The Osterley Times: The Gaza Bombshell

I've long complained about the Bush regime's failure to recognise Hamas as the democratic representatives of the Palestinian people. However, there is an article in this months Vanity Fair which reveals just how incompetent the Bush regime have been with regard to Hamas and how Bush and Condoleezza Rice set in motion the events that led to Hamas taking over the Gaza strip.

You couldn't make this shit up:

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 there were even neo-cons warning them not to go ahead with this crazy scheme:

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.
The botched plan has rendered the dream of Middle East peace more remote than ever, but what really galls neocons such as Wurmser is the hypocrisy it exposed. “There is a stunning disconnect between the president’s call for Middle East democracy and this policy,” he says. “It directly contradicts it.”

I am glad that Wurmser sees what many of us have long pointed out. There was a simply stunning hypocrisy between Bush's calls for the exportation of democracy and his refusal to accept a democratic choice that he disagreed with.

But there's worse. He was warned - in advance and before he insisted on the elections - that Fatah would lose... but he ploughed on anyway.

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.

And how did they react to this Fatah defeat that everyone else predicted would happen? They sent forth Rice:

“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?’ ”

Israel, the US and the EU then started sanctions against the Hamas led government. Then they went further. Rice held a meeting with Abbas at which she made America's policy abundantly clear:

Isolating Hamas just wasn’t working, she reportedly told Abbas, and America expected him to dissolve the Haniyeh government as soon as possible and hold fresh elections.

I love the notion that Abbas must hold "fresh elections"; as if elections are things you simply keep having until the populace give you the answer that you seek.

However, Abbas - having promised to move against Hamas within the fortnight - started to drag his feet and Jake Walles, the consul general in Jerusalem, is dispatched to give him an ultimatum:

“You told Secretary Rice you would be prepared to move ahead within two to four weeks of your meeting. We believe that the time has come for you to move forward quickly and decisively.”

The memo left no doubt as to what kind of action the U.S. was seeking: “Hamas should be given a clear choice, with a clear deadline: … they either accept a new government that meets the Quartet principles, or they reject it The consequences of Hamas’ decision should also be clear: If Hamas does not agree within the prescribed time, you should make clear your intention to declare a state of emergency and form an emergency government explicitly committed to that platform.”

Walles 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.”

However, the irony was that the sanctions imposed by Israel, the EU and the US had disproportionately weakened the morale of Fatah rather than Hamas. As a member of Fatah makes clear:

“We are the ones who were not getting paid,” Issa says, “whereas they were not affected by the siege.” Ayman Daraghmeh, a Hamas Legislative Council member in the West Bank, agrees. He puts the amount of Iranian aid to Hamas in 2007 alone at $120 million. “This is only a fraction of what it should give,” he insists. In Gaza, another Hamas member tells me the number was closer to $200 million.

The result was becoming apparent: Fatah could not control Gaza’s streets—or even protect its own personnel.

So lets have a brief recap. Bush insists that Fatah holds elections that everyone is telling him they will lose, then he insists that they embark on a civil war that they are unready to fight. It's bloody bonkers.

Bush then starts sending weapons to Fatah, for the forthcoming civil war, which alarms Israel and many of his own neo-con supporters:

In late December 2006, four Egyptian trucks passed through an Israeli-controlled crossing into Gaza, where their contents were handed over to Fatah. These included 2,000 Egyptian-made automatic rifles, 20,000 ammunition clips, and two million bullets.

“There were severe fissures among neoconservatives over this,” says Cheney’s former adviser David Wurmser. “We were ripping each other to pieces.”

However, it is when Abbas forms a coalition government with Hamas that Rice goes "apoplectic".

The State Department quickly drew up an alternative to the new unity government. Known as “Plan B,” its objective, according to a State Department memo that has been authenticated by an official who knew of it at the time, was to “enable [Abbas] and his supporters to reach a defined endgame by the end of 2007 The endgame should produce a [Palestinian Authority] government through democratic means that accepts Quartet principles.”

Like the Walles ultimatum of late 2006, Plan B called for Abbas to “collapse the government” if Hamas refused to alter its attitude toward Israel. From there, Abbas could call early elections or impose an emergency government. It is unclear whether, as president, Abbas had the constitutional authority to dissolve an elected government led by a rival party, but the Americans swept that concern aside.

Eventually, on April 30, 2007, news of the planned U.S.-backed Fatah coup was leaked to a Jordanian newspaper, Al-Majd. From then on it was inevitable that Hamas would attempt to preempt such a coup.

The Hamas leadership in Gaza is adamant that the coup would not have happened if Fatah had not provoked it. “Everyone here recognizes that Dahlan was trying with American help to undermine the results of the elections,” says Mahmoud Zahar, the former foreign minister for the Haniyeh government, who now leads Hamas’s militant wing in Gaza. “He was the one planning a coup.”

And we all know what happened next. Hamas routed Fatah in Gaza and took control of the entire strip from where they can now fire rockets into Israel as they please.

Have you ever heard a tale of such stunning incompetence? However, there appears to be one slight sparkle of silver lining to this cloud of incompetence and strategic buffoonery:

With few good options left, the administration now appears to be rethinking its blanket refusal to engage with Hamas. Staffers at the National Security Council and the Pentagon recently put out discreet feelers to academic experts, asking them for papers describing Hamas and its principal protagonists. “They say they won’t talk to Hamas,” says one such expert, “but in the end they’re going to have to. It’s inevitable.”