In early July, President Joe Biden nominated Elliott Abrams to chair the bipartisan U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, a public relations post whose goal is to shape international perceptions about the United States? If anyone has shaped international perceptions about the US, to the detriment of the US, it is Elliott Abrams!
Like yet another entry in the Child’s Play/Chucky franchise – there’s been at least 10 according to Collider -- Abrams, currently a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, is one of those political figures that is rarely without an official position, despite a history of lying to Congress, supporting murderous Central American dictators, and beating the drums of war for better than half-a-century. Given his record of failures, miscalculations, and human rights abominations, Biden’s appointment of Abrams boggles the mind!
“It’s definitely a way to reach out to neoconservatives, and to throw them a bone,” the historian and journalist Eric Alterman, who has written about Abrams since the 1980s, told The Guardian. “It’s a risky move on Biden’s part.”
“It’s appalling,” Mark Rosenthal writes in The Progressive (https://progressive.org/op-eds/bidens-nomination-elliott-abrams-excuses-violent-past-rosenthal-231016/), “that Abrams, a former member of the Trump and Reagan Administrations, can still be seen as a respectable candidate for any public office, much less one that’s involved with diplomacy.”
These days, the longtime neo-conservative war hawk has taken stands “against an independent Palestinian state, coupled with advocacy for Israeli expansionist policies and illegal settlements in the West Bank, [which] reveals a consistent pattern of disregard for human rights and international law,” Rosenthal noted.
Why does Rosenthal come to this conclusion about Abrams? In part, because during the 1980s, Abrams was at the center of some of most despicable foreign policy initiatives, particularly in Central America. “One of the most glaring stains on Abrams’s record is his involvement in the El Mozote Massacre, a horrifying atrocity during which around 1,000 innocent civilians, including 195 children, were brutally killed,” Rosenthal notes.
Abrams was assistant secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, and was deeply involved in the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra affair. As The Guardian’s Mary Yang reported in July (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/08/biden-elliott-abrams-iran-contra-venezuela), “During Reagan’s second term, a congressional investigation found that senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to the Iranian government and used the money to support the Contras, a rightwing rebel group in Nicaragua – the Iran-Contra affair.
“Abrams, who was assistant secretary of inter-American affairs from 1985 to early 1989, later pleaded guilty to two charges of illegally withholding information from Congress – including his role in soliciting $10m from Brunei – during two October 1986 hearings, one before the Senate foreign relations committee and a second before the House intelligence committee.”
Then there was Abrams support for Guatemalan military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, “who was later convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity during the Guatemalan civil war. Adams’s advocacy was crucial in ending the weapons embargo that had been instituted by the Carter Administration in response to Montt’s human rights record—making him complicit in a legally-defined genocide,” Rosenthal, a retired ER Nurse who has been involved in international solidarity for over fifty years, and a co-founder of the U.S.-El Salvador Sister City Network, pointed out.
In August of 2020, then President Donald Trump appointed Abrams as special envoy to Iran. At the same time, Abrams continued his role as special representative to Venezuela, where he aimed to undermine and isolate Venezuela’s President Maduro.
Abrams has been a persistent critic of the Obama administration’s relations with Iran, including the 2015 sanctions relief for the nuclear rollback deal.
When Abrams was appointed special representative to Venezuela, WNYC’s On The Media co-host Bob Garfield pointed out: “The Trump administration has brought in Ronald Reagan’s old conquistador Elliott Abrams, because, I suppose, Hernán Cortés was unavailable.”
Stephen Kinzer, author of numerous books, including Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq told Garfield that “The appointment of Elliott Abrams is truly mindboggling, especially for us old fogies that remember the 1980s. … [Back then] Elliott Abrams was a principal perpetrator of U.S. policy in Central America.”
"From El Salvador to Guatemala, Nicaragua to Panama, Elliott Abrams' life's work has been defined by the worst impulses of U.S. foreign policy: embracing war, ignoring gross human rights abuses, and supporting horrific authoritarian regimes," Stephen Miles, executive director of Win Without War, told Common Dreams’ Jake Johnson.
The Guardian’s Yang noted that “There are seven seats on the diplomacy panel, four of which were vacant as of March, according to a state department notice. It is housed within the Office of the Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, a post that sat empty until Biden nominated Elizabeth Allen to lead the office in January. She began in June.”
When Trump appointed Abrams as special envoy to Venezuela in an attempt to oust Nicolás Maduro, and followed that by appointing him as special envoy to Iran, I wondered if this would the veteran neoconservative’s last hurrah. Apparently not!