http://www.counterpunch.org/christison07262007.html

(excerpt)

Enter Elliott Abrams, the neocons' Dr. Frankenstein and senior working-level creator of much of the Middle East's current turmoil. Although not a main architect of the Iraq war, Abrams, who has been the principal Middle East adviser on the National Security Council staff throughout most of the Bush administration, was part of the pro-Israeli neocon cabal that devised and pushed for the war. He it was who advocated and has now largely succeeded in creating the "hard coup" against Hamas. Working with Vice President Cheney's Middle East adviser David Wurmser, another rabid Israeli supporter, and with Cheney himself, Abrams fully supported and may have given Israel a green light for Israel's war against Hizbullah in Lebanon last summer. This year, according to the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh and others, Abrams has been a key figure behind the fighting going on at the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon; the insane scheme, undertaken in cooperation with some Saudi elements, some powerful rightwing Christians in Lebanon, and at least indirectly with Israel, has involved arming and encouraging extremist Sunni militias in Lebanon in order to weaken Shia Hizbullah, as well as Iran and Syria. Finally, it almost goes without saying that Abrams has become a leading advocate, again according to Hersh, of an attack on Iran, and he has been pushing Israel to launch an attack on Syria.

Palestinian commentator Rami Khouri calls this induced chaos the beginning of a great "unraveling" of the current Arab state order established decades ago in the aftermath of World War I. At the very moment when Arab states -- including not only governments, but various groups within them, including Islamist, other sectarian, ethnic, and tribal movements -- are struggling to define themselves, Khouri says, huge external pressures led by the U.S., Israel, and some European governments and abetted by some Arab governments (those currying favor with the U.S.), are weighing down on the local elements to thwart them and redirect them toward fulfilling Western interests. Khouri calls this a formula for an explosion. Some form of utter turmoil, if not an outright explosion, would seem to be precisely the desire of Abrams and his fellow neocons, as well as of Israel.

No one should be surprised that Abrams has had a hand in creating the mess in the Middle East and is actively working for the dismemberment and emasculation of the Arab world. He did this in Central America before being caught lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra investigation and being momentarily sidelined. More to the point, concern for Israel's interests, and an extreme rightwing agenda, have long driven Abrams' actions.

He is the son-in-law of two of the original neocons and the most strident rightwing supporters of Israel, Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. If his relatives were not enough to incriminate him, Abrams has been outspoken himself, in office and outside, in opposition to virtually any peace process and any Israeli territorial concessions. In the early 1990s, according to a 2003 profile in the New Yorker, he co-founded the Committee on U.S. Interests in the Middle East, which spoke out against Israeli territorial concessions, and later in the '90s he was a fierce critic of the Oslo process. He has written of the first Palestinian intifada, which involved virtually no violence beyond stone-throwing, that it was no mere "uprising" but involved "terrorist violence" against Israelis. Since coming to the NSC staff, he has made it widely known that he has pushed the administration to line up in support of Israel. He has also made little secret of his strong anti-Palestinian views. Far worse than putting the fox in charge of the henhouse, the move that put Abrams on the NSC staff placed the pro-Israel lobbyist par excellence, emotional advocate for Israel, icn charge of making policy on a conflict of surpassing importance to U.S. national interests in a world far beyond Israel.

More than most policymakers past or present, Abrams wears his pro-Israeli heart on his sleeve. In a 1997 book on the place of Jews in U.S. society, Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America, he took the position that Jews should "stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart -- except in Israel -- from the rest of the population." Although maintaining that this stance implies no disloyalty to whatever nation Jews live in, he unabashedly affirmed the importance of the Jewish "bond" to Israel. The Jewish community in the U.S., he said, should conceive of itself as a religious community because "faith is the only ultimately reliable bond between American Jews and Israel." He laid out a program for change in the Jewish community that could not have made his commitment to Israel clearer. Describing Israel as a source of Jewish identity for millions of American Jews and "the essence of their lives as Jews," he said his program would mean making "the link to Israel . . . one of personal contact and commitment" rather than merely of financial support.

For all his affection for Israel, Abrams has shown himself to be a pragmatist -- in the sense of devious manipulator that describes his hero Ariel Sharon -- and this pragmatism has ultimately allowed him to accomplish more for Israel than his harder lining colleagues would have been able to do. One longtime friend says of him, according to the New Yorker profile, that he is "unusually effective at combining different strands of policy. It's a mark of his performance in these jobs -- showing an acute sensitivity to what his political opponents are worried about and knowing how to win them over, or neutralize their animosity toward him." This cold-blooded awareness of what politics demands enabled Abrams to maneuver through the hype surrounding the Roadmap peace proposal when it was first presented in 2003, and in the end undermine the Roadmap altogether at a time when politics demanded that Israel appear to be going along with this U.S.-proposed peace plan.

While many Israelis and most of Abrams' neocon colleagues feared that the plan would demand real territorial concessions of Israel, Abrams worked closely with Sharon's chief of staff, Dov Weisglass, to design a scheme that would make it appear that Israel had agreed to the plan while actually placing the onus on the Palestinians to take the first step by stopping all terrorist incidents and dismantling militant organizations. After Israel had destroyed all Palestinian security capability, it was clear that this would be an impossible task for any Palestinian leadership, but Abrams and Weisglass knew this would give Israel the breathing space to proceed with settlement expansion and consolidation of the occupation. It was an intricate maneuver that reassured the right wing in Israel and the U.S. that Israel was making no concessions but made it appear to most of the world outside that Israel was ready to make "painful concessions" if the Palestinians "showed their good will."

Weisglass later exposed the thinking behind the scheme as it began to evolve a year later into Sharon's plan for so-called disengagement from Gaza. These peace plans, he said, speaking specifically of the disengagement plan, supply "the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians." They "freeze" the political process. "And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda." Weisglass boasted that this had occurred with "a [U.S.] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress." He did not openly credit Abrams, but, as a State Department official once told an interviewer, Abrams is "very careful about not leaving fingerprints."

Abrams has repeated this act multiple times -- not only over the Roadmap and disengagement, but over the issue of Israeli settlement expansion and over Israel's construction of the apartheid wall (on which he has helped plan such minutiae as the placement of gates and some parts of the wall's route) -- each time making it appear that Israel is making concessions, or would do so if it had a decent Palestinian partner for peace, but quietly manipulating the situation so that in the end Israel is enabled to proceed with its plans more or less unimpeded. By thus cooperating with Israel to fine tune its occupation practices, Abrams has acted as a partner of Israel rather than as a U.S. policymaker and has given legitimacy to virtually every aspect of Israel's continuing occupation.

This same pattern is apparently being repeated with the engineered Hamas-Fatah split. Although Israel has no more intention now than ever previously of making real concessions to Abbas (and indeed announced immediately after Bush's speech that it will not even discuss the central issues of borders, refugees, and Jerusalem), the U.S. and presumably Abrams have persuaded the Israelis to make some low-cost gestures to Abbas, while acting as though they are eager for negotiating progress whenever the "moderate" Palestinians are ready -- all in the hope of undermining and finally defeating Hamas.

Reports of a rift between Abrams and Condoleezza Rice are frequent, but it is probable that Rice has simply decided to follow Abrams' lead in most things Middle Eastern. She is probably more dovish than Abrams, and she seems to have made a serious although badly misguided and short-lived effort early this year to restart some kind of negotiating process between Israel and the Palestinians, with her attempt to put a "political horizon" for negotiations before them, but she is neither as clever nor as emotionally involved in the issue as Abrams, and she appears content to follow along, even at the cost of some embarrassment when her initiatives are undermined.

There is some question in fact whether Rice truly disagrees with Abrams. She did, after all, learn most of what she knows about the Palestinian-Israeli situation at the feet of Abrams, who was the NSC staff's principal Middle East point person for most of her term as national security adviser. The fact that her principal State Department assistant secretary for the region, David Welch, seems to be actively cooperating with Abrams in efforts to stir up turmoil in Lebanon and travels with Abrams to Israel indicates either Rice's total submission to Abrams' dictates or her disinterest in taking any kind of policymaking lead in the Middle East. In either case, if there was ever a disagreement strong enough to matter, it appears by now to have been submerged.

Thus Abrams almost certainly has fairly free rein to fold, spindle, and mutilate policy on Palestine-Israel. He is obviously in his element, hyperactively pulling strings behind the scenes everywhere, wheeling and dealing with cohorts in Israel -- where he travels every month or two, sometimes more often -- as well as with compliant elements among the "moderate" Arab governments. Shortly after September 11 and the start of the "war on terror," according to the New Yorker profile, he was so enthusiastic about the prospect of manipulating the Arab world that he exulted that "I feel young again! I love all these battles -- they're so familiar to me." He was back in the fray, as during the era of the Central American wars. There is little evidence that he faces any restraints inside the U.S. He has obviously triumphed in whatever competition there might have been with Rice, he works closely with Cheney and Cheney's right hand, David Wurmser, and he has a coterie of admirers and supporters among the neocons in think tanks around Washington. He appears to be not only Israel's facilitator and co-conspirator on Middle East issues, but Bush's Middle East brain as well.

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