| (Keep him in mind if you're inclined to agree with the "let's not do anything divisive by prosecuting these criminals" mantra coming from Versailles. All the bad pennies of the Bush years will keep turning up for decades to come unless they and their deeds are repudiated in detail.)
That digression aside, the VF piece is a must-read backgrounder on the current problems in Gaza. Particularly if you assign a lot of blame to the Palestinians at large for the behaviour of Hamas. Sorting out how much blame individual citizens have for the actions of their government is difficult enough in a democracy, never mind trying to do so when a much hated superpower is fucking with your system.
First off, some context on those elections which brought Hamas to power at all:
Dahlan says he warned his friends in the Bush administration that Fatah still wasn't ready for elections in January. Decades of self-preservationist rule by Arafat had turned the party into a symbol of corruption and inefficiency-a perception Hamas found it easy to exploit. Splits within Fatah weakened its position further: in many places, a single Hamas candidate ran against several from Fatah.
"Everyone was against the elections," 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."
"Everyone blamed everyone else," says an official with the Department of Defense. "We sat there in the Pentagon and said, 'Who the fuck recommended this?'?"
Up to here, none of this is illegal, and in a naive way it would even be defensible that Bush would push for democratic elections. The problem is the obvious cynicism that his crew of spotless mind optimists had no concept that the elections might not return Fatah to power and were really unwilling and unable to actually deal with that once it happened. I thought back then that there really was no choice but to deal with the Hamas government, despite their despicable position on Israel. Instead, the starry idealists with their great love of democracy did the following (from a Democracy Now interview with Rose):
[...]what the Bush administration tried to do was, as one source put it to me, change facts on the ground. And the strategy set out in these documents was to persuade President Abbas, the Fatah president of the Palestinian Authority, to sack the Hamas government in both its two incarnations, first the Hamas-led government that took office in January '06 and then the so-called national unity government, the coalition with Fatah, that took office in March '07. He was to fire this government, replace it with an emergency government or call new elections, and meanwhile, Fatah would be armed, at America's behest, to deal with the inevitable outbreak of violence that would take place, because Hamas, it could be predicted with certainty, would not take that lying down.
"Change facts on the ground" is pretty classic Orwell for "stage a coup" if I ever heard it.
Well, what's a coup without some good old fashioned lying to congress:
AMY GOODMAN: Isn't it openly known that the US is arming and supporting Fatah?
DAVID ROSE: Well, no, it's not, because, for example, General Keith Dayton, the United States security coordinator who has been in the region now for three or four years and is supposedly there to help strengthen Fatah's security institutions, told the Congress on May 23, 2007-that's just over two weeks before the Hamas coup-that the US was only supplying non-lethal aid to Fatah. He was emphatic about this: no lethal aid was going into the Palestinian territories to support Fatah. And, indeed, he had testified and other officials had testified to that effect on several occasions previously.
(See Dayton's testimony, and also, see VF's documentation)
AMY GOODMAN: Are you saying the Bush administration misled Congress, when it comes to-
DAVID ROSE: I'm absolutely saying that, yes. They lied to the Congress.
AMY GOODMAN: And it's specifically on-
DAVID ROSE: They told the Congress that there was no program to supply lethal aid to Fatah. This was not true. There was a covert program to supply lethal aid to Fatah.
So the story so far: Bush demands elections, Abbas complies. Hamas wins. Bush doesn't know WTF. They start arming Fatah and pushing Abbas to simply dismiss the Hamas governments and use the military aid to suppress them if/when they fight back. The plan blows up when it is leaked to a middle eastern newspaper and Hamas finds out Fatah is accepting help from America.
You might expect this too, would not help Fatah's popularity with Palestinians. Hamas preempts Fatah's coup with their own and succeeds in driving Fatah out of Gaza because, in a big surprise, the scheme was not well managed or really all that effective in bolstering Fatah's military might.
So here we are, with Hamas firmly entrenched as the party in power in Gaza and Fatah not even a credible alternative, having been driven out completely and thoroughly discredited.
The closing thought:
Jaberi [ed: a former Fatah commander in Gaza] pauses. He spent the night before our interview awake and in hiding, fearful of Israeli air strikes. "You know," he says, "since the takeover, we've been trying to enter the brains of Bush and Rice, to figure out their mentality. We can only conclude that having Hamas in control serves their overall strategy, because their policy was so crazy otherwise."
I never know whether to believe the "they're just idiots" or the "their idiocy serves ulterior motives" explanations myself, since even their hand-in-glove conspiracies are so badly run as to be inexplicable as far as actual motives go.
Anyway, again, Read the Rose piece. In terms of illegality, this isn't Iran/Contra (since there was no law prohibiting military aid to Fatah, Congress just didn't fund it) but it is clearly part of the US responsibility for the plight of the Palestinians. Hamas might have come to power anyway, no matter if Abbas delayed the elections or not, but like in so many things, the Bush Administration did not miss an opportunity to ruin an opportunity. |
