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elliott abrams
Architects of the Disastrous Iraq War Want a Do-Over in Gaza
In an echo of Washington's disastrous de-Baathification campaign in occupied Iraq, a new report puts special stress on "deradicalization" efforts in the Gaza Strip.
Mar 03, 2024
Several key architects of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq 21 years ago are presenting a plan for rebuilding and “de-radicalizing” the surviving population of Gaza, while ensuring that Israel retains “freedom of action” to continue operations against Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The plan, which was published as a report Thursday by the hard-line neo-conservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, or JINSA, and the Vandenberg Coalition, is calling for the creation of a private entity, the “International Trust for Gaza Relief and Reconstruction” to be led by “a group of Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates” and “supported by the United States and other nations.”
With regard to Palestinian participation, the report by the “Gaza Futures Task Force,” envisages an advisory board “composed primarily of non-Hamas Gazans from Gaza, the West Bank, and diaspora.” In addition, the Palestinian Authority, which is based on the West Bank, “should be consulted in, and publicly bless,” the creation of the Trust while itself undergoing a process of “revamping.”
In addition to granting Israel license to intervene against Hamas and Islamic Jihad within Gaza, the plan calls for security to be provided by the Trust’s leaders and “capable forces from non-regional states with close ties to Israel,” as well as “vetted Gazans.” The Trust should also be empowered to “hire private security contractors with good reputations among Western militaries” in “close coordination with Israeli security forces,” according to the report.
The task force that produced the report consists of nine members, four of whom played key roles as Middle East policymakers under former President George W. Bush and in the run-up to and aftermath of the disastrous Iraq invasion in 2003.
The group is chaired by John Hannah, who served as deputy national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney from 2001 to 2005 and then as Cheney’s national security advisor (2005-2009), replacing Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who resigned his position after being indicted for perjury. Libby, who was later given a full pardon by former President Donald Trump, is also a member of the Gaza task force.
Another prominent member of the task force is the founder and chairman of the hawkish Vandenberg Coalition, Elliott Abrams, who served as the senior director for Near East and North African Affairs in the National Security Council under Bush from 2002 to 2009 and more recently as the Special Envoy for Venezuela and Iran under Trump. Ironically, Abrams, who also served as the NSC’s Senior Director for Democracy under Bush, played a key role in supporting an attempted armed coup by Hamas’s chief rival, Fatah, in 2007 after Hamas swept the 2006 Palestinian elections. The coup attempt sparked a brief but bloody civil war in Gaza, which eventually resulted in Hamas’ consolidation of power in the Strip.
Amb. Eric Edelman (ret.), a fourth member of the task force, served as Cheney’s principal deputy national security adviser from 2001 to 2003 and then as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, the number three position at the Pentagon, under Rumsfeld and his successor, Robert Gates, from 2005 to 2009, as U.S. troops struggled to contain the mainly Sunni resistance to the U.S. occupation in Iraq.
In addition to their collaboration during the Bush administration, the four men have long been associated with strongly pro-Israel neoconservative groups, having served on the boards or in advisory positions for such organizations and think tanks as the Hudson Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the ultra-hawkish Center for Security Policy, as well as the Vandenberg Coalition and JINSA. Indeed, such groups have promoted policies that have been generally aligned with those of the Likud Party led by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Thus, the report’s “key findings” prioritize as considerations: [these are quotes]
- restoring the deterrence and security needs of Israel, both for its own people and its standing as a powerful regional ally and essential component of resisting Iran’s ambitions; and
- dismantling Hamas as a military and governing force and protecting against its reconstitution through Israel’s continued freedom of action against it and against Palestinian Islamic Jihad; and by de-militarizing, de-radicalizing, and improving conditions in Gaza such that major terrorist attacks like October 7 can’t and won’t happen again…
Its proposed Trust, according to the report, should involve the United States and concerned states that accept Israel’s role in the region” and “should provide the humanitarian assistance and help to restore essential services and rebuild civil society in Gaza as intense combat and over subsequent months. Its activities should be governed by an international board composed of 3 to 7 representatives from the key states supporting the Trust, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and others. At least one notable omission from the list is Qatar, which has provided tens of billions of dollars in assistance to Gaza over the last decade.
In an echo of Washington’s disastrous de-Baathification campaign in occupied Iraq, the report puts special stress on “deradicalization” efforts. “The Trust, recognizing that years of radicalization by Hamas has complicated the task of reforming and restoring Gaza, should focus on a long-term program for deradicalizing the media, schools and mosques,” according to the report which adds that “Gazans and the Gazan diaspora should play an active role in developing and implementing these plans, alongside the Trust’s Arab members who have hands-on experience in successful deradicalization efforts in their own societies.” Such efforts in Gaza, it goes on, could “serve as a model to encourage a similar program there that will be essential if a credible two-state solution is to be revived.”
The task force urges the Trust to coordinate with other states’ efforts and with those of NGOs and international organizations, including the United Nations. But, in an echo of a key Likud talking point, “it should recognize that the activities of UNRWA serve to perpetuate and deepen the Palestinian crisis.”
The report said UNRWA’s immediate assistance in providing relief may be necessary, but “plans to replace it with local Palestinian institutions or other international organizations committed to peace should be developed and implemented.”
All of these efforts should be pursued within the more general context of countering “Iran’s aggressive campaign to derail regional peace efforts, including by constraining the threat posed by Hezbollah and resuming progress toward normalizing Israel and Saudi Arabia,” according to the report.
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Elliott Abrams’ Nomination Is an Insult to Diplomacy
In a 1981 memo, written weeks before his confirmation by the Senate, Abrams stated that “human rights is at the core of our foreign policy.” His record says otherwise.
Jul 17, 2023
Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, or any other country that respects human rights do not have fond memories of Elliott Abrams. The Biden administration’s nomination of Abrams to the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy is wrong and, given his track record, is an insult to diplomacy.
Abrams gained prominence when he served as President Ronald Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. He later became Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs. And yet, Abrams has been accused of covering up atrocities carried out by the military forces of U.S.-backed Central American governments in Guatemala and El Salvador and of supporting the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. With characteristic chutzpah, he accused his critics of being “Un-American” and “unpatriotic.”
In a 1981 memo, written weeks before his confirmation by the Senate, Abrams stated that “human rights is at the core of our foreign policy.” In 1985, The Lawyers Committee, Americas Watch and Helsinki Watch charged Abrams for developing a policy that undermined the purpose of the human rights bureau in the State Department.
Abrams dismissed the gravity of the massacre, stating to a Senate committee that the reported number of deaths at El Mozote was not “credible” and that “it appears to be an incident that is at least being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas.”
What has Elliott Abrams done to receive such harsh criticism? In 1983, as Assistant Secretary of State, Abrams advocated aid to Guatemala then ruled by dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt. Abrams stated that Ríos Montt’s ruling “brought considerable progress” to human rights in that country.
Ríos Montt came to power in 1982. In 2013, he was found guilty of overseeing a mass campaign of murder and torture of Indigenous people in the country. Ríos Montt’s defense was that he had no operational control of the military forces involved in the massacre.
In El Salvador, on December 10, 1981, the Salvadoran military bombarded El Mozote, a small town in the Morazán district of El Salvador. An estimated one thousand people were massacred, with almost half of the victims being minors. After the massacre, the troops returned to their headquarters to inform their superiors of the operation’s “success.” To this day, the El Mozote Massacre marks the largest massacre to occur in Latin America.
Abrams dismissed the gravity of the massacre, stating to a Senate committee that the reported number of deaths at El Mozote was not “credible” and that “it appears to be an incident that is at least being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas.” A 1992 Human Rights Watch report criticized Abrams for downplaying the massacre.
The Salvadoran deaths squads—commanded by Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, who proclaimed himself “The Fuhrer of El Salvador”—didn’t even spare religious figures. The most noted victim was Archbishop Oscar Romero. Romero was assassinated while presiding a memorial Mass in the Carmelite Chapel of the Hospital de la Divina Providencia on March 24, 1980.
He had issued an appeal to soldiers carrying out assassinations to disobey their orders. “In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to Heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: Stop the repression!” In 2001, Abrams said that Washington’s policy in El Salvador had been a “fabulous achievement.”
In Nicaragua, Abrams worked closely with Contra rebels who were trying to overthrow the Government. In 1982, Congress shut down funding for the Contras through what was known as the Boland Amendment. Behind the scenes, Abrams worked closely with Colonel Oliver North secretly seeking contributions to assist the Contra rebels.
In 1986, to obtain additional funds for the Contras, Abrams met with Brunei’s defense minister General Ibnu Basit bin Apong in London, to solicit a $10 million contribution from the Sultan of Brunei. Because of a clerical error in Oliver North’s office, the money was sent to the wrong Swiss bank account, and the Contras never received the funds. As an intelligence operation it was a total failure; the blunder, however, made someone extremely happy.
In 1991, Abrams admitted in his Congressional testimony that he knew more about the case than he had acknowledged, and reached a plea agreement in which he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress. Abrams was sentenced to a $50 fine, probation for two years, and 100 hours of community service. He was later pardoned by President George H. W. Bush in December 1992.
Abrams also left traces of his nefarious political involvement in Venezuela. Hugo Chávez, the democratically elected president of Venezuela, carried out a series of reforms that infuriated Washington. The U.K. Observer reported that Abrams had advance knowledge of these reforms and had approved the military coup that removed Chávez from power for 47 hours.
Abrams was also one of the intellectual architects of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq. In 1998, he co-authored a letter to President Bill Clinton urging regime change in Iraq. It is now widely accepted that the invasion of Iraq was a failure. It didn’t produce any substantial economic development, improve the country’s judicial institutions, or create a better standard of living for the Iraqis.
Abrams’ track record on human rights is the antithesis of public diplomacy. Nominating him for a diplomacy post is wrong. It means that a man who has shown a tremendous disregard for human rights, democracy, and the rule of law can still be rewarded and celebrated.
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It's Mindblowing That Biden Thinks Elliott Abrams Is a Good Man for Any Job
That Biden officials do not see how hypocritical — and counterproductive — it is to embrace figures like Abrams and Henry Kissinger while trying to rally the globe against their adversaries' human rights abuses is almost unfathomable.
Jul 06, 2023
In February 2019, then-freshman congresswoman Ilhan Omar committed a rare offense in U.S. politics: she called out a sitting official, to his face, for his complicity in horrific human rights abuses.
The official in question was Elliott Abrams, who had just been appointed the Trump administration’s “special envoy” for Venezuela. Omar highlighted Abrams’ 1991 guilty plea for lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair, saying that this called into question why members of the body should trust what he has to say. She went on to excoriate Abrams for his role in downplaying the horrific massacre of hundreds of civilians by U.S.-armed and trained troops in El Salvador.
The reaction to Omar’s breach of decorum was swift and bipartisan. A number of neoconservative intellectuals lept to defend Abrams as a champion of democracy and human rights, joined by a handful of nominally liberal foreign policy professionals such as Kelly Magsamen, then vice president for National Security and International Policy at the Center for American Progress, and now chief of staff to Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
“I worked for Elliott Abrams as a civil servant,” Magsamen tweeted. “He is a fierce advocate for human rights and democracy. Yes, he made serious professional mistakes and was held accountable. I’m a liberal but I’m also fair. We all have a lot of work to do together in Venezuela. We share goals.”
This strange episode gained renewed relevance on Monday when, in a possible attempt to bury the news on the eve of the Fourth of July, the Biden administration announced its intent to nominate Abrams to the bipartisan “United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.”
Abram’s appointment may be largely symbolic and grant him little power or influence over policy. But his selection, rather than any of the many available Republican former officials with less blood-stained careers, speaks volumes.
The commission is charged with assessing U.S. efforts to “understand, inform, and influence foreign publics” and issuing reports to Congress and the executive on these topics. It is statutorily bipartisan; no more than four of its seven members can come from any one political party.
Abram’s appointment may be largely symbolic and grant him little power or influence over policy. But his selection, rather than any of the many available Republican former officials with less blood-stained careers, speaks volumes.
Abrams may not be as infamous as Henry Kissinger, but his record of “public service” is similarly ignominious, littered with the policy failures and complicity in crimes against humanity that have unfortunately characterized U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War era and beyond.
In 1981, a day before Abrams assumed the post of Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, the Atlacatl Battalion, a U.S.-trained unit of the Salvadoran military, massacred nearly 1,000 civilians, committing mass rapes against women and children in the process. Abrams insisted to Congress that rumors of the massacre were essentially propaganda by leftist guerillas, and continued to do so despite investigations by U.S. embassy officials, the New York Times, and the Washington Post confirming the massacre and placing blame squarely at the feet of the Salvadoran military.
Throughout the Reagan administration’s brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Central America, Abrams continually testified that U.S.-backed forces were making serious improvements in their human rights practices so that they could continue receiving arms and training. In fact these forces in Guatemala and El Salvador were waging genocidal war against their countries’ peasantry and indigenous populations. A U.N.-backed truth commission eventually found that 85 percent of the violence was carried out by the military and its associated death squads.
Abrams reserved particular praise for Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, lauding the dictator for “considerable progress” on human rights and attitudes toward the indigenous population. Rios Montt was later convicted of genocide against Guatemala’s Ixil Maya.
Abrams is best known for his central role in the Iran-Contra Affair, working to secure funding for the brutal counterrevolutionaries and to direct their operations. The Contras, a group consisting mostly of former officials and soldiers from the deposed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza, failed in their task of overthrowing the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. But the militants, who were almost completely reliant on U.S. support, became notorious for their brutal killings of civilians.
It was for this affair that Abrams would earn his criminal conviction — not for abetting and concealing mass atrocities, but for misrepresenting U.S. support for the Contras to Congress. In 1991, Abrams pleaded guilty for lying to Congress about the extensive U.S. role in supplying and funding the Contras, for which he received two years of probation and 100 hours of community service — a punishment he never actually served after an 11th hour pardon from George H.W. Bush.
The contention that Abrams merely “made mistakes” and was held accountable — more popular with his liberal defenders — is belied by this pardon and by Abrams’ book Undue Process, his angry and self-pitying account of his prosecution in which he labels Iran-Contra investigators “miserable, filthy bastards” and “bloodsuckers” (and which this author has had the misfortune of reading in full).
Abrams’ record of abuse and failure continued into the 21st century. He served in the George W. Bush administration and was alleged to have approved the failed coup plot against Hugo Chavez in 2002. Later, he was named as a central figure in the administration’s backing of a failed Fatah coup against Hamas after the latter party won Palestinian elections — ultimately leading to Hamas’s uncontested control of the Gaza strip.
In his aforementioned time as Trump’s “special envoy” for Venezuela, U.S. policy fared no better, with attempts to overthrow the government of Nicolas Maduro ending only in Juan Guaido’s spectacularly unsuccessful 2019 putsch attempt and an even more quixotic effort by a group of U.S. mercenaries and former Venezuelan soldiers to kidnap Maduro. The Trump administration denied any involvement in the latter affair, which historian Greg Grandin has described as a “burlesque Iran-Contra.”
In response to a query from Mother Jones, a White House spokesperson implied that Abrams’ nomination to this latest appointment was put forward by Republican leadership and merely accepted by the administration. But given the White House’s vague explanation of the willingness of members of the administration to publicly embrace Abrams and others like them, it would be granting Team Biden far too much benefit of the doubt to simply believe that Republicans forced their hand.
The United States embraces repressive and murderous (but useful) governments while in the same breath condemning the human rights abuses of its adversaries
Biden entered office pledging that “human rights will be the center of our foreign policy.” Since then he has comprehensively broken this promise, as recounted last month by former Bernie Sanders advisor Matt Duss (who also sharply criticized Abram’s nomination). In embracing great power competition — particularly confrontation with China — at all costs, the Biden administration has made some degree of human rights hypocrisy inevitable. The United States embraces repressive and murderous (but useful) governments while in the same breath condemning the human rights abuses of its adversaries and calling on the world to rally behind liberal principles.
This contradiction is readily apparent in the administration’s campaign against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In March, Antony Blinken gave a speech highlighting Russia’s massacres of civilians in Bucha, appealing to the world to rally for justice and against Russia’s war. Just two months later, Blinken joined other foreign policy luminaries for the 100th birthday party of Henry Kissinger, who is directly responsible for the massacre of countless civilians in Cambodia and beyond.
That Biden officials do not see how hypocritical — and counterproductive — it is to embrace figures like Abrams and Kissinger while trying to rally the globe against their adversaries human rights abuses is almost unfathomable. But the exceptionalist convictions held by most U.S. foreign policy elites — that American power is synonymous with liberal order, and that U.S. global primacy is, in the words of analyst Van Jackson, a “global public good” — are powerful and enduring.
The problem for America’s foreign policy establishment is that it is increasingly impossible for anyone outside of Western elites to believe this too. Over the coming years the United States will be faced with a choice to either adopt a more humble foreign policy that accepts the same restraints it demands of others, or to drop the pretenses altogether.
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