Vanity Fair: Bush administration caused Hamas takeover of Gaza
Vanity Fair is claiming in its April edition that the Bush administration - specifically President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliot Abrams - touched off the civil war in Gaza that brought about the Hamas takeover of the Strip last June, by backing Fatah strongman Muhammed Dahlan in his bid to oust Hamas from the Gaza Strip. (Hat Tip: Memeorandum)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.Is this believable? In a word, yes. David Wurmser has been a severe critic of White House Middle East policy since he resigned as Cheney's adviser. His wife Meyrav has also indicated that the Bush administration abandoned Israel as a consequence of its failure to produce in the 2006 Lebanon War. Meyrav Wurmser is an Israeli; David is an American. Their commitment to Israel has been unstinting.
Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)
But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza. [And the weapons are now in Hamas' hands. CiJ]
Some sources call the scheme “Iran-contra 2.0,” recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.’s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.
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.
On the other hand, the US obsession with Dahlan is inexplicable. It's most obvious manifestation is the State Department's stonewalling of an investigation into the murders of three of its own contractors - John Branchizio, Mark Parsons, and John Linde - widely presumed to have been carried out by Dahlan in 2003. Dahlan is also rumored to be behind a coup attempt against Salam Fayad, who is supposed to be the only honest politician in Fatah. And in October, the State Department demanded that Abu Mazen himself appoint Dahlan as his deputy.
The US backing of Dahlan is probably the result of a search for a 'strong' 'Palestinian leader' who is not affiliated with Hamas. Dahlan meets those criteria. But he is a brutal and ruthless thug who has not hesitated to target children or to ally himself with Hamas when it suited him. Either Dahlan has something on someone high up in Washington, or the Bush administration's backing him shows a desperation to create a 'Palestinian'
Read it all.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:20 AM
3 Comments:
Exactly. What neither the Bush Administration nor Ehud Olmert grasps is that its the IDF that keeps the Duchy Of Ramallah in power. If the peace process was carried to its logical conclusion, Abbas would be gone in a heartbeat. That isn't in his interest so that's the real reason he cut off talks with Israel - not the one given that he has brotherly feelings towards Hamas. Olmert and Rice are too stupid to get it. Abbas of all the figures in this tragicomedy does understand a Palestinian reichlet would mean he would pay with his life. Short of Hamas somehow being eliminated, he not going to agree to a three state solution.
Bush has long had a love affair with Dahlan.
After that meeting, Bush turned to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and said, "We have a problem with Sharon I can see, but I like that young man [Dahlan] and I think their prime minister is incapable of lying. I hope that they will be successful. We can work with them."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=301839&contrassID=2&subContrassID=5&sbSubContrassID=0&listSrc=Y
The Bushies would like Dahlan as a potential successor to the feckless Abbas. But the latter is not going to go quietly and to underline what I had written this morning, Abbas did not promise to resume the peace talks after his meeting with Secretary Rice. Why would that be in his personal interest? A Palestinian reichlet would mean a Hamas takeover in short order, if free elections were held. Both Bush and Olmert have made a mess of things in the Middle East.
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