[A-List] US imperialism: Middle East

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Bush's trusty new Mideast point man
By Jim Lobe
Asia Times, December 19 2002

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.