COLUMN RIGHT / GEORGE WEIGEL : History Has Vindicated Elliott Abrams : Many persecuted people around the world think they owe him a debt of gratitude.

Schadenfreude --reveling behind a mask of sadness in the misfortunes of one’s adversaries--is an ugly self-indulgence. It is particularly offensive when, as in the case of former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, it is the tactic by which those whose politics have been discredited by history try to destroy the reputations and records of those whose views have been decisively vindicated.

That is what Abrams’ foes have done ever since he pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor charges of misleading Congress, for which he was sentenced to two years of probation Friday. Abrams deserves better. So does the historical record.

During his eight years in the State Department in the Reagan Administration, Abrams’ responsibilities included international organization affairs, human rights and inter-American affairs. His tenure at the human-rights bureau made that office, which was created by Jimmy Carter, a significant force in U.S. foreign policy.

During the Carter years, the human-rights bureau was widely regarded inside the State Department as a bizarre aberration and, consequently, was cut out of serious policy-making. Abrams changed all of that. Under his leadership, the bureau articulated a sophisticated defense of civil rights and political freedoms; it gave effective support to a host of what we once called “dissidents”; it paid special and welcome attention to the persecution of religious believers, and it helped wage the ideological war against totalitarianism by articulating an attractive vision of humane political values.

Those who are chortling over Elliott Abrams’ plea bargain should think about the number of democrats, and persecuted Christians and Jews, who believe that they owe Abrams a great debt of gratitude.

But it was his work as head of Inter-American Affairs that caused Abrams to be attacked with special fury. In that post, he refused to concede an inch to the liberal neo-isolationists who looked at Nicaragua and El Salvador and saw Vietnam, demanding American withdrawal from those tropical outposts of the Cold War.

Abrams thought that was strategically and morally irresponsible. He believed that the people of Central America wanted something better than the tyrannies of caudillos or commissars: They wanted democracy. And on the record of their behavior at the polls over the past decade, it would seem that Abrams read the aspirations of the Central American poor far better than those who celebrated, or were prepared to tolerate, the Sandinista revolution and the FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) guerrillas of El Salvador.

A new wave of historical revisionism is upon us in the aftermath of the Cold War. It read the collapse of the Soviet Union after August’s failed coup as evidence for the dubious proposition that Soviet power was a paper tiger all along and that the Reagan Doctrine of anti-communist resistance was a hysterical overreaction to an overrated threat. That is not what one hears in Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, though. In those countries, democrats of both the left and the right remain enormously grateful to the Reagan Administration for its ideological and military challenge to what they knew in their bones was, yes, an “evil empire.”

His enemies charge that Elliott Abrams was “arrogant.” What they mean is that he had an intelligent position that he forcefully articulated in ways they found difficult to counter. Indeed, there is a great irony in the fact that Abrams is being charged with “arrogance” at a time when Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa)--whose politics are the antithesis of Abrams’--brags to the New Republic magazine about his message to left-liberal Democrats that “we haven’t been wrong, we’ve been right.” Harkin’s arrogance, though, brings the charge of “arrogance” against Abrams into clearer focus: Abrams, Harvard Law School graduate and one-time Democrat, was a traitor to his class.

That Abrams is being demeaned and degraded by people who never really understood the tyranny of communism in the first place, and who now seek to rewrite history to buttress the broken foundations of their world view, is bad enough. That such abuse is being heaped on a man who, with his family, made tremendous personal and financial sacrifices for public service simply makes the whole episode even more distasteful. The one consolation is that Elliott Abrams’ position in the history of freedom is secure.

And that, alas, is what his enemies cannot concede. For to do so would be to acknowledge not only Elliott Abrams’ success but, far worse, their failure.