AmericasProgramGlobalAffairs
FPIFPresentDanger
GlobalGoodNeighborRightWeb
RightWeb
ProfilesFeaturesAbout
Publications
BookStoreRightWebNews
SupportIRCSubscribeSearch
SiteMap
RSSFeed
/
Elliott Abrams
Deputy National Security Adviser Project for the New American Century: Founding Member
Ethics and PublicPolicyCenter: Former President /
/ Top of Form
Right Web News
Bottom of Form
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 e-mails 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).
For observers of Abrams, a well-known figure from the Reagan era who was convicted (and later pardoned) on charges related to the Iran-Contra scandal, the e-mails were part of a typical strategy, an effort to impact policy using behind-the-scenes tactics that don't reveal his role. It is a tactic that Abrams, described by the Washington Post as "a legendary bureaucratic infighter and outspoken neoconservative," has often used since his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. During that affair, Abrams fought a rearguard effort within the 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).
Although his portfolio in President George W. Bush's National Security Council (NSC) involves democracy promotion abroad, Abrams is widely regarded as being one of the key champions of the neoconservative line on foreign affairs, shunning negotiations in favor of confrontational, militaristic U.S. policies. One of his major targets has been Middle East policy, serving as a point person for policies related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and pushing a hardline stance on Iran, Syria, and Iraq. And just as he did during the Contra wars, Abrams seemed to use his perch in the NSC to fight efforts by some administration officials and members of Congress aimed at pushing diplomatic approaches to Middle East issues. As the Inter Press Service reported in early April 2007: "Just as [Abrams] worked with Reagan hardliners to undermine the Arias Plan [for Central America] 20 years ago, so 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" (see Jim Lobe, " Elliott Abrams' Repeat Performance," Right Web, April 17, 2007).
When he was appointed to the NSC during President George W. Bush's first term, first as chief human rights officer and then as senior director of Near East and North African Affairs, the White House told the media that Abrams was unavailable for interviews. Yet his gusto for the post was clear: "Iran and Iraq were part of his portfolio—'I have two-thirds of the axis of evil!' he enthused to one well-wisher" (New Yorker, December 15, 2003).
Hours before Bush's second inauguration in January 2005, the White House announced that Abrams would serve as Bush's 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 when she was adviser. In his announcement of Abrams's new position, Hadley called Abrams one of the administration's strongest and most consistent advocates of American strength and the expansion of freedom worldwide.
Abrams is a key proponent of the "freedom and democracy" policy that Bush highlighted during his 2005 State of the Union Address, and has been an important figure in dealings with Israel. Prior to Rice's first trip to Israel as secretary of state, Abrams met with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's top adviser, Dov Weisglass, to establish the parameters of the Rice-Sharon 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 mid-1970s, 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 three-person 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 self-described "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 Podhoretz-Decter 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 up-and-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 scandal-free, 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.