Elliot Abrams gets my vote

Friday, 8:31 am

By Kate

Kevin Drum asks the question that Shakespeare’s Sister asks: Who is your least favorite person in the Bush administration, excluding the President and Vice-president? And why?

While my automatic response would be Rumsfeld, I tend to agree with Kevin that Elliot Abrams is the worst. As a neoconservative and a Zionist, his special bailiwick, for the past four years, has been courting the worst of the religious right. Abrams is a gung-ho Zionist who finds common ground with the Rapture Ready contingent of the religious right. They have a common goal....a reconstituted Biblical Israel which emphatically does not include a Palestinian state.

Abrams, pardoned by Bush Sr for his conviction in his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, is now back stronger than ever as the new senior director for democracy, human rights and international operations, from within the National Security Council. His specialty is black ops and, well, mostly getting away with it. His current focus? The Middle East. Human rights? Not so much.

Recalling that the neoconservatives (including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser) penned the 1996 policy paper for Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government—A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm—the signers urged Netanyahu to abandon the Oslo Peace process and settle the West Bank and Gaza. To hell with the Palestinians or the idea of a Palestinian homeland. Further, the document said that Israeli peace could only be secured if Saddam Hussein was removed from Iraq, and the governments of Iran, Syria, and Lebanon were toppled.

Two years later, Elliot Abrams signed on with a full complement of other neocons in an open letter to President Clinton, urging him to adopt their comprehensive political and military strategy for bringing down Saddam Hussein. Several of the signers of that document, oddly enough, turned up as a nearly full contingent in George Bush’s (43) first administration: Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, Fred Ikle, Zalmay Khalilzad, Peter Rodman, Paul Wolfowitz, David Wurmser, Dov Zakheim, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and, of course, Elliot Abrams.

Now, only a few weeks into George Bush’s second administration, besides Saddam’s government being gone, we suddenly find that Lebanon’s government has fallen and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government isn’t all that secure in the aftermath of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri’s assassination. From a practical perspective, I find it bizarre that Syria would have had anything to do with the assassination. They, of all the involved parties, have the most to lose by the assassination. They know it and, probably, so do a lot of other people. However, that hasn’t discouraged the major interested parties from baying for Syrian blood. The louder they yell, the less convinced I am.

That leads to all sorts of speculation, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s not as if Elliot Abrams hasn’t been almost at the epicenter of a car bomb assassination before.

Elliot and his neocon buddies have been batting 1000 so far, considering that they are the ones running the government’s foreign policy which, as we know, is (currently) all about ‘democracy on the march’. They are (usually) successful in toppling governments. They don’t, however, appear to have the first idea what to do next. With Iraq being torn apart by factional violence and Lebanon on the brink of the same, as this article points out, the third world war has already begun...unless the political opposition inside the United States gets off its duff and does something...oppositional.

Nevertheless, I envision Elliot Abrams gleefully rubbing his hands together, thinking that everything is humming along on schedule, with all of his rosy scenario outcomes running through his mind like a lousy movie.