BACK ROADS.(Israel and the roadmap to peace)

In the 2000 Presidential campaign, George W. Bush was sharply critical of Bill Clinton's efforts to pressure Israel for a peace settlement with the Palestinians. "In recent times, Washington has tried to make Israel conform to its own plans and timetables," Bush said. "But this is not the path to peace." He seemed determined not to allow his own Administration to become mired in the conflict, and during the first year of his Presidency Bush kept his distance, despite escalating violence in the region. Then, in November, 2001, two months after the September 11th attacks, Bush seemed to change his mind, telling the United Nations General Assembly, "We are working toward a day when two states, Israel and Palestine, live peacefully together within secure and recognized borders." He had now endorsed, more explicitly than any previous President, the creation of an independent Palestinian state.

Last April, the President presented each side with an actual plan--the so-called "road map" to peace. In the first of a series of projected phases, it called for the Palestinian Authority to curtail terrorist groups and for Israel to dismantle settlement outposts and to freeze the construction of new settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The road map was marketed as being different from the Oslo plan of the nineties, in that it made progress contingent upon the two parties' performance. In June, Bush convened a summit in Aqaba, Jordan, and exhorted the two sides to "keep their promises" by following the outlined steps according to the plan's schedule. He pledged that his Administration would be fully involved, saying, "I've also asked Secretary of State Colin Powell and national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice to make this cause a matter of the highest priority." And for a time it seemed that it was.

Not everyone in the Administration shared the President's view. Some of Bush's neoconservative supporters--former liberals who became fervent Cold Warriors in the nineteen-seventies and today tend to urge Israelis to take a hard line--thought that Israel should not give up the occupied territories or allow the creation of a Palestinian state. The road map also drew public criticism from a number of prominent neoconservatives outside the Administration; others, however, seemed content to let the plan take its course, certain that this plan, like so many before it, would fail. Their equanimity may have stemmed, in part, from their confidence in the plan's White House facilitator, Elliott Abrams.

In the Reagan Administration, Abrams was one of the fiercest supporters of the Nicaraguan contras, and subsequently pleaded guilty to criminal charges of having withheld information from Congress. His life in government appeared to be over. In December of 1992, however, he and five others in the case were pardoned by President George H. W. Bush, and in the second Bush Presidency Abrams was offered a job with the National Security Council. Last December, while working for Condoleezza Rice, Abrams was appointed the N.S.C.'s senior director for Near East and North African affairs. Iran and Iraq were part of his portfolio--"I have two-thirds of the axis of evil!" he enthused to one well-wisher. And the Israeli-Palestinian conflict became a cardinal responsibility.

Abrams had long held hawkish positions on Israel. In the early nineties, he helped form the Committee on U.S. Interests in the Middle East, which opposed President Bush's efforts to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to participate in the Madrid peace conference, and then opposed territorial concessions for peace. After Shamir's successor, Yitzhak Rabin, decided to pursue the Oslo peace process, Abrams became a staunch critic of that process. Not long before his appointment to the N.S.C., Abrams wrote an article for a Web site called beliefnet.com in which he praised Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as someone who understood that "the road to peace lies through strength instead of weakness, and firmness rather than unilateral concessions," and compared Sharon to Winston Churchill. Among supporters of the Israeli hard line, Abrams's appointment last December was greeted with jubilation. By early May, however, the President's newly revealed peace plan, with its goal of a "sovereign, independent, democratic and viable Palestine" by 2005, had dampened their spirits considerably.

At this year's dinner for the Commentary Magazine Fund, in May, Abrams--whose father-in-law is Norman Podhoretz, the former editor of Commentary, and whose mother-in-law is the writer Midge Decter--told his audience that no terms would be imposed on Israel and the Palestinians by outside parties, saying, "It is a peace that if it is ever to be made has to be made between them." He explained that he had just returned from a trip to Israel, where he had met with Sharon and other Israeli government officials. "I did not find the government of Israel nearly as concerned about this as American Jews, and I think the Israelis have it right." Abrams seemed to be suggesting to his listeners that they were taking an even harder line than Sharon's right-wing Likud government. It was one thing for such an audience to hear this sort of message from a State Department official (who might be an "Arabist"), and quite another from a favorite son. Had Elliott Abrams changed sides? Was the Bush Administration really serious about creating a Palestinian state?

Abrams grew up in a middle-class family in Queens, the son of Democrats so liberal that they named their sons Franklin and Elliott. There were early signs, however, that Elliott had different affinities. Even as a teen-ager at Manhattan's progressive Elisabeth Irwin High School, he was offended by the left-wing sympathies of his peers, and by what he saw as the excesses of a radical, undisciplined time. After graduating from Harvard Law School, in 1973, he practiced law briefly in New York but soon went to Washington, where he worked as special counsel for Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, a Cold Warrior Democrat and one of neoconservatism's progenitors; working in that office, too, were the men who would become Abrams's political allies in the coming decades, Douglas Feith and Richard Perle. In 1977, Abrams went to work for Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and ultimately became his chief of staff. In 1979, he left Moynihan's office and later helped to recruit Jewish voters for Ronald Reagan. He switched parties, and, after Reagan's victory, he was named Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs--at thirty-three, the youngest Assistant Secretary in the twentieth century. The same year, as a member of a search team to find a new Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, Abrams successfully put himself forward for the post. Although Alexander Haig, the Secretary of State, had wanted to do away with the Carter Administration's emphasis upon human rights in its foreign policy, Abrams argued that the human-rights issue could be a powerful weapon in the fight against Communism.

In his new position, Abrams essentially argued that whatever the Reagan Administration was doing to prevent a country from going Communist was in the service of human rights. The problem with this conceit was that the forces that the United States supported themselves often committed unspeakable violations of human rights. In El Salvador, for example, civilian massacres by government troops were downplayed or denied by the State Department in order to justify continuing United States aid. Abrams and others in the Administration consistently attacked the credibility of the journalists and human-rights organizations that published accounts of government killings.

In cases of rightist human-rights violations where the anti-Communist stakes were not so high, Abrams took a more evenhanded approach. He vigorously pressed for change in Augusto Pinochet's Chile, and fought Senator Jesse Helms and the right wing in the Administration. Stephen Sestanovich, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, who has known Abrams since they both worked for Moynihan, told me, "He's unusually effective at combining different strands of policy. It's a mark of his performance in these jobs--showing an acute sensitivity to what his political opponents are worried about and knowing how to win them over, or neutralize their animosity toward him, or at least befuddle them in the caricatured pictures they want to draw of him."

Abrams's adroitness failed him when it came to his fervent activities on behalf of the right-wing contras in Nicaragua. Since the end of 1981, the United States had been providing the contras with financial support and military assistance in their effort to overthrow the Sandinista government, which had the backing of the Soviet Union. In October of 1984, however, Congress prohibited government funding of military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua. An attempt to circumvent this prohibition resulted…