[Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority's parliment after fair and open elections. These elections were foisted upon the Palestinians by the Bush Administration in the name of "Democratizing the Middle East." Afterwards the Bush administration, deciding that the Palestinians have had too much "democracy" already, used the FBI and CIA in cooperation with Fatah, the ousted party, to try and overthrow Hamas. This Vanity Fair article by David Rose breaks this amazing story . . . So much for democracy. How much more disasterous meddling in the lives of the people of the Middle East can the U.S. engage in for the sake of Oil , Power, and Israel? Based on the responses by many politicians, both Democratic and Republican, there is no end in sight!]
“An Institutional Failure”
How could the U.S. have played Gaza so wrong? Neocon critics of the administration—who until last year were inside it—blame an old State Department vice: the rush to anoint a strongman instead of solving problems directly. This ploy has failed in places as diverse as Vietnam, the Philippines, Central America, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, during its war against Iran. To rely on proxies such as Muhammad Dahlan, says former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, is “an institutional failure, a failure of strategy.” Its author, he says, was Rice, “who, like others in the dying days of this administration, is looking for legacy. Having failed to heed the warning not to hold the elections, they tried to avoid the result through Dayton.”
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.”
It is impossible to say for sure whether the outcome in Gaza would have been any better—for the Palestinian people, for the Israelis, and for America’s allies in Fatah—if the Bush administration had pursued a different policy. One thing, however, seems certain: it could not be any worse.
David Rose is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.