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2 Rice faces formidable White House
foe By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - If, as she insists, US
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is determined
to make concrete progress toward achieving
President George W Bush's vision of a two-state
solution to the Israel-Palestine question, one in
which Israel would be required to make major
territorial concessions, it appears that she faces
a major foe in the White House.
No, not
only Vice President Dick Cheney and the surviving
members of the neo-conservative clique that
surrounded him and
former Pentagon chief Donald
Rumsfeld during Bush's first term - although the
Vice President's Office remains a formidable force
against any concessions to a Palestinian
government of national unity that includes Hamas,
despite Saudi Arabia's role in midwifing its birth
at Mecca last week.
Rather, it appears
that Rice's own chief Middle East aide when she
served as Bush's national security adviser,
Elliott Abrams, has become the principal foil in
frustrating her efforts to resume a peace process.
Until her meeting in Jerusalem last
weekend with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, the
process had been frozen since the last days of US
president Bill Clinton's administration.
Abrams' personal influence over Bush could
not possibly match Rice's, but his bureaucratic
skills and political connections - notably to the
so-called "Israel lobby" of pro-Likud Jewish
organizations and the Christian Right - give him
considerable clout. According to various sources,
Abrams has been working systematically to
undermine any prospect for serious negotiations
designed to give substance to Rice's hopes - and
increasingly impatient demands by King Abdullah of
Saudi Arabia - of offering the Palestinians a
"political horizon" for a final settlement.
"The Bush administration has done nothing
to press Israel to deliver on its commitments,
beyond Washington's empty rhetoric about a
two-state 'political horizon'," Henry Siegman, the
longtime director of the US/Middle East Project at
the influential Council on Foreign Relations,
wrote in the International Herald Tribune just
last week.
"Every time there emerged the
slightest hint that the United States may finally
engage seriously in a political process, Elliott
Abrams would meet secretly with Olmert's envoys in
Europe or elsewhere to reassure them that there
exists no such danger," Siegman complained.
After the resignation of Cheney's chief of
staff, I Lewis Libby, and the departure from the
Pentagon nearly two years ago of Paul Wolfowitz
and Douglas Feith, Abrams became the US
administration's most influential
neo-conservative, particularly regarding Middle
East policy, which he oversees as deputy national
security adviser for global democracy strategy.
Abrams was an early protege of Richard
Perle, whom he first met, along with other
prominent pro-Likud hardliners such as Feith,
former ambassador to the United Nations Jeane
Kirkpatrick, and Weekly Standard editor William
Kristol, while working in the offices of Henry
"Scoop" Jackson, Democratic US senator for
Washington state from 1953 until his death in
1983. Abrams rose swiftly through the
neo-conservative ranks, even becoming a member of
one of its most influential families as the
son-in-law of the legendary editor of Commentary,
Norman Podhoretz, and his activist wife, Midge
Decter, who herself published a hagiography of
Rumsfeld just after the invasion of Iraq.
Like his fellow-neo-cons, Abrams has never
trusted "peace processes", and not just between
Israel and its Arab neighbors. During the
mid-1980s, when he served as the top Latin America
policymaker in president Ronald Reagan's State
Department, he worked doggedly to scuttle all
regional diplomatic efforts to stop not only
Washington's "contra war" against Nicaragua's
Sandinista government (which, among other things,
he charged with anti-Semitism) and the civil war
in El Salvador, but even in southern Africa, where
Cuban troops helped defend Angola against attacks
by South Africa and its proxies.
"He
opposed regional peace talks, he opposed bilateral
talks between the United States and Nicaragua, and
he opposed talks with Cuba," said William
LeoGrande, dean of American University's School of
Public Affairs and author of In Our
Backyard, a magisterial work on US Central
America policy.
"He wouldn't negotiate
with adversaries, even when negotiations promised
to safeguard US interests," LeoGrande said, citing
the eventual deal that resulted in Cuba's
withdrawal from Africa in exchange for Namibian
independence. "He insisted on total victory, as if
foreign policy were a moral crusade in which
compromise was anathema."
Badly damaged by
his felony conviction for lying to Congress about
his role in the Iran-Contra affair, Abrams, like
many neo-cons, left government service under the
decidedly "realist" administration of president
George H W Bush and spent the 1990s at various
think tanks. There, he helped forge the coalition
- epitomized by Kristol's Project for the New
American Century of which he was a charter member
- of mainly Jewish neo-conservatives, the
Christian and Catholic Right, and aggressive
nationalists that would seize control of US policy
after the terror attacks of September 2001.
On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
Abrams has long been identified with his hardline
patrons, such as Perle and Podhoretz, who have
strongly opposed the "land for peace" formula
that, until the younger Bush, had been official US
policy since 1967.
When the elder Bush
pressed Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir to
participate in the Madrid peace conference after
the first Gulf War, Abrams and dozens of other
neo-conservatives organized the Committee on US
Interests in the Middle East to lobby against such
an effort.
Throughout the 1990s, Abrams
denounced the Oslo peace process in the strongest
terms - a Likud government was engaged in it. When
Palestinians launched the second intifada in
September 2000, he lambasted mainstream US Jewish
groups for their continued support for peace talks
between Israel and the Palestinian Authority as
"self-delusion". "The Palestinian leadership," he
wrote, "does not want peace with Israel, and there
will be no peace."
Politically unable,
because of his Iran-Contra conviction, to gain
Senate confirmation to a State Department or
Pentagon post, Abrams entered the George W Bush
administration as a National Security Council
(NSC) staffer under Rice in 2001 with
responsibility for democracy promotion. But in a
major coup that set off celebrations in Rumsfeld's
and Cheney's offices, he was given the Middle East
portfolio in December 2002.
In that
capacity, he forged close ties to Dov Weisglass
and Shalom Turgeman, two of Israeli prime minister
Ariel Sharon's top aides. Together, the three men
established a direct channel between Sharon's
office and Rice's NSC that in effect excluded
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