Hunting Monsters with Elliott Abrams
An important article by Tom Barry of the International Relations Centre
A Centre-Left Think Tank based in New Mexico
In the wake of the most recent Israel-Hezbollah conflict, Israel is abuzz with criticism of the government and the Israeli Defense Forces 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 U.S. neoconservatives have been encouraging Israel to act as the U.S. 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 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 U.S. policy toward Iraq, the neoconservative 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 and by such neocon pundits and strategists as Max Boot, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Ledeen, and Elliott Abrams—has long promoted that the United States and Israel implement regime change and preemptive strategies against Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran.
Also like the Iraq War, the neoconservatives 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 neocons have vociferously pressed for the U.S. government to proceed “faster, please,” as AEI's Freedom Scholar Michael Leeden 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 United States 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, Elliott Abrams has quietly pushed for a transformational Middle East policy with Israel at its center. If one U.S. official were to be blamed—aside from the president, vice president, and secretary of state—for the U.S. government's disastrous stance with Israel in the recent war, it would be Elliot 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 U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
Abrams, a neoconservative who has dedicated himself to reshaping U.S. 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 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 (Feb. 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 in the past, Abrams has either preceded or accompanied Secretary of State Condoleezza 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 neoconservative-militarist Washington consensus on Israel-Arab/Iran policy.
Bush's choice of Elliott 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—U.S.-led democratization and Middle East transformation—also points to the White House's high comfort level with the foreign policy agenda promoted by the neoconservative camp.
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A Centre-Left Think Tank based in New Mexico
In the wake of the most recent Israel-Hezbollah conflict, Israel is abuzz with criticism of the government and the Israeli Defense Forces 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 U.S. neoconservatives have been encouraging Israel to act as the U.S. 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 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 U.S. policy toward Iraq, the neoconservative 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 and by such neocon pundits and strategists as Max Boot, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Ledeen, and Elliott Abrams—has long promoted that the United States and Israel implement regime change and preemptive strategies against Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran.
Also like the Iraq War, the neoconservatives 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 neocons have vociferously pressed for the U.S. government to proceed “faster, please,” as AEI's Freedom Scholar Michael Leeden 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 United States 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, Elliott Abrams has quietly pushed for a transformational Middle East policy with Israel at its center. If one U.S. official were to be blamed—aside from the president, vice president, and secretary of state—for the U.S. government's disastrous stance with Israel in the recent war, it would be Elliot 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 U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
Abrams, a neoconservative who has dedicated himself to reshaping U.S. 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 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 (Feb. 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 in the past, Abrams has either preceded or accompanied Secretary of State Condoleezza 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 neoconservative-militarist Washington consensus on Israel-Arab/Iran policy.
Bush's choice of Elliott 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—U.S.-led democratization and Middle East transformation—also points to the White House's high comfort level with the foreign policy agenda promoted by the neoconservative camp.
Read the rest of the article Click Here
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