New American Century
(PNAC), and son of Irving Kristol, godfather of the
neo-conservatives, Abrams has been a leading light of
the fifty-something crowd in the neo-conservative
movement, although the Iran-contra affair forced him
into a less public role in the 1990s.
Abrams has
been close to virtually all of the key neo-conservative
officials inside the administration, as well as those on
the outside in PNAC, the Center for Security Policy
(CSP), the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs, and the American Enterprise Institute, the
long-time roost of Perle and other neo-con hawks, most
notably former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, former
CIA officer Marc Reuel Gerecht, and terrorism expert
Michael Ledeen.
A Harvard student in the 1960s
when he, like many other neo-conservatives, were
associated with the Socialist Party USA, Abrams got his
first job out of law school in the offices of the
staunchly pro-Israel Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson of
Washington state. It was there that he met Perle, Feith
and Frank Gaffney. Gaffney, who himself worked for Perle
in the Reagan administration, went on to found and
direct CSP, on whose advisory board Perle, Abrams and
Feith have all served.
Abrams first gained
national prominence, however, when he was appointed in
1991 by Reagan to serve as assistant secretary of state
for international organizations, a spot requested on his
behalf by Jean Kirkpatrick, Reagan's first UN
ambassador. After Reagan failed to get Ernest Lefever
confirmed as assistant secretary for human rights and
humanitarian affairs, however, Abrams was put in that
considerably more prominent and politically sensitive
post. His tenure there was marked by frequent and angry
clashes with mainstream church groups, particularly
those with a large missionary presence in Central
America, and prominent human rights groups, including
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which
accused him of covering up horrendous abuses committed
by US-backed governments, such as El Salvador and
Guatemala, and rebel forces, such as the Nicaraguan
Contras and Angola's Unita movement, while, at the same
time, exaggerating abuses by US foes.
Such
conflicts only became more intense after he was
appointed as assistant secretary for inter-American
affairs in 1985, the year in which Congress fatefully
cut off aid to the Contras, thus setting the stage for
what would become the Iran-Contra Affair, which, at its
core, was an effort to raise money and arms for the
Contras by whatever means necessary. In his new job,
Abrams not only became acquainted with the machinations
of Oliver North and his fellow conspirators in the White
House, he was also tasked to raise money himself,
leading to his secret trip disguised as "Mr Kenilworth"
to the palaces of the Sultan of Brunei. In one of the
more comic episodes of the whole affair, the two men
reached agreement on a $10 million contribution to the
Contras, but Abrams gave the Sultan the wrong number of
the Swiss bank account into which the funds were to have
been deposited, and the money was never used.
Abrams was indicted by the Iran-Contra special
prosecutor for giving false testimony about his trip,
but he pleaded guilty to two lesser offenses of
withholding information to Congress in order to avoid a
trial and a possible jail term. He was pardoned by
president George H W Bush along with a number of other
Iran-Contra defendants in 1992. Nonetheless, his
reputation for truth-telling was severely damaged - so
much so that, for some time after the Iran-Contra affair
broke, he was required to take an oath before testifying
on any matter in Congress. Most analysts believe that he
was given an NSC post by the Bush administration because
it is one of the few high-level foreign policy posts
which do not require Senate confirmation.
After
Reagan left office in 1989, Abrams, like a number of
other prominent neo-conservatives, was not invited to
serve in the far more centrist-minded administration of
Bush Senior. Instead, he worked for a number of think
tanks and eventually became head of the Ethics and
Public Policy Center, a think tank founded by Lafever,
where he wrote and lectured on foreign policy issues,
including the Middle East and China. He also remained an
integral part of the tight-knit, neo-con foreign policy
community in Washington that revolved around Perle,
Wolfowitz, Kirkpatrick, Podhoretz, Kristol and other
luminaries.
Then-House of Representatives
Speaker Newt Gingrich furthered Abrams' public
rehabilitation in 1999 by appointing him to the new US
Commission on International Religious Freedom, for which
he then served as chairman in 2000. Muslim groups that
came before the commission during his tenure complained
on a number of occasions that Abrams refused to
criticize as violations of religious freedom various
controversial Israeli practices in the occupied
territories and Jerusalem, such as sealing off Muslim
holy sites.
At the same time, Abrams' service on
the commission endeared him even more to the Christian
Right, which had sought strong condemnations of
religious persecution of Christians in China, Vietnam,
Egypt, Pakistan and Sudan, among other countries.
Abrams is not known as a Mideast specialist, but
has long favored Likud positions on the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict and even assailed former
Likud prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu for caving into
US pressure to respect the Oslo peace process. Within
just a few weeks of the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa intifada
at the end of September 2000, he sharply criticized
mainstream Jewish groups for calling for a resumption of
peace talks between Arafat's Palestine Authority and
Israel, as well as a halt to the violence.
"After a decade of self-delusion, American Jews
must face up to reality," he wrote at the time. "The
Palestinian leadership does not want peace with Israel,
and there will be no peace ... Let's stop this flight
from reality before it does even more harm to Israel.
Let's stop pushing for more talks and offer instead
something simpler and more valuable: solidarity and
support."
In an article published just before
his first appointment to the NSC, Abrams cited Sharon's
hawkish stance as the best policy, calling it "firmness
and resistance to violence or the threat of violence".
The same article compared Sharon to French president
Charles de Gaulle. In his position as NSC Democracy
chief, Abrams reportedly played an important role in
moving Rice into the Cheney-Rumsfeld camp in the June
decision to demand Arafat's ouster and an overhaul of
the Palestinian Authority as a condition for the
resumption of peace talks between Israel and the
Palestinians. The decision, which echoed Sharon's
demands, infuriated Secretary of State Colin Powell and
caused widespread dismay among Bush Sr's advisers,
notably his former national security adviser, Brent
Scowcroft.
Over the years, Abrams has largely
opposed any US pressure on Israel. As a member, along
with Feith, Perle and Gaffney, of the Committee on US
Interests in the Middle East, a short-lived group of
former Reagan administration officials formed in late
1991, Abrams opposes Bush Sr's Mideast policies, and
particularly his pressure on then-Israeli prime minister
Yitzhak Shamir to take part in the Madrid peace
conference that followed the Gulf War against Iraq and
to make territorial concessions once a peace process got
underway.
"We advocate support for a US policy
toward Israel that would - in contrast to current
American policy - reflect the traditional, strong
American support for the legitimacy, security and
general well-being of the Jewish state: a proven,
valuable democratic friend and ally of the United
States," declared an ad placed by the group in the New
York Times in early 1992. The group was particularly
outraged by secretary of state James Baker's threat to
withhold US$10 billion in housing guarantees unless
Shamir stopped the construction of new settlements in
the occupied territories.
With Abrams overseeing
the flow of paper onto to the president's desk, other
foreign policy players - especially the State
Department, Washington's European allies and even the
old guard around Bush Sr - will find it much more
difficult to get a hearing at the White House. Abrams is
not only zealous in pursuit of his views; by all
accounts, he is also a very canny political operator
with his own network of support both inside and outside
the administration. He also enjoys the strong support
not only from the neo-con network in which he was
nurtured, but also among more mainstream figures,
notably his former boss at the State Department, George
Shultz. "He is a formidable player," said one retired
diplomat.
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