A foreign policy expert and former advisor to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, will discuss "The Freedom Agenda and the Middle East," at Duke University on Tuesday.
Elliott Abrams is currently a senior fellow in the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2002, he was the senior director on the National Security Council for the Near East and North African Affairs during Bush's first term. At the start of Bush’s second term, he was promoted to Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy, helping advance democracy abroad and U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Under the Reagan administration, Abrams worked in the state department, where he supervised U.S. participation in the United Nations and policy in Latin America and the Caribbean.
"Elliott Abrams has held pivotal positions of power and influence at key turning points in American history, most recently as President Bush’s point man for policy in the broader Middle East and for global human rights," said Duke political science professor Peter Feaver, co-director of Duke’s Program in American Grand Strategy, which is one of the event’s sponsors.
The event is scheduled to begin at 5:30 p.m. in the Rhodes Conference Room (Room 223) in the Sanford School of Public Policy. The talk is free and open to the public.
Comments
Elliot Needs To Retire
March 17, 2010 - 10:38am — AquaManthis guy is a convicted felon.
Will the Neocons never go away?
March 15, 2010 - 6:06pm — scharrisonEven after seven long years fighting insurgency in Iraq after our "victory" there, a conflict he was deeply involved in orchestrating, by the way, Elliott Abrams actually believes the Iranian population would support (or at least not fight against) an American military invasion of their country.
just an added note for the really smart folks at Duke University: if Abrams believes withholding vital information from Congress is okay:
http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/chap_25.htm
"On October 7, 1991, Abrams pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor charges of withholding information from Congress. Abrams admitted that he withheld from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) in October 1986 his knowledge of North's contra-assistance activities. In support of his guilty plea, Abrams admitted that it was his belief ``that disclosure of Lt. Col. North's activities in the resupply of the Contras would jeopardize final enactment'' of a $100 million appropriation pending in Congress at the time of his testimony.3 He also admitted that he withheld from HPSCI information that he had solicited $10 million in aid for the contras from the Sultan of Brunei. "
I sure hope the University isn't paying Abrams a lot of cash to "provide information" for its students, if you catch my drift.
Just one more observation (good things come in threes, people). As to Elliott Abrams' "Long-range foreign policy acumen", as it were, the country he thinks we should now invade with our tanks is still in possession of several hundred of those TOW missiles we sold them, and Daniel Ortega is once again in charge of Nicaragua.