| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"peace.seeker.27" |
| Date: |
23 Feb 2007 02:19:36 PM |
| Object: |
Neocons Sabotage Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice |
Rice Faces Formidable White House Foe
by Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service
WASHINGTON, Feb 21 (IPS) - If, as she insists, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice is determined to make concrete progress toward
achieving George W. Bush's vision of a two-state solution, one in
which Israel would be required to make major territorial concessions,
it appears that she faces a major foe in the White House.
No, not only ***** Cheney and the surviving members of the
neoconservative clique that surrounded him and former Pentagon chief
Donald Rumsfeld during Bush's first term - although the vice
president's office remains a formidable force against any concessions
to a Palestinian government of national unity that includes Hamas,
despite Saudi Arabia's role in midwifing its birth at Mecca last week.
Rather, it appears that Rice's own chief Middle East aide when she
served as Bush's national security adviser, Elliott Abrams, has become
the principal foil in frustrating her efforts to resume a peace
process. Until her meeting in Jerusalem last weekend with Israeli
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas,
the process had been frozen since the last days of Bill Clinton's
administration.
Abrams' personal influence over Bush could not possibly match Rice's,
but his bureaucratic skills and political connections - notably to the
so-called "Israel Lobby" of pro-Likud Jewish organizations and the
Christian Right - give him considerable clout. According to various
sources, Abrams has been working systematically to undermine any
prospect for serious negotiations designed to give substance to Rice's
hopes - and increasingly impatient demands by Saudi King Abdullah - of
offering the Palestinians a "political horizon" for a final
settlement.
"The Bush administration has done nothing to press Israel to deliver
on its commitments, beyond Washington's empty rhetoric about a two-
state 'political horizon'," Henry Siegman, the longtime director of
the U.S./Middle East Project at the influential Council on Foreign
Relations, wrote in the International Herald Tribune just last week.
"Every time there emerged the slightest hint that the United States
may finally engage seriously in a political process, Elliott Abrams
would meet secretly with Olmert's envoys in Europe or elsewhere to
reassure them that there exists no such danger," he complained.
After the resignation of Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis
Libby, and the departure from the Pentagon nearly two years ago of
Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, Abrams became the administration's
most influential neoconservative, particularly regarding Middle East
policy which he oversees as Deputy National Security Adviser for
Global Democracy Strategy.
Abrams was an early prot=E9g=E9 of Richard Perle, whom he first met, along
with other prominent pro-Likud hard-liners, such as Feith, former UN
Amb. Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Weekly Standard editor William Kristol,
while working in the offices of Washington State Sen. Henry "Scoop"
Jackson. Abrams rose swiftly through the neoconservative ranks, even
becoming a member of one of its most influential families as the son-
in-law of the legendary editor of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, and
his activist wife, Midge Decter, who herself published a hagiography
of Rumsfeld just after the Iraq invasion.
Like his fellow neocons, Abrams has never trusted "peace processes,"
and not just between Israel and its Arab neighbors. During the
mid-1980s, when he served as the top Latin America policy-maker in
Ronald Reagan's State Department, he worked doggedly to scuttle all
regional diplomatic efforts to stop not only Washington's "contra war"
against Nicaragua's Sandinista government (which, among other things,
he charged with anti-Semitism) and the civil war in El Salvador, but
even in southern Africa, where Cuban troops helped defend Angola
against attacks by South Africa and its proxies.
"He opposed regional peace talks, he opposed bilateral talks between
the United States and Nicaragua, and he opposed talks with Cuba,"
according to William LeoGrande, dean of American University's School
of Public Affairs and author of In Our Backyard, a magisterial work on
U=2ES. Central America policy.
"He wouldn't negotiate with adversaries, even when negotiations
promised to safeguard U.S. interests," LeoGrande told IPS, citing the
eventual deal that resulted in Cuba's withdrawal from Africa in
exchange for Namibian independence. "He insisted on total victory, as
if foreign policy were a moral crusade in which compromise was
anathema."
Badly damaged by his felony conviction for lying to Congress about his
role in the Iran-Contra affair, Abrams, like many neocons, left
government service under the decidedly "realist" administration of
President George H.W. Bush and spent the 1990s at various think tanks.
There, he helped forge the coalition - epitomized by Kristol's Project
for the New American Century (PNAC) of which he was a charter member -
of mainly Jewish neoconservatives, the Christian and Catholic Right,
and aggressive nationalists that would seize control of U.S. policy
after 9/11.
On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Abrams has long been identified
with his hard-line patrons, such as Perle and Podhoretz, who have
strongly opposed the "land-for-peace" formula that, until the younger
Bush, had been official U.S. policy since 1967.
When the elder Bush pressed Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to
participate in the Madrid peace conference after the first Gulf War,
Abrams and dozens of other neoconservatives organized the Committee on
U=2ES. Interests in the Middle East to lobby against such an effort.
Throughout the 1990s, Abrams denounced the Oslo peace process in the
strongest terms - a Likud government was engaged in it. When
Palestinians launched the second intifada in September 2000, he
lambasted mainstream U.S. Jewish groups for their continued support
for peace talks between Israel and the PA as "self-delusion." "The
Palestinian leadership," he wrote, "does not want peace with Israel,
and there will be no peace..."
Politically unable, due to his Iran-Contra conviction, to gain Senate
confirmation to a State Department or Pentagon post, Abrams entered
the younger Bush administration as a National Security Council (NSC)
staffer under Rice in 2001 with responsibility for democracy
promotion. But in a major coup that set off celebrations in Rumsfeld's
and Cheney's offices, he was given the Middle East portfolio in
December 2002.
In that capacity, he forged close ties to Dov Weisglass and Shalom
Turgeman, two of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's top aides. Together,
the three men established a direct channel between Sharon's office and
Rice's NSC that effectively excluded Secretary of State Colin Powell,
the administration's strongest advocate for resuming an Israeli-
Palestinian peace process.
The same channel was used to line up Bush's support for Sharon's
unilateral disengagement from Gaza, a scheme designed in part to
preempt growing pressure from Washington's European and Arab allies to
get a credible peace process underway - this time in the form of the
long-delayed "Road Map" sponsored by the Quartet (the U.S., the
European Union, the UN, and Russia) - as Washington's position in Iraq
deteriorated in 2004 and 2005.
Sharon's disengagement plan, as well as his departure from Likud to
form the more centrist Kadima Party, was opposed by U.S. Christian
Right leaders and most hard-line neoconservatives, including Perle,
who had long been among Abrams' closest associates. But Abrams
himself, apparently persuaded by Weisglass' argument that such a
preemptive move would gain Israel time to consolidate its position on
the West Bank and create a precedent for imposing a final border
unilaterally, strongly defended the move.
Rice thought so highly of Abrams' effectiveness that she considered
appointing him deputy secretary of state when she moved over to the
State Department in early 2005. But Bush's political advisers said his
appointment would set off a major and costly confirmation battle and
instead suggested that he be promoted to deputy national security
adviser.
Signs of a serious breach between the two, however, surfaced during
the first days of last summer's Israel-Hezbollah conflict.
Rice reportedly favored a request by Olmert for Washington to
discreetly contact Syrian President Bashar Assad about securing the
release of two Israeli soldiers captured by the Lebanese group. Abrams
not only strongly opposed such a move, but in a meeting with a "very
senior Israeli official" in Jerusalem within 48 hours of the outbreak
of hostilities, also suggested that Washington would have no objection
if Israel extended its military offensive from Lebanon to Syria, a
well-informed source who received an account of the meeting from one
of its participants told IPS.
Abrams' advice echoed similar appeals by neoconservatives, including
Kristol, Perle and his colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute
(AEI), such as David Frum, Newt Gingrich, and Danielle Pletka, who
repeatedly attacked Olmert for timidity in the conduct of the war and
urged the administration to reject growing pressure from Washington's
European and Arab allies to bring the war to an end. Rice herself
became a target of neoconservative attacks as it became clear that she
was relaying that pressure to Bush directly.
According to the New York Times, Abrams, who accompanied Rice on all
of her trips to the region throughout the crisis, "...kept in direct
contact with Mr. Cheney's office," the last stronghold of
neoconservatives, notably the vice president's national security
adviser, John Hannah and his Middle East adviser, David Wurmser.
That breach has, by most accounts, only become wider since the war's
end, as Rice has become increasingly sensitized to the depth of anger
in the Arab world directed against both the U.S. and Israel. She is
acutely aware of the impatience of Washington's Quartet partners to
leapfrog the Road Map and move toward "final status" negotiations, as
well as the difficulty in rallying the pro-U.S. Arab states against
Iran in the absence of a credible Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
It is in that context that Rice has been pushing for resuming a peace
process that could, at the very least, offer the Palestinians a
"political horizon" for a final settlement involving large territorial
concessions by Israel. She has reportedly even reviewed the
hypothetical peace settlement negotiated informally in 2003 by Israeli
and Palestinian politicians and retired military and intelligence
officials, known as the Geneva Initiative.
She has reportedly been encouraged by some in the Israeli government,
notably Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, perhaps Olmert's most serious
political rival within the Kadima party.
But, as in the Israel-Hezbollah war, Rice is up against a formidable
adversary in Abrams and his confederates in the vice president's
office who appear once again to have established their own direct line
to Olmert, this time through Turgeman and another top adviser, Yoram
Turbowicz.
It was that channel that was in play last Friday, on the eve of the
Jerusalem talks, when Olmert held a personal telephone conversation
with Bush and emerged claiming that the U.S. president had promised to
boycott any new Palestinian government of national unity that includes
Hamas so long as the Islamist party does not explicitly recognize
Israel, renounce violence, and pledge to abide by existing agreements
between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
"The American and Israeli positions are totally identical," Olmert
declared, essentially rejecting what had been worked out in Mecca just
a few days before and dooming whatever hopes Rice had for a productive
summit Sunday that could provide the effort with some positive
momentum that she could report to the Quartet meeting in Berlin
Wednesday.
"For the first time in six years, the secretary of state seems to be
committed to moving this process forward," said Martin Indyk, director
of the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy and
a former top policymaker under Clinton, last week before the meetings.
"But there are others in the administration who want to 'Powellize'
her," he added in a thinly veiled reference to Abrams and his allies.
Indeed, Abrams and his friends in recent days have appeared to be
broadening their attack on Rice. In an email he fired off to his East
Asia colleagues and that was subsequently leaked to the Washington
Post, he complained about last week's agreement with North Korea in
the "Six-Party Talks" in Beijing, a complaint that has been quickly
picked up by other neoconservatives.
Abrams had been "frustrated because so many key decisions had been
made at the highest levels without much vetting by officials scattered
across the government," according to the Post's sources - a charge
echoed with some vehemence by other allies, including Frum and former
UN Amb. John Bolton.
"The deal reveals a breakdown of the administration's decision-making
process," Frum wrote this week, citing a Times report that Rice had
"bypassed layers of government policy review that had derailed past
efforts to negotiate an agreement."
The complaint was a particularly ironic one in light of Abrams' role
with the Iran-Contra scandal, his own use of back channels, and his
efforts, along with Cheney's and Rumsfeld's offices, to exclude the
State Department and Central Intelligence Agency, during Bush's first
term.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=3D36675
.
|
|
| User: "JHM" |
|
| Title: Re: Neocons Sabotage Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice |
23 Feb 2007 02:40:38 PM |
|
|
On Feb 23, 3:19 pm, "peace.seeker.27" <vesuvian.doppelga...@lycos.com>
wrote:
Rice Faces Formidable White House Foe
by Jim Lobe, Inter Press Service
Beltway City intrigue and Crawford cowpoker back-stabbing within their
various GOP covens and "conservative" conventicles I do not know
about, but I think it safe to lay it down that the net atomic weight
of Mizz Condoleezzza is exactly 0.00.
Why, you might as well, and quite as ridiculously, lay it down that
their Party Neocomradess K. Hughes tells Little Brother what to think!
BGKB. Bomby days.
.
|
|
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
