Vanity Fair magazine has published a report revealing plans by the US government dating back to 2006 to overthrow the newly elected Palestinian government it deemed illegitimate.
After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.
I haven’t yet read the full eight page expose, but Al Jazeera has a quick summary of it.
Blogger bluster
Journalists weighed in early on the article.
Eric Umansky, currently studying in Damascus, recollects a piece he wrote for Slate last year on the idea of arming Fatah as “completely dunder-headed”.
The Osterely Times, a self-described left-wing opinion blog, responds similarly, citing “stunning hypocrisy between Bush’s calls for the exportation of democracy and his refusal to accept a democratic choice that he disagreed with.”
At Checkpoint Jerusalem, Dion Nissenbaum, Jerusalem bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers, found few “new revelations” in the article, recalling covering much of the same ground in July – that “US policy missteps led to a nasty fall in Gaza”.
Meanwhile, Carl, an American Orthodox Jew who writes the blog Israel Matzav, writes “the US obsession with Dahlan is inexplicable.”
“The US backing of Dahlan is probably the result of a search for a ‘strong’ ‘Palestinian leader’… But he is a brutal and ruthless thug.”
Sarabeth, a retired finance professor, was reaffirmed that Condoleezza Rice & George Bush “understand diddly squat about the Middle East and they understand diddly squat about peace”.
Denunciations all round.
Nissenbaum and Umansky point out that it isn’t the first time the issue has come to light. The 100% turnaround of US policy – from calling for Palestinian elections to sanctioning the elected government in 2006 for not being the government it wanted – was startling.
But AP & Reuters newswire stories, and surely countless other newspapers, routinely write about Hamas’s route of Dahlan’s PA security forces in the Gaza Strip as a takeover – some even calling it a coup – without a hint of its context as the backfiring of US policy meant to replace the elected Palestinian government.
With Rice now in Israel, calling for a resumption of dialogue, she’ll be hard pressed to maintain any credibility – at least with the Palestinian people – as a broker of peace.
