In the wake of the most recent conflict
with Hezbollah, Israel is abuzz with criticism of
the government and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)
for having led the nation to war without achieving
any of its objectives. Many Israelis, including
IDF officers, are also charging that the Bush
administration and US neo-conservatives have been
encouraging Israel to act as the US government's
stalking horse in its grand strategy to create a
"new Middle East" by striking out first against
Hezbollah - and then Syria and
Iran.
In marked
contrast, there is little public debate in the
United States about the Bush administration's
role in supporting Israel's failed and criminal
war in Lebanon. As recent press reports reveal,
President George W Bush and his foreign-policy
team had given Israel a green light to take out
Hezbollah at least two months before Hezbollah
guerrillas kidnapped two Israeli soldiers.
As was the case in US policy toward Iraq,
the neo-conservative camp - led by such institutes
as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI),
Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Center for
Security Policy and the now-defunct Project for
the New American Century (PNAC), and by such
neo-con pundits and strategists as Max Boot,
Charles Krauthammer, Michael Ledeen and Elliott
Abrams - has long promoted that the US and Israel
implement regime change and preemptive strategies
against Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.
As with
the Iraq war, the neo-conservatives inside and
outside the Bush administration have seen their
own causes embraced, to various degrees, by Vice
President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Stephen
Hadley, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and
the president himself.
Outside the
administration the neo-cons have vociferously
pressed for the US government to proceed "faster,
please", as AEI's freedom scholar Michael Ledeen
often says, with its Middle East transformation
strategy. During the recent hostilities, Ledeen
and others, notably Krauthammer, Boot and William
Kristol, have advocated that the US and Israel
take the war to Syria and Iran.
Since he
joined the Bush administration in 2002 as the
chief Middle East adviser at the White House's
National Security Council (NSC), Abrams has
quietly pushed for a transformational Middle East
policy with Israel at its center. If one US
official were to be blamed - aside from the
president, vice president and secretary of state -
for the US government's disastrous stance with
Israel in the recent war, it would be Abrams.
Perhaps more than any other member of Bush's
foreign-policy team, Abrams embodies the
administration's zealous, ideological and
dangerously delusional vision of US foreign policy
in the Middle East.
Abrams, a
neo-conservative who has dedicated himself to
reshaping US foreign policy since the mid-1970s,
is the Bush administration's point man for Middle
East transformation. According to Seymour Hersh
writing in the August 21 New Yorker, Cheney's
foreign-policy staff and Abrams in early summer
had signed off on an Israeli plan to wipe out
Hezbollah.
During the first George W Bush
administration, Abrams was the NSC chief of Middle
Eastern and Northern African Affairs. "I have
two-thirds of the axis of evil," he boasted,
according to a New Yorker essay (February 10,
2005). Abrams wears two hats in the second Bush
administration, serving as the chief of the
president's "Global Democracy Strategy" and also
serving as a top deputy to National Security
Adviser Hadley. Although closely involved in all
Middle East policy, Abrams' official NSC role is
addressing "Israeli-Palestinian" affairs. But
Abrams has long insisted on referring to
Israel-Palestine tensions as an "Israel-Arab"
conflict that is artfully disguised as a
self-determination conflict.
As he has
done in the past, Abrams has either preceded or
accompanied Rice on her trips to the Middle East -
where the main destination is Jerusalem. After
more than a week watching Israel unleash its might
against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Abrams went to
Jerusalem in late July as part of a three-person
high-level delegation led by Rice and also
including C David Welch, a career diplomat who is
assistant secretary of state for Near East
affairs.
Although he has spent most of his
time in Jerusalem over the past several weeks,
Abrams has shuttled back and forth from Washington
and has played a central role in holding together
the neo-conservative-militarist Washington
consensus on Israel-Arab/Iran policy.
Bush's choice of Abrams as his top Middle
East expert and the administration's point man in
the current war speaks volumes about the
president's own views on "global democracy" and
Middle East affairs. Bush's selection of Abrams to
play a leading role in two key aspects of the
administration's aggressive foreign policy -
US-led democratization and Middle East
transformation - also points to the White House's
high comfort level with the foreign-policy agenda
promoted by the neo-conservative camp.
Neo-conservative and
neo-Reaganite Abrams, a proud self-declared
"neo-conservative and neo-Reaganite", is the
son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter,
an activist couple who played a leading role in
establishing neo-conservatism as an influential
political tendency in the 1970s.
There's
no doubting Abrams' neo-conservative and
neo-Reaganite credentials. Like many other
second-generation neo-cons, Abrams got his
political start as a member of the right-wing
Social Democrats USA and as legal counsel to the
hawkish and avidly pro-Israel senator Henry
"Scoop" Jackson (1912-83). In the late 1970s,
Abrams worked with other right-wing Democrats in
the Coalition for a Democratic Majority as part of
an unsuccessful attempt to turn the post-Vietnam
War Democratic Party back toward hardline
anti-communism, and then along with other Cold
Warrior Democrats became Republicans and
supporters of Ronald Reagan.
When not in
government service, Abrams has been affiliated
with key neo-conservative institutes and pressure
groups, including the Ethics and Public Policy
Center, PNAC, Center for Security Policy,
Committee for US Interests in the Middle East,
Committee for the Free World, and the Nicaraguan
Resistance Foundation.
As a Reaganite,
Abrams served in president Ronald Reagan's State
Department, in the first term as assistant
secretary of state for human rights and then as
assistant secretary for inter-American affairs. As
a State Department diplomat, Abrams helped
coordinate illegal government support for the
Nicaraguan Contras, known by Reaganites as
"freedom fighters", and worked with
Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North to triangulate
arms sales through Israel to Iran with the
proceeds channeled to the Nicaraguan Contras - an
illegal operation about which he falsely denied
knowledge in congressional testimony, resulting in
his criminal conviction.
During the Reagan
administration, Abrams was 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. Abrams worked closely with Otto Reich,
who directed the White House's Office of Public
Diplomacy, which was in charge of disseminating
"white propaganda" to the US public, media and
policymakers to build support for the Reagan
administration's interventionist policies in Latin
America and elsewhere.
Before joining the
George W Bush administration, Abrams served as the
first chairman of the US Commission on Religious
Freedom, a government commission established at
the initiative of House majority leader Newt
Gingrich and a coalition of neo-conservatives and
Christian Right organizations.
Regarding
Abrams' biased stance on Middle East affairs, Dr
Laila al-Marayati, a former member of the US
Commission on International Religious Freedom,
wrote:
From the vantage point of the [US
Commission on International Religious Freedom],
as an American and as a Muslim, I had the
unfortunate opportunity of witnessing - clearly
and unequivocally - the deep bias that Abrams
brings to his new position ... As chairman of
the commission at the time, Abrams led the
delegation to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but did
not go to Jerusalem with three of us as he was
of the opinion that there are no problems with
religious freedom in Israel that would warrant
the attention of the commission ... Bypassing
Israel was not the only way Abrams undermined
the commission's visit to the Middle East ...
Abrams managed to snub the leading Islamic
cleric in Egypt ... which nearly created a
diplomatic nightmare that was only narrowly
averted by the intervention of the US
ambassador.
'Peace through
strength' in the Middle East As part of
his neo-Reaganite identity, Abrams in the 1990s
argued for a renewal of Ronald Reagan's "peace
through strength" foreign policy, particularly in
the Middle East. In 1992, Abrams helped form the
Committee for US Interests in the Middle East,
which was actually a committee to ensure that US
policy was aligned with the Likud Party in Israel.
Other members included Richard Perle,
Douglas Feith, Frank Gaffney and John Lehman,
among dozens of other neo-conservatives and
pro-Israel hawks. The committee spoke out against
what it perceived was a dangerous distancing
between the Bush administration and Israel,
evident in its pressure for Israel to pull out of
some occupied territories and halt its campaign to
expand settlements in these zones. "Mr President,
we don't agree that the current policy of
antagonism toward Israel is in the US national
interest."
A charter member of the Project
for the New American Century, Abrams signed all
PNAC statements published before 2001, including
two calling for regime-change strategy in Iraq,
before he joined the Bush administration. In 2000,
Abrams participated in the ad hoc Lebanon Study
Group, which was jointly sponsored by the Middle
East Forum and the US Committee for a Free
Lebanon. The group called for the US to rid Syria
of its alleged weapons of mass destruction,
initiate strict sanctions against Syria and for
Syria to remove its troops from Lebanon.
Also in 2000, Abrams authored a chapter in
a PNAC volume titled "Present Dangers" that was
designed as a policy blueprint for the incoming
president. "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 US Middle East policy, and we
should not permit the establishment of a
Palestinian state that does not explicitly uphold
US policy in the region," he asserted.
Presaging the Middle East policy of the
George W Bush administration, Abrams wrote that US
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'."
In his writings in Commentary,
the neo-conservative magazine of the American
Jewish Committee, Abrams expressed his support for
right-wing Likud positions, including those of
prime ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel
Sharon. Abrams has consistently rejected any "land
for peace" formula for Israel-Palestinian
negotiations, calling the Oslo Accords an
"illusion" and criticizing the "policy of
concessions" of the Israeli government. What is
more, Abrams, who has family members living in
Israel, has repeatedly called for the US to back
publicly Israel's sovereignty claims over
Jerusalem by moving the US Embassy from Tel Aviv
to Jerusalem.
Peace in the Middle East,
according to Abrams, will be the product of
Israeli and US military strength. In October 2000,
Abrams wrote: "After a decade of self-delusion,
American Jews must face up to reality. The
Palestinian leadership does not want peace with
Israel and there will be no peace." Criticizing
dovish American Jewish organizations for
supporting the "peace process", Abrams advocated a
tough response and wrote that "years of US
pressure on Israel must end".
After
Sharon's election as prime minister, Abrams wrote
that Sharon embodied a new approach "of firmness
and resistance to violence or the threat of
violence". Abrams likened the return of Sharon to
head the Israeli government as similar to the
return of Winston Churchill to government when
Britain's survival was threatened.
There's
no doubt that Abrams is an ardent proponent of
Israel and a fierce critic of Hezbollah in the
enfolding Middle East crisis. On a trip back to
Washington from Israel late last month, Abrams
briefed a delegation of Jewish organizations
seeking assurance that the US administration would
unconditionally back Israel. On July 20, Abrams,
who serves unofficially as the US president's
liaison to Jewish organizations on Middle East
issues, told the delegation that Hezbollah was "a
monster that needs to be dealt with".
Abrams' strong opinions extend to the
religious and national identity of US Jews. A
radical separatist, Abrams argues that Jews should
not date or attend elementary schools with
non-Jews. According to Abrams, "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."
Abrams takes care to insist
that his positions imply no "disloyalty" to the
United States, but at the same time 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."
Ideologue turns diplomat
Outside Washington, particularly in the
Muslim world, it might seem that the US government
is unified around its support for Israel's
military campaigns in Gaza and Lebanon. However,
traditional fissures between the militarists and
the neo-conservatives, on one side, and the
diplomats and the realists, on the other, belie
the apparent unity in support for Israel.
This divide cuts right through the Bush
administration's three-person team that is
managing the US response to the crisis. A New York
Times report (August 10), "Rice's hurdles on
Middle East begin at home", noted that Rice had
been accompanied in the Middle East "by two men
with different outlooks on the conflict", namely
Abrams and the State Department's David Welch.
According to the Times, "Mr Abrams, a
neo-conservative with strong ties to Mr Cheney,
has pushed the administration to throw its support
behind Israel" and during Rice's travels Abrams
had "kept in direct contact with Mr Cheney's
office".
One administration official told
the Times that Welch and Abrams served as
"counterfoils", with Abrams "articulating the
Israeli stance".
While Bush's supporters
on the right are generally pleased with the
administration's strong backing of the Israeli
position, many criticize the State Department and
Rice. Leading the attack is Richard Perle, who
along with the former Department of Defense under
secretary for policy, Douglas Feith, has worked
with Abrams since the mid-1970s when both advised
senator Jackson. In a Washington Post op-ed
(June 25) that served to coalesce conservative
forces against Rice, Perle wrote that, having
moved from the National Security Council to the
State Department, Rice was "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".
A month later, an article
titled "Dump Condi" (July 25) in Insight magazine,
a publication of the Washington Times and written
by its editors, approvingly reported:
"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." All
of Rice's main critics, who include Newt Gingrich
and William Kristol, charge that Iran is taking
advantage of Rice's inexperience and incompetence,
as well as the State Department's purported
tradition of "appeasement".
Abrams' close
association with Rice - when he worked under her
at the National Security Council during Bush's
first term and more recently as one of the
secretary of state's top Middle East advisers -
has raised questions among conservatives about his
ideological integrity. When Sharon advocated
unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip, many
neo-conservatives, Christian Zionists and
national-security radicals were critical, along
with such radical Likudniks as former prime
minister Netanyahu, while Abrams voiced support
for Sharon's initiatives.
However, those
close to Abrams have never doubted him. When
conservatives started wondering if he was
capitulating to conservative moderates like Rice
and to the State Department "appeasers" during
Bush's first term, then-defense under secretary
Feith and Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum
told those in the pro-Israel community to hold
their fire - that Abrams knew that what he was
doing was in the best interests of Israel.
Working inside government, both during the
Reagan and George W Bush administrations, Abrams
has proved adept at advancing his own radical
policy agendas through all key departments of the
executive branch. With his own neo-conservative,
pro-Israel credentials well established, Abrams
has focused on the pragmatic implementation of
policy agendas rather than holding fast to
ideological positions. A senior Bush
administration official told the New York Times:
"The genius of Elliott Abrams is that he's Elliott
Abrams. How can he be accused of not sufficiently
supporting Israel?"
A novice in Middle
East affairs, Rice - while national security
adviser and currently as secretary of state - has
relied on Abrams for his unnuanced view of Middle
East affairs. A friend of Rice told The New
Yorker: "She sees 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."
Abrams is a neo-conservative ideologue who
as a government operative has turned ideology into
strategy and policy. But are his instincts and
vision for the Middle East in keeping with US
national interests and Mideast realities? Richard
John Neuhaus, a longtime Abrams colleague since
the 1970s and fellow neo-conservative, 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."
In his dual role as chief of the
White House's global democracy initiative and as
NSC deputy adviser, Abrams is well positioned to
ensure that his radical ideas about a US-led
democracy crusade and about an Israel-centric
Middle East determine the directions of US foreign
policy - the former providing a moral cover for
the latter.
But Abrams and others in the
Bush administration are finding that its
"democratic globalist" and "power through
strength" ideologies are badly backfiring.
As part of his job spearheading what the
US president calls the "global democratic
revolution", Abrams helped organize a Washington
meeting for Iranian dissidents, coincidentally on
the same day he ensured representatives of Jewish
organizations that the Bush administration would
continue its virtually unqualified support of
Israel.
But most of the invited Iranian
dissidents brushed off the invitation, saying that
US government involvement in Iranian affairs
undermined the struggle for democracy. Akbar
Ganji, who had been imprisoned by the Iranian
government in 2000, declined the White House's
invitation, saying that such meetings undermined
the credibility of the Iranian opposition. In a
speech in Washington, Ganji said that the war in
Iraq had fostered the growth of Islamic
fundamentalism and hampered the democracy movement
in the Middle East.
The "peace through
strength" vision of spreading pax Americana
and ensuring Israel's security has proved illusory
and wrong-headed. Rather than ridding the region
of an anti-Israel and anti-US regime, the invasion
and occupation of Iraq supported by Abrams and
other neo-con ideologues have created a new
breeding ground for non-state Islamic terrorists
and a state that shows signs of becoming part of a
new anti-Israel bloc in the region.
Meanwhile, the US-backed Israeli campaign
to hunt down other declared monsters - Hezbollah,
Hamas, Iran and Syria - may indeed lead to a new
Middle East, but one in which Israel is much less
secure and the United States still more hated.
Tom Barry is policy director of
the International Relations Center.
(Published with permission of the International
Relations Center
)
