The Elliott Abrams Factor

Clemons in TWN, here

"When I saw that the right-anchored Jerusalem Post was running an interview of Elliott Abrams with Ruthie Blum Leibowitz, I expected the worst. Leibowitz is the daughter of Norman Podhoretz, essentially co-founder with Irving Kristol of the neoconservative movement, and is brother of John Podhoretz and sister of Elliott Abrams' wife, Rachel Decter...

The honesty and bluntness (see arrogance of a criminal) of Elliott Abram's commentary is important here -- as well as the acknowledgment that the Bush team was fully supportive of Ariel Sharon's flipping of the finger to Palestinian moderates.....

And third, I found the following bit on Bush's White House decision making process important. It's a long clip, but important to read in full:

Now, this all changed when Condi - Bush's closest adviser - became secretary of state. The role of the State Department then became much more important, though it depended on the issue. For example, when it came to Iraq, the State Department was far less important, because Iraq policy was really being made by the president, the vice president, the secretary of defense and the joint chiefs. But there were other areas of policy in which the State Department was very directly and deeply involved. Palestinian-Israeli affairs was one of them. The other was North Korea. In both cases, policy was essentially made in the State Department.

In this area, you have a kind of organizational problem. You want the president - any president - to get a variety of opinions and to make choices based on them. And when the secretary of state is by far his closest foreign policy adviser, you sometimes don't get the full panoply of advice. In the Reagan and Bush administrations, there was the view - it will be interesting to see whether it will be so in the Obama administration, as well - that policy disputes should be ironed out at the level of cabinet principals: the national security adviser, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the chairman
of the joint chiefs, the head of the CIA, etc. The idea was that you don't go to the president with these fights; you go to the president with a solution, with a policy proposal that reflects a consensus.
This has always seemed to me to be a gigantic mistake. When people of that rank and office have policy disagreements, the president should hear them, and be allowed to choose among the options that are being debated. He should not be presented with a homogenized, consensus, compromised position. There's an old story told about the way the State Department works: There are always three options, one of which is so weak, another of which is so over-the-top strong, that it's obvious the middle one is the one you're going to choose. And it's true! Well, it's a mistake, and presidents should not permit that kind of thing. And I think that in the case of Middle East policy, it happened all too often.

So I was the resident skeptic. We were hearing, both from secretary Rice and from prime minister Olmert that there was a very good chance of concluding a final-status agreement. I never believed this, neither before Annapolis nor after. So I was always like a little black cloud in all these meetings, saying, "I don't think this is going to happen."

It's really hard to envision a government worse than Assad's, for Israel or for the people of Syria. Indeed, if it had played any worse a role than it did with respect to Iraq, the US would have attacked it, I suppose. There is no reason in the world to think that the people of Syria wish to be governed by this tiny - and, in the eyes of many of them, no doubt - heretical minority, which is covered in blood, including Syrian blood.

Egypt is a more difficult example, because it does have what, in international-political terms, is considered a moderate government that is working with the US, with the Europeans and with Israel against the worst forces in the region, such as Hamas. And it isn't clear what will follow that government. I took the view that if you believed that a Muslim Brotherhood takeover would be extremely dangerous, then you would have to wonder what alternative will be presented at the end of the Mubarak era.

Elliott Abrams will soon be on staff at the Council on Foreign Relations.......,