Michael Dobbs, the Washington Post’s State Department correspondent, don’t know much about history — even recent history. In an editorial masquerading as a news story about the Clinton administration’s human rights policy toward China last week, Dobbs badly mangled the Reagan administration’s human rights record. Of Elliott Abrams, Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights and later for Latin American affairs, Dobbs wrote simply that he “was roundly disliked by the human rights community for subordinating their concerns to the fight against communism.”
Never mind that fighting communism was — and is — an important element of any human rights policy. Dobbs forgets that it was Abrams who inaugurated the policy of pressuring Chile’s dictator Augusto Pinochet, a policy that led to the restoration of Chilean democracy in the late 1980s. He forgets Abrams’s role in ousting Haitian dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier; his staunch opposition to the regime of Manuel Noriega in Panama; and his support for such moderate reformers as Jose Napoleon Duarte in El Salvador and Vinicio Cerezo in Guatemala and even for the left-wing Alan Garcia in Peru. Among those who remember, Abrams is also noted for his work on behalf of dissidents in some vicious dictatorial regimes in Africa.
