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POLITICS: Elliott Abrams and Déjà Vu All Over Again
Analysis by Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Apr 9, 2007 (IPS) - It has an all too familiar ring to it.
A crisis area - in this case, the Middle East - finds itself in
desperate need of a peace process capable of tamping down the forces of
violence and destabilisation which the United States itself has played a
central role in unleashing.
Regional efforts at diplomacy - in this case, led by Saudi Arabia - gain
some momentum but are frustrated by die-hard hawks in a U.S.
administration. While increasingly on the defensive both at home and
abroad, they are determined to carry through their strategy of isolating
and destabilising a hostile target - in this case, Syria - despite its
oft-repeated eagerness to engage Washington and its regional allies.
Sensing an increasingly dangerous impasse, the Democratic Speaker of the
House of Representatives - in this case, Nancy Pelosi, backed by a
growing bipartisan consensus that the administration's intransigeance will
further reduce already-waning U.S. influence in the region - tries to
encourage regional peace efforts by engaging the target directly.
But, worried that her quest might actually gain momentum, administration
hawks - in this case, led by Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott
Abrams and Vice President Dick Cheney - accuse the speaker of undermining
the president and, working through obliging editorial writers at the
Washington Post, among other sympathetic media, including, of course, the
Wall Street Journal, attack her for "substitut(ing) her own foreign policy
for that of a sitting Republican president."
If that scenario sounds familiar, your foreign policy memory dates back at
least to 1987, when, despite intensified regional peace-making efforts for
which Costa Rican President Oscar Arias won that year's Nobel Peace Prize,
the Ronald Reagan administration was persisting in its efforts to isolate
and overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.
It was then-House Speaker Jim Wright who, with the quiet encouragement of
Republican realists, notably Reagan's White House chief of staff, Howard
Baker, Secretary of State George Shultz and his special Central America
envoy, Philip Habib, sought to promote Arias' plan.
Like today's Republican realists on the Iraq Study Group (ISG), who have
urged the Bush administration to engage rather than continue to isolate
Syria, they understood that popular and Congressional support for a
"regime change" policy in Nicaragua was not sustainable and Washington
should seek a regional settlement on the most favourable terms available.
But Abrams, then assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs,
worked assiduously with fellow hard-liners in the White House and the
Pentagon - just as he works today with Cheney's office - to torpedo both
the Arias plan and Wright's efforts to advance it throughout the latter
half of 1987.
As Abrams' assistant at the time, the future neo-conservative heavy
thinker, Robert Kagan, put it later, "Arias, more than any other Latin
leader single-handedly undid U.S. policy in Nicaragua." And when he won
the Nobel Prize, "all us of who thought it was important to get aid for
the contras reacted with disgust, unbridled disgust."
As part of their strategy, hard-liners led by Abrams rejected appeals by
Nicaragua for high-level talks, thus forcing Habib to resign by late
summer and insisting - as they now do with Syria - that direct
negotiations would serve only to legitimate Sandinistas and demoralise the
contras.
In November 1987, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega came to Washington
with a proposal for a ceasefire with the contras. After the administration
refused to receive him, Wright, seeing an opportunity to jump-start a
stalled peace process, attended a meeting at the Vatican Embassy here at
which Ortega asked his main domestic foe, Cardinal Miguel Obando y Bravo,
to mediate between the Sandinista government and the contras.
Wright's participation in the talks was seized by Abrams as the launching
pad for a public - if barely concealed - attack on the speaker.
Interviewed by the Post under the guise of an unnamed "senior
administration official," Abrams charged Wright with engaging in
"guerrilla theater" and "an unbelievable melodrama" that had dealt a
"serious setback" to the administration's policy.
"This was not forward movement; this was screwing up the process," the
"senior official" complained to the Post which, as in its criticism Friday
of Pelosi's meeting with Assad, obligingly followed up with its own
editorial, entitled "What is Jim Wright Doing?", charging the speaker with
having acted "as though the actual conduct of diplomacy in this delicate
passage were his responsibility."
The Journal's neo-conservative editorial writers swiftly joined in,
accusing Wright of a "compulsion for running off-the-shelf foreign-policy
operations," just as last week they charged Pelosi and Democrats of
seeking "to conduct their own independent diplomacy".
Within just a few months of his meeting with Ortega, however, the
Democratic-led Congress rejected Reagan's request to fund the contras, a
step which Abrams incorrectly predicted at the time would result in "the
dissolution of Central America".
According to Roy Gutman's aptly named 1988 book about Reagan's Central
America policy, "Banana Diplomacy", Washington soon found itself "at the
margins of the region's diplomacy".
Unlike his high-public profile as assistant secretary 20 years ago,
Abrams, who now presides over Middle East policy at the National Security
Council, is today far more discreet, no doubt in part because his
conviction in 1991 for lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-contra
scandal has made him an easy target for Democrats.
"He's very careful about not leaving fingerprints," one State Department
official told IPS earlier this year.
But there is little doubt among Middle East analysts here that Abrams is
playing a lead role in White House efforts to discredit Pelosi for meeting
with Assad, just as he did with Wright for meeting Ortega in 1987.
And just as he worked with Reagan hard-liners to undermine the Arias Plan
20 years ago, so he appears to be doing what he can to undermine recent
efforts by Saudi King Abdullah to initiate an Arab-Israeli peace process
and, for that matter, by Republican realists, and even Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, to push it forward.
(END)
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