The one thing Elliott Abrams and I do not discuss during our hour-long interview in Jerusalem this week is his imminent career move. More specifically, how someone who has spent the better part of the last three decades vilified by those who consider "neoconservatism" a four-letter word will fare as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a key part of the liberal establishment.
Former US Deputy National Security Adviser Elliot Abrams.
Photo: Ariel Jerozolimski [file]
Not that it isn't an interesting question, mind you. Especially not in his particular case. For, whatever else characterizes Abrams and his amazingly illustrious CV, "fig leaf" simply doesn't figure. And I ought to know. Abrams is married to my sister, Rachel. I have thus had many occasions over the decades to witness, firsthand, my brother-in-law's cheerful confidence in his convictions - convictions that sometimes clash with my own. Contrary to popular belief, my family, all of whose members are so-called neocons, is just as capable of raising the roof over politics at the dinner table as the next guy's. The devil, after all, is in the details.
But so is what makes the man. Having devoted much of his adult life to one political pursuit or another, the 60-year-old lawyer by profession (who was born and raised in New York, and educated at Harvard and the London School of Economics), Abrams has served two Republican administrations so far - those of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.
On Capitol Hill, he served as assistant counsel to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, special counsel to senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson and then chief of staff to senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan; in the Reagan State Department, he served as assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs, then for human rights and humanitarian affairs and finally for inter-American affairs.
It was the last job on this list that catapulted him into the notoriety that his gleeful opponents in the Democratic Party cherished, cultivated and have held over his head, as though wielding a deadly weapon. Indeed, Abrams was among those prosecuted in the Iran-Contra affair, though he was never actually indicted. Instead, he entered into a plea bargain, according to which he was convicted of withholding information from Congress, placed on probation for two years (though the judge later shortened that period) and fined $50. In 1992, he was given a presidential pardon by the first president Bush. His 1993 book, Undue Process: How Political Differences Are Turned into Crimes, tells this story in all its shocking lack of glory.
In the years that followed, before joining Bush the son's administration, Abrams was a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, and later served as president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. It was then that he published Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America.
But for Abrams, returning as a fish to water was just a matter of time - and of the Republicans retaking the White House. Which they did in January 2001. Abrams was offered a job just there a couple of months later.
During the first term of the "Dubya" presidency, Abrams, was special assistant to the president and senior director of the National Security Council for democracy, human rights and international organizations, then senior director of the NSC for Near East and North African affairs.
In the second term, he was appointed deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy, in which capacity he supervised both human rights efforts and US policy in the Middle East. This was as significant to me personally as it was to the region, since it brought Abrams here on a regular basis. Due to the rules of the NSC, however, he was not at liberty to talk to the press, other than when officially giving background briefings.
Now that he's liberated from the constraints of officialdom and embarking on a new chapter, he is willing and able to speak his mind. Well, up to a point, that is. "I signed a secrecy agreement that binds for life," he warns. "And I don't gossip."
Three weeks into the new US administration, can you say anything about President Barack Obama's appointments - particularly those relating to the Middle East, including your own replacement?
It's a bit too soon to form an opinion. For instance, in the State Department, nobody has been named as assistant secretary for Near East affairs. From the moment that person is named, and through the process of confirmation, chances are that there won't actually be somebody in that position until April.
In any case, it looks as though this administration is not going to replicate the NSC structure we had, where there was a director for Israeli-Palestinian affairs, a senior director for the Middle East and above them, me, as the deputy national security adviser. Structures come and go. I can't really tell yet how they're going to arrange this. They, for example, are doing something we did not do, which was to appoint a special envoy to the Middle East - George Mitchell.
Why wasn't there a Middle East envoy under the Bush administration?
When we came in, in 2001, the intifada was going on. It seemed to us pretty clear - and we were right - that there could be no negotiations in the middle of a giant, ongoing terrorist attack. Then came 9/11. And we really did not come back to the question of how to move forward on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict until the spring of 2002. Then, on June 24 of that year, the president gave a remarkable speech in which he declared Yasser Arafat a terrorist and completely broke with him. The essence of that speech was that though the president was in favor of a two-state solution, the borders of the Palestinian state didn't matter nearly as much as the character of the state within those borders - and that there had to be new Palestinian leadership.
Once such a statement is made, if there had been a special envoy, what would he be doing? So it was really only when Arafat died that an argument could have been made that it was time to appoint a special envoy. But we took the view that negotiations had to take place between Israelis and Palestinians - that the American role should not be to invent solutions, or to pressure Israel or the Palestinians into a particular compromise, but rather that we should all get behind an Israeli-Palestinian effort. And at that point, there was an Israeli-Palestinian effort. First, there was Ariel Sharon's disengagement from Gaza. Then, once Sharon became incapacitated and Ehud Olmert took his place, there was a prime minister who was trying to negotiate with the Palestinians. So, again, what need could there possibly be for an American envoy? What would he do - encourage the Israelis to do something that their prime minister was himself so anxious to do?
When Bush made that June 24 speech, Israelis cheered, because what it indicated was that he was putting the Palestinian-Israeli conflict into a wider context of a global war between Islamic terrorists and democracy. Has that American view of the world begun to revert to its previous, more narrow one, according to which the Palestinian issue is not only separate, but key to solving the region's problems?
It's too soon to say about Obama, but your characterization of what Bush did is accurate. After 9/11, we did see Palestinian terrorism in the context of all terrorism. And I think that one of the reasons Sharon was able to defeat the intifada was the very strong support that he had from president Bush when he took measures like building the fence, on the one hand, and carrying out targeted assassinations of terrorist leaders - such as [Abdel Aziz] Rantisi and [Sheikh Ahmed] Yassin - on the other. Now, there were many people in Washington who wanted the US to say that such assassinations were somehow illicit. But, the fact that we were engaging in similar activity ourselves strengthened the argument that it was not something we should criticize.
There is a point of contention in this country over the question of which was the chicken, so to speak, and which the egg, regarding the disengagement initiative. Some maintain that Bush, being the friendliest US president Israel ever had, would have gone along with anything Sharon deemed beneficial to Israel's security. Others argue that it was precisely because of Sharon's willingness to withdraw from territory that the administration in Washington was so supportive. Which is it?
