Elliott Abrams

Elliot Abrams discusses why backing democracy over authoritarianism in the Middle East isn't empty idealism.

Senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations Elliott Abrams supervised US policy in the Middle East during the Bush administration, discusses his new book Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict 

 

As political unrest spreads across the Middle East, analysts here in the United States wonder whether and how U.S. policy has influenced the protestors. How does the U.S.’s increasing role in the Middle East since 9/11 — in Afghanistan, Iraq and in the Israel-Palestine conflict — relate to the current political instability in the reigon?

This is the fifth edition of Wave of Change, a special podcast from The Takeaway, covering the mass protests in Egypt and the consequences for the wider Arab world, hosted by John Hockenberry with Celeste Headlee.

In this episode, get up to date on all the events that transpired over the weekend in Egypt; in an exclusive interview, Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times takes us inside the generational divide in the Egyptian Army; and, Bush administration deputy national security advisor Elliot Abrams tells us why he thinks George W. Bush's "freedom agenda" was right for the Arab world.