Elliott Abrams, the "gladiator" converted to "theopolitics"

Elliott L. Abrams is back. He who had been banned from the Congress buildings because of the false testimony he had given there during Irangate, is returning through the front door. He has just been appointed No. 2 of the National Security Council.

Born on January 24, 1948 in New York, into an observant Jewish family, Elliott Abrams studied at Harvard and then at the London School of Economics. He then became a congressional assistant to Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson (1975-76) and then to Senator Daniel P. Monihan (1977-79).

Leader of the Democratic Party, which he chaired during the campaign of John F. Kennedy, Senator Jackson was the author of legislation conditioning trade with the Soviet Union on the lifting of restrictions on the emigration of religious minorities [1]. In thirty years, this pressure encouraged the emigration of about 1.5 million Soviets, including 250,000 Christians and 250,000 Jews to the United States, and especially 1 million Jews to Israel, thus ensuring the settlement of this colony, which at the time had only 3 million inhabitants. Jackson, who was close to the aircraft manufacturer Boeing, was the hawk of the Democrats. He had surrounded himself with a team of young Trotskyists, who had entered the party and had formed a tendency, the American Social Democrats (SD/USA). Among these promising young people were Douglas Feith, Abram Shulsky, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz (current Deputy Secretary of Defense) and Elliott Abrams (new Deputy National Security Advisor) [2]. They were in contact, in the USSR, with Aanatoly Sharansky (current Israeli minister for Jerusalem and the diaspora under the name of Natan Sharansky).

Elliot Abrams participated in the administration of Ronald Reagan’s two terms. On the recommendation of Jeane Kirkpatrick, [3] he was appointed Assistant to Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig in charge of international organizations in January 1981. He then organised the withdrawal of the United States from UNESCO [4] by denouncing the "politicization" of the organization. The latter has indeed tried to challenge the monopoly of Western press agencies that impose their points of view on the world.

In 1980, Abrams married Rachel Decter, Midge Decter’s daughter and Norman Podhoretz’s daughter-in-law. He thus entered the exclusive club of neo-conservative journalists. He was given access to the columns of Commentary, the influential journal of the American Jewish Committee, and the columns of the Committee for the Free World. [5]

In December 1981, Elliott Abrams became assistant to the Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs in place of his friend Ernest W. Lefever, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), whose confirmation had been rejected by the Senate [6]. Abrams focuses on denouncing religious persecution in Iran against the Bahaia community and in the USSR with the Communist Party’s control of the Orthodox Church. Above all, he denounced the UN, which he accused of legitimizing anti-Semitism by condemning Zionism [7]. According to him, the United Nations is under the influence of the 90 nations of the Non-Aligned Group, with which the PLO plays a major role. By having the General Assembly adopt a resolution in 1975 that equated Zionism with a form of racism, the UN is said to have called into question "the survival of Israel and that of the Jewish people".

Elliott Abrams oversaw the creation of a new agency, responsible for continuing the work of the CIA without resorting to violence: the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) [8]. The idea is to use the promotion of human rights to interfere in and take control of the internal affairs of states. The long-standing example of the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran showed that it is possible to subvert states by corrupting political parties and paying extras to organize demonstrations. Abrams acted as a liaison between the NED and two secret and illegal units of the National Security Council: first the Office of Public Diplomacy, i.e. the Office of Propaganda, headed by Otto Reich [9], then Project Democracy, responsible for building friendly pressure groups under the authority of Colonel Oliver North.

In July 1985, Elliott Abrams was appointed Assistant to Secretary of State George P. Schultz for Inter-American Affairs. In Chile, he tried to lead General Pinochet towards the exit, without losing control of the country, on the model of what had just been achieved with the ouster of Marcos in the Philippines and Duvalier in Haiti. But in the end, he found it difficult to corrupt the opposition political parties and renounced "democratization". It was not carried out until four years later.

Above all, Elliott Abrams threw himself wholeheartedly into the operation to support the Nicaraguan Contras and took on the nickname "Gladiator". He was then "the pit bull of the administration’s policy: ’rather dead than red’" [10]. He acts in direct liaison with successive National Security Advisors Frank C. Carlucci and Admiral John M. Pointdexter, and their henchman Colonel Oliver North. But soon the Irangate scandal broke out. "Members of Congress remember Abrams’ furious appearances at congressional hearings, defending death squads and dictators, denying massacres, lying about illegal U.S. activities in support of the Nicaraguan Contras. Abrams derided his critics for their blindness and naivety, or called them vipers," says a Washington Post columnist [11]. He was later prosecuted for perjury, if not for his responsibility in various massacres in Honduras. He pleaded guilty to two counts, thus escaping prison, and was finally pardoned by President Bush senior, who thus protected himself from the continuation of the investigation.

From 1990 to 2001, Abrams worked at various think tanks. First in an institute of futurology, the Hudson Institute, then chaired by Donald Rumsfeld and directed by his mother-in-law Midge Decter [12]. Then, Abrams joined the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), which has already been mentioned. He took the lead and developed the idea that human rights should become a "diplomatic tool" allowing the United States to exert pressure on other states. He particularly advocated the instrumentalization of attacks on religious freedom and ended up obtaining from the Clinton administration the creation of a Commission on Religious Freedom in the World [13], of which he became president in 1999.

Abrams’ theories have been little discussed in the United States. As part of a majority movement, he considers that it is religious faith that ensures social ties. Agnosticism and atheism are therefore threats to the social order. Freedom of conscience and secularism, which grant them the right to citizenship, are attacks on religious freedom and society as a whole. It is up to religions to organize the public space and to the "chosen people" to show the way. He writes in his book Faith or Fear: How the Jews Can Survive in a Christian America: [14] "Outside the land of Israel, there is no doubt that the Jews, trusting in the Covenant between God and Abraham, must live separate from the nation in which they reside. It is the true nature of Jews to be separated – except in Israel – from the rest of the population." Similarly, he actively campaigns for the prohibition of inter-religious marriages. As a result, the EPPC established privileged contacts with Jewish and Christian fundamentalist organizations, including Opus Dei, which was represented on its board of directors by Professor Mary Ann Glendon [15].

For Abrams, the opposition between the United States and France was fundamental: it lay in the antagonism of their political projects that Thomas Paine had already made explicit in the eighteenth century: [16] if the United States was a new promised land, secular France was a new Egypt. He therefore organized hearings before his committee, the Congress and the OSCE, to denounce the "French secular totalitarianism" that persecuted followers of the Church of Scientology and encouraged anti-Semitism.

Abrams frequented the Center for Security Policy (CSP) where he rubbed shoulders with other neoconservatives as well as his hardest collaborators in the Reagan administration. [17]

In 1997, Richard Perle (whom he had known in Senator Jackson’s cabinet and followed to the CSP) asked him to join a working group of the American Enterprise Institute: the Project for a New American Century [18]. In it, he pledged to attack Iraq and Syria. On behalf of this group, he wrote a chapter on the Near East in a book-manifesto, entitled The Present Dangers [19]. In this document and in a few others, he defends the theses of the Likud: there is no Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because the Palestinians have no legitimate demands, but an Israeli-Arab conflict, because the Arabs are viscerally anti-Semitic. The Oslo process was a maneuver by Yasser Arafat to retain his power after the collapse of the USSR, which protected him. The Israelis joined it only to close a secondary front and better confront the Arab masses. But it is up to the United States to come to the aid of the chosen people and to reverse this balance of power.

On the basis of such a background and such conceptions, Elliott Abrams returned to the administration with George W. Bush. In 2001, the new president appointed him to the National Security Council, special assistant to Condoleezza Rice in charge of human rights; then, in 2002, special assistant in charge of the Near East and North Africa. In terms of human rights, he oversaw the attempted coup d’état in Venezuela, to overthrow elected President Hugo Chavez and "restore democracy" against Bolivarianism [20]. Later, in the Middle East, he proposed to "democratize Palestine" by eliminating the leaders of Hamas and Yasser Arafat and placing Mahmoud Abbas in power. The first will be assassinated, the second will die of an unknown and devastating disease, the third will win elections after his rivals have been dissuaded from running. By closing the Palestinian front, it becomes possible to open the Syrian one.

In October 2002, he explained to an audience of Scientologists and Moonies, gathered in the International Coalition for Religious Freedom, that "Today’s educated elites, particularly in the West, are still the children of the Enlightenment» [21], a despised philosophy that it is time to eradicate before it distances man from God and pushes him towards communism. In October 2003, he helped, with Richard Perle and his friends, to organize the Jerusalem summit dedicated to the advent of “theopolitics” [22]: Reading the Scriptures teaches the wise the will of God in politics.

President George W. Bush has appointed Mr. Abrams as deputy to National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley [23]. His programme: to attack Baathist Syria by blaming it for an attack [24] and transform Lebanon into a Christian state.