February 24, 2007	Saturday	Safar 6, 1428

(The first instalment of this article was published in Friday’s Dawn).

In that capacity, he forged close ties to Dov Weisglass and Shalom Turgeman, two of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s top aides. Together, the three men established a direct channel between Sharon’s office and Rice’s NSC that effectively excluded Secretary of State Colin Powell, the administration’s strongest advocate for resuming an Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

The same channel was used to line up Bush’s support for Sharon’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza, a scheme designed in part to pre-empt growing pressure from Washington’s European and Arab allies to get a credible peace process underway -- this time in the form of the long-delayed “Road Map” sponsored by the Quartet (the US, the European Union, the UN, and Russia) -- as Washington’s position in Iraq deteriorated in 2004 and 2005.

Sharon’s disengagement plan, as well as his departure from Likud to form the more centrist Kadima Party, was opposed by US Christian Right leaders and most hard-line neo-conservatives, including Perle, who had long been among Abrams’ closest associates. But Abrams himself, apparently persuaded by Weisglass’ argument that such a pre-emptive move would gain Israel time to consolidate its position on the West Bank and create a precedent for imposing a final border unilaterally, strongly defended the move.

Rice thought so highly of Abrams’ effectiveness that she considered appointing him deputy secretary of state when she moved over to the State Department in early 2005. But Bush’s political advisers said his appointment would set off a major and costly confirmation battle and instead suggested that he be promoted to deputy national security adviser.

Signs of a serious breach between the two, however, surfaced during the first days of last summer’s Israel-Hezbollah conflict.

Rice reportedly favoured a request by Olmert for Washington to discreetly contact Syrian President Bashar Assad about securing the release of two Israeli soldiers captured by the Lebanese group. Abrams not only strongly opposed such a move, but in a meeting with a “very senior Israeli official” in Jerusalem within 48 hours of the outbreak of hostilities, also suggested that Washington would have no objection if Israel extended its military offensive from Lebanon to Syria, a well-informed source who received an account of the meeting from one of its participants told reporters.

Abram’s advice echoed similar appeals by neo-conservatives, including Kristol, Perle and his colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), such as David Frum, Newt Gingrich, and Danielle Pletka, who repeatedly attacked Olmert for timidity in the conduct of the war and urged the administration to reject growing pressure from Washington’s European and Arab allies to bring the war to an end. Rice herself became a target of neo-conservative attacks as it became clear that she was relaying that pressure to Bush directly.

According to the New York Times, Abrams, who accompanied Rice on all of her trips to the region throughout the crisis, “...kept in direct contact with Mr Cheney’s office”, the last stronghold of neo-conservatives, notably the vice president’s national security adviser, John Hannah and his Middle East adviser, David Wurmser.

That breach has, by most accounts, only become wider since the war’s end, as Rice has become increasingly sensitised to the depth of anger in the Arab world directed against both the US and Israel. She is acutely aware of the impatience of Washington’s Quartet partners to leapfrog the Road Map and move toward “final status” negotiations, as well as the difficulty in rallying the pro-US Arab states against Iran in the absence of a credible Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

It is in that context that Rice has been pushing for resuming a peace process that could, at the very least, offer the Palestinians a “political horizon” for a final settlement involving large territorial concessions by Israel. She has reportedly even reviewed the hypothetical peace settlement negotiated informally in 2003 by Israeli and Palestinian politicians and retired military and intelligence officials, known as the Geneva Initiative.

She has reportedly been encouraged by some in the Israeli government, notably Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, perhaps Olmert’s most serious political rival within the Kadima party.

But, as in the Israel-Hezbollah war, Rice is up against a formidable adversary in Abrams and his confederates in the vice president’s office who appear once again to have established their own direct line to Olmert, this time through Turgeman and another top adviser, Yoram Turbowicz.

It was that channel that was in play last Friday, on the eve of the Jerusalem talks, when Olmert held a personal telephone conversation with Bush and emerged claiming that the US president had promised to boycott any new Palestinian government of national unity that includes Hamas so long as the Islamist party does not explicitly recognise Israel, renounce violence, and pledge to abide by existing agreements between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

“The American and Israeli positions are totally identical,” Olmert declared, essentially rejecting what had been worked out in Makkah just a few days before and dooming whatever hopes Rice had for a productive summit on Sunday that could provide the effort with some positive momentum that she could report to the Quartet meeting in Berlin on Wednesday.

“For the first time in six years, the secretary of state seems to be committed to moving this process forward,” said Martin Indyk, director of the Brookings Institution’s Saban Centre for Middle East Policy and a former top policymaker under Clinton, last week before the meetings. “But there are others in the administration who want to ‘Powellize’ her,” he added in a thinly veiled reference to Abrams and his allies.

Indeed, Abrams and his friends in recent days have appeared to be broadening their attack on Rice. In an email he fired off to his East Asia colleagues and that was subsequently leaked to the Washington Post, he complained about last week’s agreement with North Korea in the “Six-Party Talks” in Beijing.

Abrams had been “frustrated because so many key decisions had been made at the highest levels without much vetting by officials scattered across the government,” according to the Post’s sources.

“The deal reveals a breakdown of the administration’s decision-making process,” Frum wrote this week, citing a Times report that Rice had “bypassed layers of government policy review that had derailed past efforts to negotiate an agreement.”

The complaint was a particularly ironic one in light of Abrams’ role with the Iran-Contra scandal, his own use of back channels, and his efforts, along with Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s offices, to exclude the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency, during Bush’s first term.—Dawn/The IPS News Service

Concluded