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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
By naming Iran-contra rogue Elliott Abrams its top policy advisor on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the White House is signaling a hard pro-Sharon line that could prove disastrous.
Dec 10, 2002 | What crook, rogue and hard-line reprobate from the Republicans' glory years will President George W. Bush exhume next? It's hard to say -- he seems to have already hired them all.
There's Henry Kissinger, Machiavellian master of secrecy and deceit, architect of the horrific air war against Laos and Cambodia and best friend of murderous (but "pro-American") regimes in Pakistan, Indonesia and Chile. America can now rejoice in the knowledge that this paragon of transparency, ethical uprightness and independence is in charge of investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.
There's Adm. John "to the best of my recollection, I can't recall" Poindexter, who ran the illegal and disgraceful Iran-contra project and was convicted of lying and obstruction of justice, only to be exonerated on a legal technicality by conservative appellate judges. Who better to head the "Total Information Awareness" program, which promises to turn the U.S. into a gigantic Panopticon? Don't be concerned about the loss of your privacy -- those who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear!
And now there's Elliott Abrams, another major Iran-contra villain who was convicted of lying to Congress (this risumi seems to be virtually required for Bush appointees lately), but was saved from iron sorrows by Bush the First, who pardoned him on Christmas Eve. Abrams, in fact, had already been rehabilitated last year, when Bush appointed him to head the National Security Council's democracy, human rights and international operations division. Recently, however, Abrams has been promoted to one of the most crucial jobs in the administration: making NSC policy on the Middle East.
Like the Poindexter and Kissinger appointments, this egregious hire would be laughable if it weren't so frightening. It is not hard to understand why Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld would want to stuff their young regent's administration full of old cronies and anti-Commie soul mates from the good old Ronnie years, though one might have thought that Bush the Younger would have wanted to have a few different viewpoints in the West Wing. But he is apparently not yet ready to take the training wheels off his presidency -- leaving Colin Powell to serve all alone as the administration's designated com-symp whipping boy, laughingstock Arabist and Euro-friendly buffoon.
Abrams fits right into the Bush White House, and not just because he almost went to jail for a scandal so much bigger and nastier than Whitewater it's embarrassing even to mention them in the same breath. Like the Big Three in the Bush Tetrarchy -- Rice, Rumsfeld and Cheney -- Abrams is a hawk, unabashed about using American power unilaterally. Like them, his worldview has been shaped by a black-and-white Cold War ideology in which stopping Communist or leftist expansion by any means necessary was America's top priority. If that meant looking away while sadistic thugs like El Salvador's Roberto D'Aubuisson killed lots of peasants who didn't know from Lenin but only wanted to be rid of their murderous, authoritarian (but not "totalitarian"!) regimes, well, better dead than red. As a key player in implementing Ronald Reagan's vicious "anti-Communist" Central American policies, he defended the savage regimes that slaughtered thousands of civilians, and denied that massacres carried out by U.S.-backed troops -- such as the infamous massacre at Mozote -- had taken place.
For all of the old Reagan warriors, Osama bin Laden restored the post-Soviet world to its comfortingly Manichaean order. The Cold War has become the War on Terror. Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush himself have simply updated their demonizing Cold War ideology, with radical Islam replacing Communism. Just as the Cold War hawks could not distinguish between legitimate Third World national liberation movements and the Communist Menace, so today they can't distinguish between the real political, national and economic grievances that help drive Muslim and Arab rage and the Islamic Menace, a reified version of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations." Now add to this a hard-line, politically useful commitment to Israel's security (more accurately, to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's vision of a secure Israel) and a Likud-like belief -- perhaps also influenced by some ill-understood Bernard Lewis -- that the Arabs are all talk and that a taste of the lash will send them cowering back into their tents. Taken together, you have the explanation not just for the Bush administration's unprecedented pro-Israel policies, but its apparent unconcern that invading Iraq could cause terrorism, like the 21st century's Black Death, to finally and definitively infect the religious fanatics among the world's powerless.
Considering this mind-set, and the considerable political importance Bush attaches to the fervently right-wing Christian evangelicals who believe that Israel must be supported at all costs in order for the rapture to take place, the appointment of Elliott Abrams to the U.S.'s top Middle East policy position may not seem surprising. Abrams, like the Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, is a hard-line Israel supporter who has cast doubt on the value of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and warned the U.S. not to strengthen the Palestinians at the expense of Israelis.
