Elliott Abrams

In his new position, Abrams will oversee the administration’s promotion of democracy and human rights while continuing to provide oversight to the National Security Council’s directorate of Near East and North African affairs, which covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

During the first Bush administration, the White House kept Abrams out of the public limelight. When he was appointed to the National Security Council (NSC), first as chief human rights officer and then as the NSC’s senior director of Near East and North Africa Affairs, the White House told the media that Abrams was unavailable for interviews.

There is less reticence this time around. Even before just-departed Secretary of State Colin Powell started clearing his desk in Foggy Bottom, Abrams was hitting the road last November in Europe to promote the Sharon-Bush plan to resolve what he calls the “Israel-Arab” conflict.

Abrams has also become a key proponent of the “freedom and democracy” policy that Bush highlighted during his State of the Union Address. Hours before Bush’s Inaugural, the White House announced that Abrams would serve as his 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 National Security Council. In his announcement of Abrams’ new position, Hadley said that Abrams is one of the administration’s strongest and most consistent advocates of American strength and the expansion of freedom worldwide.

Abrams has served as Rice’s point man on Israel. Prior to her first trip to Israel as secretary of state, Abrams met with Prime Minister Sharon’s top adviser, Dov Weisglass, to establish the parameters of the Rice-Sharon meetings.

In November Abrams participated in an hour-plus meeting in the Oval Office with the president and Natan Sharansky, Israel’s minister for Jerusalem and diaspora affairs. Sharansky, the author of The Case for Freedom, subsequently met with Rice. Both Bush and Rice have repeatedly referred to Sharansky’s book in their pronouncements about the U.S. government’s new commitment to ending tyranny and spreading democracy, frequently using the same phrasing as Sharansky. 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 neoconservatives. After Jackson’s failure to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Abrams joined the staff of Sen. Patrick Moynihan, and later became his chief of staff.

Also in November, Abrams led conference calls with the leaders of the major national Jewish American organizations in advance of formal meetings with Rice. According to reports from one meeting that included representatives from such organizations as American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Rice assured the Jewish American leaders that the 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 be backing away from its previous commitments to Israeli security.

Rice also explained that the Abrams’ visits with the heads of European governments in November did not signify that President Bush was backtracking in his support for Israel as part of a “price” to improve U.S.-European relations. “I hope that everyone understands by now that you don’t extract a price from this president,” Rice said. (21)

One of the reasons that pundits and analysts have such a difficult time defining neoconservatism is that this closely-knit political camp has multiple faces and historical roots.

These include the Trotskyist roots of many of the leading neoconservatives; their close links to the Cold Warriors of the Democratic Party in the 1970s, especially Henry “Scoop” Jackson; their pivotal role in challenging the moderate threat assessments of the CIA through Team B and the Committee on the Present Danger; their influence in shaping the foreign policy of the Reagan administration; their pivotal role in promoting “democratization” and the formation of the National Endowment of Democracy (NED); their key role in forging backlash coalitions against the counterculture and progressive Democrats; their advocacy of the militarist policies of the Likud Party in Israel; and their creation or reshaping of an array of right-wing policy institutes, front groups, and think tanks that address domestic policy, military policy, and cultural and religious issues.

Today, the neoconservatives are best known for their success in setting and implementing the national security agenda of the Bush presidency.

Perhaps more than any other neoconservative, Abrams has integrated the various influences that have shaped today’s neoconservative agenda. A creature of the neoconservative incubator, Abrams is a political intellectual and operative who has consistently advanced the neoconservative agenda with chutzpah and considerable success.

As a government representative, Abrams organized front groups to provide private and clandestine official support for the Contras; served as the president of an ethics institute despite his own record of lying to Congress and managing illegal operations; rose to high positions in the National Security Council to oversee U.S. foreign policy in regions where he had no professional experience, only ideological positions; proved himself as a political intellectual in books and essays that explore the interface between orthodox Judaism, American culture, and political philosophy; and demonstrated his considerable talents in public diplomacy as a political art in the use of misinformation and propaganda to ensure public and policy support for foreign relations agendas that would otherwise be soundly rejected.

Abrams has moved back and forth between government and the right’s 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 neocon camp in the 1990s.

His family ties have helped propel Abrams 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. As a member of the Podhoretz-Decter clan (the other key family is the Kristol clan), Abrams became a frequent contributor to Commentary and Norman Podhoretz’s choice to direct the magazine’s symposiums on foreign policy. As one of the leading neocons in the Reagan administration, Abrams also served as a liaison between government and the right wing’s network, as exemplified by his appearances at the forums organized by Midge 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.” (22)

As an aide to Sen. Henry “Scoop” 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 in a group of Cold Warriors called the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which was associated with the Democratic Party and led by the neoconservatives.

Among former members of Jackson’s staff to find positions in the Reagan administration’s foreign policy team were such neoconservative operatives as Douglas Feith, Richard 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 director of the State Department’s Office for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. But 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 Carter’s human rights policy. Lefever’s dubious credentials as a human rights advocate came in part from the white paper “The Trivialization of Human Rights,” published in 1978 by the neoconservative Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC). Abrams was also closely associated with the EPPC at the time, and would later—in 1996—go onto serve as its president.

An embarrassing conflict of interest between his EPPC and Nestle Corp., which had contributed $35,000 to this think tank, resulted in such bad publicity that the administration withdrew his nomination. In an article in Fortune magazine, Lefever attacked Nestle’s critics, who charged that the corporation’s aggressive marketing of its infant powdered-milk formula in the third world was causing a new surge in infant death, as “Marxists marching under the banner of Christ.” (23)

The Senate then confirmed Elliott 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.

Abrams pleaded guilty to two lesser offenses (including withholding information from Congress) to avoid a trial and a possible jail term. He and five other Iran-Contra figures were pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992, shortly before the senior Bush left office. By pardoning Abrams, John Poindexter, and other former Reagan officials, Bush was in effect protecting himself. At that time media and congressional investigations of the Iran-Contra scandal were threatening to expose the role of Bush himself, who was Reagan’s vice president during the executive branch’s program of illegal support to the Nicaraguan Contras.

Throughout the proceedings, Abrams kept up a stream of denials of his knowledge of the National Security Council and CIA programs to support the Contras. He even had the temerity to blame Congress for the deaths of two U.S. military crew members who were shot down by the Sandinistas in an illegal and clandestine arms supply operation over Nicaragua. He described the legal proceedings against him as “Kafkaesque” and called his prosecutors “filthy bastards” and “vipers.” (17) (18) (24)

In his book Reagan, Bush, and Right-Wing Politics, Philip Burch underscores Abrams’s unapologetic attitude regarding the excesses of the war in Nicaragua. “A few years after he stepped down as assistant secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Abrams, once the State Department’s top human rights official, wrote an article on El Salvador in the National Review titled ‘An American Victory;’ at the end of this piece he proudly proclaimed that ‘El Salvador’s decade of guerilla war cost thousands of Salvadoran lives, and those of eight Americans. The violence is ending now in part because of the collapse of Communism throughout the world, but more because Communist efforts to take power by force were resisted and defeated. In this small corner of the Cold War, American policy was right, and it was successful.’ Perhaps Mr. Abrams should read Mark Danner’s The Massacre at El Mozote (which contains an appendix giving name, age, and gender for almost every one of the 784 people killed in this grizzly episode [perpetrated by the Salvadoran Army’s Atacatl Battalion, a U.S.-trained counterinsurgency force]).” (20)

During the Reagan administration, Abrams also served as the government’s nexus between the militarists in the National Security Council and the public-diplomacy operatives in the State Department, White House, and National Endowment for Democracy (NED). NED supported the creation of a series of neoconservative-controlled front groups that sought bipartisan and U.S. public support for an interventionist policy in Central America, which was part of the larger rollback policy advocated by groups such as the Committee on the Present Danger and the Coalition for Peace through Strength. One of the most prominent of these NED-financed front groups was the Project for Democracy in Central America (PRODEMCA), which merged the hard (military) and soft (political aid and public diplomacy) sides of the neoconservative agenda in Central America. On the one hand, it received clandestine support from the unofficial “Project Democracy” of the National Security Council, operated by Oliver North and supervised by Elliott Abrams. On the other hand, it received USAID and U.S. Information Agency funding through NED for public diplomacy efforts. (25)

After Reagan left office in 1989, Abrams, like a number of other prominent neoconservatives, was not invited to serve in the Bush Sr. administration. Instead, he worked for a number of think tanks and in 1996 became president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. With EPCC as his new base, Abrams wrote widely on foreign policy issues, especially on Middle East policy, and on cultural issues, including about the threats posed by U.S. secular society to Jewish identity.

Created in 1976, EPPC was the first neocon institute to break ground in the frontal attack on the secular humanists. For nearly three decades, EPPC has functioned as the cutting edge of the neoconservative-driven culture war against progressive theology and secularism, and the associated effort to ensure right-wing control of the Republican Party. It explicitly sought to unify the Christian right with the neoconservative religious right, which was mostly made up of agnostics back then. A central part of its political project was to “clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy.” Directed by Elliott Abrams from 1996-2001, EPPC counts among its board members well-connected figures in the neocon matrix including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Neuhaus, and Mary Ann Glendon.

Abrams remained an integral part of the tight-knit neoconservative foreign policy community in Washington that revolved around one of his early mentors, Richard Perle, and former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). In the early 1990s, Abrams together with several AEI associates formed the Committee on the U.S. Interests in the Middle East, which denounced land concessions as part of any deal with the Palestinians and opposed President Bush’s efforts to engage Israel in the Madrid peace conference. (30)

Abrams was also a charter member of the Project for the New American Century, which issued its statement of principles about the need for a “neo-Reaganite” foreign policy in 1997.

While serving as EPCC president, Abrams advocated using human rights as a “policy tool” of the U.S. government. Working closely with Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress, EPCC together with the Christian Coalition and Family Research Council lobbied for the creation of a new permanent commission that focused on religious persecution. The main countries of concern listed in the congressional deliberations were China, Sudan, North Korea, Cuba, Laos, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia, as well as general condemnation of Muslim nations. Abrams became a founding member of the commission and served as its chairman until mid-2001, when he joined the Bush administration.

Like the right-wing social conservative networks that argued for the creation of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the commission has served to shift the primary consideration of U.S. human rights policy from a respect for political rights to the treatment of religious minorities, especially in countries that have long captured the attention of social conservatives such as China and Sudan.

When Abrams was appointed to be the Reagan’s administration point man on Latin America, he came to the State Department with no expertise in the region and did not speak Spanish. Similarly, Abrams became the NSC’s Middle East specialist without any expertise in the region—other than his family ties to Israel, his polemical writings for neoconservative publications, and his right-wing Zionism. He could count on some inside knowledge of Middle East intrigue based on his experience overseeing the Iran-Contra arms trade in which Israel functioned as the major broker.

Abrams has long voiced his strong support for Likud positions on the Oslo peace process and “land for peace” negotiations. After the launch of the al-Aqsa Intifada in late September 2000, Abrams lambasted mainstream Jewish groups for their continued support for peace talks between the Palestinian Authority and for their call to Israel to halt its attacks. (26)

Abrams rejects the peace process in the Middle East as a policy of appeasement. His Likudnik positions on Israeli-Palestinian tensions and Middle East restructuring are well established in his writings in Commentary and his books. Abrams authored the chapter on the Middle East in the 2000 blueprint for U.S. foreign policy by the Project for the New American Century. Edited by PNAC founders William Kristol and Robert Kagan, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy is a chapter-by-chapter playbook on how to deal with America’s current and future adversaries.

In his chapter on the Middle East, Elliott Abrams laid out the “peace through strength” credo that has become the operating principle of the Bush administration. “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 U.S. Middle East policy, and we should not permit the establishment of a Palestinian state that does not explicitly uphold U.S. policy in the region,” he asserted. Presaging the Middle East policy of the George W. Bush administration, Abrams wrote: U.S. 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’.” Like other right-wing Zionists, Abrams refers to the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis not for what it is—a conflict over occupied Palestinian land—but rather as an “Arab-Israel” conflict, implying that U.S. support of Israel necessitates a foreign policy that confronts all the Arab countries. (27)

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 support the “peace process,” Abrams advocated a tough response and wrote that “years of U.S. pressure on Israel must end.” Following Ariel 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 Israel government as similar to the return of Winston Churchill to government when Great Britain’s survival was threatened.

Abrams was appointed in December 2002 to be President Bush’s director of Near East and Northern African Affairs at the National Security Council, replacing Zalmay Khalilzad, another charter signatory of the Project for the New American Century who became the president’s special envoy to Afghanistan. (28) “I have two-thirds of the axis of evil,” Abrams remarked after his appointment, referring to Iran and Iraq being in his portfolio. (30)

Working closely with Douglas Feith, Abrams quickly became the leading behind-the-scenes actor in managing the administration’s policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. In the process, he sidelined the Middle East experts in the NSC, CIA, and State Department regarded by the neocons as “Arabists.” Robert Leverett, an Arabic speaking Middle East specialist on loan to the NSC, was forced out of the NSC after expressing his opinion that the administration should stick by its proposed “road map” for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations rather than yielding to the hard-line positions of Prime Minister Sharon, AIPAC, and Abrams.

In one of the many oddities of the Christian Right-neoconservative alliance that bolsters the Republican Party and forms a backbone of the Bush II administration, many neocon government officials are radical separatists, indeed segregationists. As Elliott Abrams, who argues against Jews dating or attending elementary schools with non-Jews, puts it: “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.”

Judaism, according to Abrams, demands “apartness”—not in the sense of confining oneself to a physical ghetto, but all necessary measures should be taken to prevent “prolonged and intimate exposure to non-Jewish culture.” Abrams takes care to insist that his positions imply no “disloyalty” to the United States, but at the same times 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.”(29) In his controversial book, Faith and Fear: How Jews Can Survive in Christian America, Abrams describes himself as a “somewhat observant Conservative Jew.”

Abrams has written various books, including Undue Process,Security and Sacrifice, and Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America. He has also contributed articles to Commentary, the Weekly Standard, the National Interest, the Public Interest, and the National Review.