Vanity Fair has what would have been a bombshell article 10 years ago, and now is barely noticed, about how the Bush administration subverted democratic elections and backed groups who employed torture in the battle between Hamas and Fatah in Palestine.
Apparently, and I know this is going to shock the hell out of everyone here, Bush and Condi Rice apparently screwed the pooch on this one. Their decisions not only put Hamas into power, tossed Gaza into their control, and imperiled the lives of countless Israelis and Palestinians.
Here are some of the lowlights of the Bush administration's failed efforts to bring peace and democracy -- also known in Bush terms as "our guys in power" -- to the Middle East.
The next day, in the West Bank capital of Ramallah, Bush acknowledged that there was a rather large obstacle standing in the way of this goal: Hamas’s complete control of Gaza, home to some 1.5 million Palestinians, where it seized power in a bloody coup d’état in June 2007. Almost every day, militants fire rockets from Gaza into neighboring Israeli towns, and President Abbas is powerless to stop them. His authority is limited to the West Bank.
It’s "a tough situation," Bush admitted. "I don’t know whether you can solve it in a year or not." What Bush neglected to mention was his own role in creating this mess.
According to Dahlan, it was Bush who had pushed legislative elections in the Palestinian territories in January 2006, despite warnings that Fatah was not ready. After Hamas—whose 1988 charter committed it to the goal of driving Israel into the sea—won control of the parliament, Bush made another, deadlier miscalculation.
Deadlier than ignoring the experts on the ground and forcing elections that put an already tenuous state in the hands of a group the United States has labeled terrorists? Deadlier than ignoring those democratically elected leaders and doing everything to choke off their funds with a multi-national embargo, solely because you didn't like the outcome.
Oh, yea. Deadlier. Because they had no clue.
"Everyone was against the elections," (Fatah strongman Muhammad) Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. "Bush decided, ‘I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?"
The elections went forward as scheduled. On January 25, Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council.
Few inside the U.S. administration had predicted the result, and there was no contingency plan to deal with it. "I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming," Condoleezza Rice told reporters. "I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing."
These are the same people who had no contingency plan for the Iraq War going bad, and the same woman who didn't know anyone who could have forseen Osama bin Laden attacking the United States after receiving a report that was headlined "Osama bin Laden determined to attack the United States.
Within the Bush administration, the Palestinian policy set off a furious debate. One of its critics is David Wurmser, the avowed neoconservative, who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser in July 2007, a month after the Gaza coup.
Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of "engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory." He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. "It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen," Wurmser says.
So what did they do? They put guns in the hands of people like Dahlan -- whose response to video and documentary evidence that his troops tortured innocent Palestinians was to say, "I didn't order or know about it. Shit happens." -- and ordered them to incite as much stress between Hamas and Fatah as possible to bring on a civil war.
One stresser was to force Abbas to dissolve the government Abbas and Hamas had negotiated, and force Hamas to do what the United States wanted, a situation sure to provide massive stress and damage any hope for peace.
[Jake Walles, the consul general in Jerusalem]and Abbas both knew what to expect from Hamas if these instructions were followed: rebellion and bloodshed. For that reason, the memo states, the U.S. was already working to strengthen Fatah’s security forces. "If you act along these lines, we will support you both materially and politically," the script said. "We will be there to support you."
The quotes in the immediate piece above are not opinion, but from a verified memo for Walles to use. They knew that dissolving the government would cause war, and that was OK with these idiots.
But it turns out that even though Fatah had a paper military advantage, it was mostly on paper and had been greatly weakened by the embargo forced by the Bush administration after the Hamas electoral victory. Amazingly, Hamas could pay their troops with money from Iran while the side we supported had no cash to pay anyone! So the "good guy" troops were surly, unpaid and underequiped while the "bad guys" were just fine.
But Congress -- the Republican Congress -- balked on the weapons purchases for Fatah and wouldn't give Bush the money. And that's where Iran Contra 2.0 comes in.
In essence, the program was simple. According to State Department officials, beginning in the latter part of 2006, Rice initiated several rounds of phone calls and personal meetings with leaders of four Arab nations—Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. She asked them to bolster Fatah by providing military training and by pledging funds to buy its forces lethal weapons. The money was to be paid directly into accounts controlled by President Abbas.
The scheme bore some resemblance to the Iran-contra scandal, in which members of Ronald Reagan’s administration sold arms to Iran, an enemy of the U.S. The money was used to fund the contra rebels in Nicaragua, in violation of a congressional ban. Some of the money for the contras, like that for Fatah, was furnished by Arab allies as a result of U.S. lobbying.
But there are also important differences—starting with the fact that Congress never passed a measure expressly prohibiting the supply of aid to Fatah and Dahlan. "It was close to the margins," says a former intelligence official with experience in covert programs. "But it probably wasn’t illegal."
And now that's the standard we set for the Bushies. It's not whether they destabalized an already unstable situation through incompetence, ignorance and lack of planning. That's not an issue.
As long as it's not illegal, it's fricking OK.
And that's what gets me most. I don't think any side in the Israeli-Palestinian battle is a good guy, and I don't think they are all bad guys. It's an incredible bad situation that needs deft and intelligent handling.
But instead they got Bush.