Those debating how much condemnation to allocate to Israel or the Palestinians need to save a bunch for the current crew in the Bush Administration. It's a good time to dig up a piece from Vanity Fair in April of this year, which goes into great detail about how Hamas came to power in Gaza almost entirely because of Bush Administration bungling. I re-present, David Rose and The Gaza Bombshell:
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.
Yes, that Elliott Abrhams, the Iran-Contra one. Neoconservatives really do never ever learn from their mistakes and manage to be always wrong about everything. It's their superpower.
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