Post by POA on Apr 17, 2004 4:05:02 GMT -5
Middle East & Africa / Arab-Israel conflict Print article | Email
Backroom bureaucrat played key role in US deal with Israel
By James Harding in Washington
Published: April 16 2004 20:29 | Last Updated: April 16 2004 20:29
When George W. Bush was in Britain last November, one of the president's aides was quietly dispatched to Rome for a discreet meeting.
Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, was in Italy and took the opportunity to relay to Mr Bush his plan for unilateral disengagement from the Palestinians. The official the White House sent was Elliott Abrams.
In shaping the Bush administration's historic and highly controversial decision this week to endorse Mr Sharon's Middle East vision, Mr Abrams, the National Security Council official chiefly responsible for Arab-Israeli relations, has played a central, if largely unseen, role.
This does not overstate his influence. Mr Abrams has worked in a trio on Middle East policy that has included his superior, Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, and William Burns, the State Department official in charge of Middle East policy.
Israeli and US officials also say that the individuals who forged this week's policy were the protagonists: Mr Sharon and Mr Bush.
Mr Abrams' role, according to a senior administration official, was to "carry out what the president wants". In 10 weeks of consultations before this week's announcement, US officials made three trips to see Mr Sharon and his staff and there were two visits from Israeli delegations to the White House.
Mr Abrams and his colleagues, the official said, were "kept on a short leash. [They] were not dreaming up policy."
The Israeli prime minister was one of the few international figures with whom Mr Bush had a relationship before he became president: Mr Sharon was his guide to Israel in 1998 when he was Texas governor.
"I had the honour of traveling the West Bank with Ariel Sharon by helicopter," Mr Bush told an audience at the Republican Jewish Coalition in 1999. "You can imagine what it was like to be given a history lesson by this great warrior and hero of freedom and democracy."
Mr Sharon also had praise this week for Mr Bush.
"I myself have been fighting terror for many years, and understand the threats and cost from terrorism," he said. "In all these years, I have never met a leader as committed as you are, Mr President, to the struggle for freedom and the need to confront terrorism wherever it exists."
These words, say some Middle East experts, may resonate favourably for Mr Bush among Jewish and conservative Christian voters in an election year. Martin Indyk, the former US ambassador to Israel, says: "The president is in a tight spot and Jewish votes matter, particularly in some key states such as Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio."
The White House insists election year politics did not play a part. "The poll data suggest that there is hardly anything that a Republican president can do to move his support among the Jewish community," the senior administration official says.
But to appreciate the internal intellectual argument within the White House for supporting the Sharon plan, diplomats and officials generally agree with a former US official who says: "Elliott was instrumental."
It was Mr Abrams, a senior White House official says, who reasoned that Mr Bush should not be bound by "myths and taboos". It was not helpful for Arab and Palestinian leaders to continue to perpetuate the "myth" that Palestinian refugees would one day return to their homes in Israel.
It was important to create the precedent of withdrawal from the settlements, the official says, rather than making settlements untouchable. And, the official says, it was important to get things moving when there had been no progress since last August.
Mr Abrams, a Reagan official implicated in the Iran-Contra affair, in 1991 admitted withholding information from Congress. He was sentenced to two years' probation and community service.
In the years after he was pardoned by President George H. W. Bush, Mr Abrams wrote a book calling for Jews to return to their faith to stem assimilation. He also helped found the Project for the New American Century, a neo-conservative think-tank that included Dick Cheney, now vice-president, Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz.
Mr Abrams supported Mr Sharon, a leader, he once wrote, who knows "the road to peace lies through strength instead of weakness". He is seen as one of the most effective operators in modern American government.
"Elliott Abrams is one of the best bureaucratic artists in Washington. He has traditionally taken bureaucratic positions and turned them into strong positions, because he reads the president and knows what he wants," says Jon Alterman, who was on the State Department's policy and planning staff.
"Elliott Abrams is the person who got the Middle East to talk about reform. [The US] cannot micromanage the universe, but you can force items on to the agenda. He has done a masterful job of that."