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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

The Return of a Criminal Neocon

Why does the foreign-policy and journalistic establishment still welcome
Elliott Abrams?

In an article about a recent foreign-policy discussion at a conference
sponsored by the sometimes pro-Trump/sometimes anti-Trump National
Review magazine, American Conservative writer Declan Leary asks the
question: "Who better to present an 'unsentimental, realistic
perspective' on 'our nation and our core interests' than Elliott
Abrams?
"
Well, that's easy: pretty much anyone. NR's Jay Nordlinger described
him as "'truly a child prodigy' for having served in the Reagan
administration at the precocious age of 33." Well, that's one way of
describing Norman Podhoretz
's
and the recently deceased Midge Decter
's
son-in-law, who I'm sure got his jobs with Pat Moynihan, Henry
"Scoop" Jackson, and ultimately the Reagan administration without
any help at all.

Post-Afghanistan and Ukraine, neocons have attempted to seize an
opportunity to return themselves to the center of foreign-policy debate,
now that (maybe) people don't remember Iraq so well. Abrams, who
literally has never met a potential U.S. (or Israeli) military action
for which he did not cheerlead (and simultaneously accuse its opponents
of lily-livered cowardice), showed up to argue that the nearly 40
percent of world military spending we account for

is far too little. America, he fears, has taken a "holiday from
history." He is further concerned with what he considers to be a
"particularly pernicious" form of "isolationism," and he
describes it as follows:

It's the one that, you know, it's the kind that says, "Who are we
to tell other people what to do? Who are we? What are we defending here,
this horrible racist society ..."

Some neocons have shown a willingness to reconsider their previous
errors in light of their politics having led to Trump. Max Boot

gets most of the honors in this category. (William Kristol

is in a sort of purgatory for acting like he now knows he was wrong
about pretty much everything, but would just as soon move on. I wrote a
sort of scorecard on this point back in 2009
.)
But Abrams, perhaps the man who needed to do more than anyone else alive
to repudiate his past views, is sticking to his rhetorical (and
metaphorical) guns. This would almost be funny in the way that Lindsey
Graham or Ted Cruz's constant brownnosing of Trump is almost funny.
Abrams, however, is particularly problematic because he continues to be
taken seriously by most of the members of the mainstream media and what
remains of the foreign-policy establishment. (He is after all a senior
fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, among his other
appointments.) Yet not only has he been demonstrably wrong about
virtually every major issue since he was a "child prodigy," but he
was also convicted of lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal
while holding the very position that Nordlinger thinks ought to
recommend him.

Above all, Elliott Abrams used his position to act as a defender and
enabler of genocide, and I do not use this word at all casually.

I have written at enormous length about Abrams's lying on behalf of
and defense of the mass murder of hundreds of women and children in El
Salvador
, as he
simultaneously slandered the journalists and human rights workers who
sought to expose it. He did the same thing vis-à-vis Guatemala during
the period when Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala's then-dictator,
was carrying out what were clearly "acts of genocide
"-in
the legally binding words of Guatemala's United Nations-backed
Commission for Historical Clarification-against the indigenous people
in the Ixil region of the department of Quiché. These are just two of
the reasons that no one should consult Abrams about anything. There are
many others, all of which have to do with his contempt for truth,
democracy, and human life. (See under: "Israel-Palestine
" and "Venezuela
,"
for instance.) I've written about these reasons here
and here
,
here ,
even back so far as 1987, here
, and
I'm not the only one. My arguments and evidence have been picked up
here and there in more mainstream sources. But here's the thing:
Almost no one cares. Journalists still quote him. The Council on Foreign
Relations still pays and promotes him. Right-wing Trump-friendly
foundations want his name on their boards
.

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It's an interesting question as to exactly why this is. Is it because
social connections triumph over genocidal ones? Is it because people
think lying for murderers to be no big deal at the highest levels of the
journalism/think-tank nexus? Is it the fact that Central Americans are
not white people that somehow makes it OK to have helped to enable their
mass murder? Is it because the Trump team is actually so much worse? Is
the soft bigotry of low expectations at work when it comes to
Republicans engendering war crimes? Is it because the Jewish right-wing
world has embraced Abrams and people understandably prefer not to get on
their bad side? And why, especially, are journalists-the very people
whom Abrams has slandered for doing their job-so eager to treat him
respectfully?

It is certainly some combination of all of the above. But what, again,
would be funny were it not so awful is the notion that this person who
in any civilized society would have been imprisoned for war crimes
himself can go around lecturing people about the "brutality and
corruption of the regime and the society from which it is coming,"
when his career-second, perhaps, only to Henry Kissinger's-is the
single best example of just those qualities in our own.

While discussing America's role in the world and the foreign-policy
establishment's crumbling case for engagement, I need to admit that
the left has lacked a coherent view of American interests tied to
American ideals for decades, save for the (necessary) reaction of
seeking to rein in the neocons, and their inheritors, the Trump team.
Bill Clinton only toyed with the edges of neocon doctrine, and Barack
Obama, however much he hated the "Blob," rarely went beyond
"Don't do stupid shit
."

Well, it's been said, not by me, that "where there is no vision, the
people perish
,"
and vision on the left as far as foreign policy has been in decidedly
short supply. Fortunately, we now have two prescient pieces in Foreign
Affairs by Bernie Sanders's foreign-policy guru (and Altercation good
friend and long-ago American Prospect intern) Matt Duss. Following up on
his 2020 piece, "U.S. Foreign Policy Never Recovered From the War on
Terror
,"
Duss's new contribution lays the groundwork for a policy that is both
hard-headed and soft-hearted; providing a framework for the rest of us
to think about individual places and issues that elude simple slogans.
In the article entitled "The War in Ukraine Calls for a Reset of
Biden's Foreign Policy
,"
Duss recognizes that Russia's war against Ukraine requires a
"paradigm shift" in our approach to the world, and credits the Biden
administration with handling the crisis well so far. But taking us well
beyond just holding NATO together (or further expanding it), he seeks to
locate how it might be possible to actually apply the principles to
which our politicians so frequently pay tribute in rhetoric while
ignoring them in practice. I cannot do justice to all, or really any, of
Duss's proposals in this space except to say that if you read these
two articles, you will come away with the single best discussion of
what's wrong with U.S. foreign policy and how it might possibly be
repaired. If there were any justice in this world-and of course, I say
that as most people do, without expecting any-Duss's should be the
most influential article on real-world U.S. foreign policy since this
one
.
At the very least, it ought to-again, I say this knowing it
won't-put Elliott Abrams out of business.

Update: In a victory for hysterical lies and (oh so ironically)
disinformation, the DHS has suspended the subject of last week's
Altercation, the Disinformation Governance Board.

Also: I'll be in conversation with Dr. Yael Sternhell at Tel Aviv
University (Gilman 281) on Tuesday, May 24, at 6 p.m. Israel time (11
a.m. Eastern), on "The American Left and Israel." It will be
livestreamed on Zoom and
Facebook Live .

Odds and Ends

It's always a pleasure to sit down with a handsome new Library of
America version of a book one has long loved. And the new edition of F.
Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

(together with the stories from All the Sad Young Men and other writings
produced between 1920 and 1926) requires no reasons other than the
stories themselves. Yet as Alec MacGillis reminded me, Fitzgerald had
Tom Buchanan blustering about white replacement theory a century ago, in
the very first chapter of the book. I'm also listening
to Grant Ginder's Let's Not Do That Again
, and
there, too, is the same sort of poison pouring out of a sad, young
Frenchman. (He is looking forward to moving to the U.S. and getting his
own show on Fox: "All you have to do is bark the loudest and they'll
give you your own television show.") Whether it's Tucker Carlson
(funded by the immigrant Rupert Murdoch) or the mass murderers such talk
inspires, it's not something that a civilized society can let slide,
much less one that owes whatever greatness it enjoys to immigrants (most
especially including involuntary immigrants).

Oh, and speaking of National Review, let's not forget that this
hate-monger (William Buckley) was its top editor. (I took a cruise with
the guy once upon a time and wrote about it here
.)

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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