Elliot Abrams in Jerusalem (Tom Barry) [View All]

[laststeamtrain]

great reprise of the career & crimes...

<snip>

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.

<snip>

Abrams, a proud self-declared "neoconservative and neo-Reaganite," is the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, an activist couple who played a leading role in establishing neoconservatism as an influential political tendency in the 1970s. There's no doubting Abrams' neoconservative and neo-Reaganite credentials. Like many other second-generation neocons, Abrams got his political start as member of the right-wing Social Democrats USAand as legal counsel to the hawkish and avidly pro-Israel Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson. In the late 1970s Abrams worked with other right-wing Democrats in the Coalition for a Democratic Majority as part of an unsuccessful attempt to turn the post-Vietnam War Democratic Party back toward hard-line anticommunism, and then along with other Cold Warrior Democrats became Reagan supporters and Republicans.

<snip>

As part of his neo-Reaganite identity, Abrams in the 1990s argued for a renewal of Reagan's "peace through strength" foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. In 1992 Abrams helped form the Committee for U.S. Interests in the Middle East, which was actually a committee to ensure that U.S. policy was aligned with the Likud party in Israel.

Other members included Richard Perle, Douglas Feith , Frank Gaffney, and John Lehman, among dozens of other neoconservatives and pro-Israel hawks. The committee spoke out against what it perceived was a dangerous distancing between the Bush administration and Israel, evident in its pressure for Israel to pull out of some occupied territories and halt its campaign to expand settlements in these zones. "Mr. President, we don't agree that the current policy of antagonism toward Israel is in the U.S. national interest."

<more> much more>

http://www.counterpunch.org/barry08252006.html