July 13, 2023:
Information Clearing
House
-- "Common
Dreams
"
--
In February 2019, then-freshman
congresswoman
Ilhan Omar committed a rare offense
in U.S. politics: she
called out a sitting official, to
his face, for his complicity in horrific
human rights abuses.
The official in question was Elliott
Abrams, who had just been appointed the
Trump administration’s “special envoy”
for Venezuela. Omar highlighted Abrams’
1991 guilty plea for lying to Congress
about the Iran-Contra affair, saying
that this called into question why
members of the body should trust what he
has to say. She went on to excoriate
Abrams for his role in downplaying the
horrific massacre of hundreds of
civilians by U.S.-armed and trained
troops in El Salvador.
The reaction to Omar’s breach of
decorum was
swift and bipartisan. A number of
neoconservative intellectuals lept to
defend Abrams as a champion of democracy
and human rights, joined by a handful of
nominally liberal foreign policy
professionals such as Kelly Magsamen,
then vice president for National
Security and International Policy at the
Center for American Progress, and now
chief of staff to Secretary of Defense
Lloyd Austin.
“I worked for Elliott Abrams as a
civil servant,” Magsamen
tweeted. “He is a fierce advocate
for human rights and democracy. Yes, he
made serious professional mistakes and
was held accountable. I’m a liberal but
I’m also fair. We all have a lot of work
to do together in Venezuela. We share
goals.”
This strange episode gained renewed
relevance on Monday when, in a possible
attempt to bury the news on the eve of
the Fourth of July, the Biden
administration
announced its intent to nominate
Abrams to the bipartisan “United States
Advisory Commission on Public
Diplomacy.”
Abram’s
appointment may be largely symbolic and
grant him little power or influence over
policy. But his selection, rather than
any of the many available Republican
former officials with less blood-stained
careers, speaks volumes.
The commission is
charged with assessing U.S. efforts
to “understand, inform, and influence
foreign publics” and issuing reports to
Congress and the executive on these
topics. It is statutorily bipartisan; no
more than four of its seven members can
come from any one political party.
Abram’s appointment may be largely
symbolic and grant him little power or
influence over policy. But his
selection, rather than any of the many
available Republican former officials
with less blood-stained careers, speaks
volumes.
Abrams may not be as infamous as
Henry Kissinger, but his record of
“public service” is similarly
ignominious, littered with the policy
failures and complicity in crimes
against humanity that have unfortunately
characterized U.S. foreign policy in the
Cold War era and beyond.
In 1981, a day before Abrams assumed
the post of Assistant Secretary of State
for Inter-American Affairs, the Atlacatl
Battalion, a U.S.-trained unit of the
Salvadoran military, massacred nearly
1,000 civilians, committing mass rapes
against women and children in the
process. Abrams
insisted to Congress that rumors of
the massacre were essentially propaganda
by leftist guerillas, and continued to
do so despite
investigations by U.S. embassy
officials, the New York Times, and the
Washington Post confirming the massacre
and placing blame squarely at the feet
of the Salvadoran military.
Throughout the Reagan
administration’s brutal
counterinsurgency campaigns in Central
America, Abrams continually testified
that U.S.-backed forces were making
serious improvements in their human
rights practices so that they could
continue receiving arms and training. In
fact these forces in Guatemala and El
Salvador were waging genocidal war
against their countries’ peasantry and
indigenous populations. A U.N.-backed
truth commission eventually
found that 85 percent of the
violence was carried out by the military
and its associated death squads.
Abrams reserved particular praise for
Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt,
lauding the dictator for
“considerable progress” on human rights
and attitudes toward the indigenous
population. Rios Montt was later
convicted of genocide against
Guatemala’s Ixil Maya.
Abrams is best known for his central
role in the Iran-Contra Affair, working
to
secure funding for the brutal
counterrevolutionaries and to
direct their operations. The
Contras, a group consisting mostly of
former officials and soldiers from the
deposed dictatorship of Anastasio
Somoza, failed in their task of
overthrowing the Sandinista government
in Nicaragua. But the militants, who
were almost
completely reliant on U.S. support,
became
notorious for their brutal killings
of civilians.
It was for this affair that Abrams
would earn his criminal conviction — not
for abetting and concealing mass
atrocities, but for misrepresenting U.S.
support for the Contras to Congress. In
1991, Abrams pleaded guilty for lying to
Congress about the extensive U.S. role
in supplying and funding the Contras,
for which he received two years of
probation and 100 hours of community
service — a punishment he never actually
served after an 11th hour pardon from
George H.W. Bush.
The contention that Abrams merely
“made mistakes” and was held accountable
— more popular with his liberal
defenders — is belied by this pardon and
by Abrams’ book Undue Process, his angry
and self-pitying account of his
prosecution in which he labels
Iran-Contra investigators “miserable,
filthy bastards” and “bloodsuckers” (and
which this author has had the misfortune
of reading in full).
Abrams’ record of abuse and failure
continued into the 21st century. He
served in the George W. Bush
administration and was
alleged to have approved the failed
coup plot against Hugo Chavez in 2002.
Later, he was
named as a
central figure in the
administration’s
backing of a failed Fatah coup
against Hamas after the latter party won
Palestinian elections — ultimately
leading to Hamas’s uncontested control
of the Gaza strip.
In his aforementioned time as Trump’s
“special envoy” for Venezuela, U.S.
policy fared no better, with attempts to
overthrow the government of Nicolas
Maduro ending only in Juan Guaido’s
spectacularly unsuccessful
2019 putsch attempt and an even more
quixotic effort by a group of U.S.
mercenaries and former Venezuelan
soldiers to kidnap Maduro. The Trump
administration denied any involvement in
the latter affair, which historian Greg
Grandin has
described as a “burlesque
Iran-Contra.”
In response to a
query from Mother Jones, a
White House spokesperson implied that
Abrams’ nomination to this latest
appointment was put forward by
Republican leadership and merely
accepted by the administration. But
given the White House’s vague
explanation of the willingness of
members of the administration to
publicly embrace Abrams and others like
them, it would be granting Team Biden
far too much benefit of the doubt to
simply believe that Republicans forced
their hand.
The United States
embraces repressive and murderous (but
useful) governments while in the same
breath condemning the human rights
abuses of its adversaries
Biden entered office pledging that
“human rights will be the center of our
foreign policy.” Since then he has
comprehensively broken this promise, as
recounted last month by former
Bernie Sanders advisor Matt Duss
(who also sharply
criticized Abram’s nomination). In
embracing great power competition —
particularly confrontation with China —
at all costs, the Biden administration
has made some degree of human rights
hypocrisy inevitable. The United States
embraces repressive and murderous (but
useful) governments while in the same
breath condemning the human rights
abuses of its adversaries and calling on
the world to rally behind liberal
principles.
This contradiction is readily
apparent in the administration’s
campaign against Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine. In March, Antony Blinken gave a
speech highlighting Russia’s
massacres of civilians in Bucha,
appealing to the world to rally for
justice and against Russia’s war. Just
two months later, Blinken
joined other foreign policy
luminaries for the 100th birthday party
of Henry Kissinger, who is
directly responsible for the
massacre of countless civilians in
Cambodia and beyond.
That Biden officials do not see how
hypocritical — and counterproductive —
it is to embrace figures like Abrams and
Kissinger while trying to rally the
globe against their adversaries human
rights abuses is almost unfathomable.
But the exceptionalist convictions held
by most U.S. foreign policy elites —
that American power is synonymous with
liberal order, and that U.S. global
primacy is, in the
words of analyst Van Jackson, a
“global public good” — are powerful and
enduring.
The problem for America’s foreign
policy establishment is that it is
increasingly impossible for anyone
outside of Western elites to believe
this too. Over the coming years the
United States will be faced with a
choice to either adopt a more humble
foreign policy that accepts the same
restraints it demands of others, or to
drop the pretenses altogether.