Elliott
Abrams, who is steering Trump’s Venezuela policy, has a long track
record of war crimes. Yet a number of liberal commentators are
rushing to his defense.
by
Paul Heideman
Part
4 - After the fall
By the
time Abrams was pardoned, the world had changed considerably from the
one in which he had been a leading cold warrior. The Soviet Union was
no more, and Bill Clinton’s election had ended 12 years of
Republican rule. Abrams needed a home in this new wilderness, and
found one, ironically, in Ernest Lefever’s Ethics and Public Policy
Center, which provided him with a comfortable sinecure. If Lefever’s
views on racial fitness ever troubled Abrams, he didn’t comment on
it.
As
the locus of American geopolitics shifted from Central America to the
Middle East, Abrams reoriented his concerns accordingly. He was a
signatory (along with assorted neocons from Paul Wolfowitz to Francis
Fukuyama) to the Project for the New American Century’s infamous
1998 letter to Bill Clinton urging regime change in Iraq. The letter
helped inspire the Iraq Liberation Act, which Clinton signed that
same year and helped initiate the bipartisan consensus for the
eventual war on Iraq.
When
George W. Bush was elevated to the presidency, Abrams found himself
back on the inside. He was appointed to the National Security
Council, and helped shape the administration’s Middle East
strategy. He reportedly “lost” an Iranian peace proposal in 2003,
and in 2006, helped shape the Fatah putsch against the democratically
elected Hamas government in Palestine that helped lead to the current
division between Gaza and the West Bank.
During
Trump’s rise, in 2015 and 2016, Abrams was a reliable
“never-Trumper,” backing Marco Rubio’s doomed candidacy. In
early 2017, Abrams was under consideration to be number two in the
State Department under Rex Tillerson. However, the Trump team, under
Steve Bannon, reportedly got Elliott Abrams confused with Eliot
Cohen, a different hardcore neoconservative, and blocked his
appointment.
Now,
thanks to Mike Pompeo’s appointment of Abrams as point person for
the U.S. intervention in Venezuela, he’s back.
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