Image Credit: Mohammed Omer, Rafah Today 2008-03-01.
The Middle East "Peace Process" is forever lost to the Bush Administration after Muhammad Dahlan and "Iran-contra 2.0"
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Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions brought down by Israel.
Image Credit: Mohammed Omer, Rafah Today 2008-03-01. |
BBSNews 2008-03-04 -- Now that the Bush Administration has been exposed as a poison "partner for peace" between occupied and brutalized Palestinians and their occupier the rogue government of Israel, it's hard to see how there can be any chance of peace under this very tainted US administration.
The revelations in Vanity Fair by David Rose are quite damning. The whole episode of trying to foment civil war in Gaza because the United States administration and Israel disliked the results of a democratic and fair election in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, an election where Hamas won a controlling number of legislative seats, might even be borderline "illegal".
Vanity Fair's teaser said, "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." The goal was to arm Fatah and provoke a civil war in the Occupied Palestinian Territories to try and dislodge the democratically elected government of Hamas.
The White House, through spokesperson Dana Perino in a very late press conference today that was sparsely attended by reporters made a categorical denial of the story put forth in Vanity Fair:
"Q -- in Vanity Fair, in an article that claims Hamas takeover of Gaza was the result of U.S. efforts to get Fatah to defeat Hamas. Is there any truth to that? Was there U.S. aid, either in weapons or money, to Fatah?MS. PERINO: Secretary of State's spokesperson, Sean McCormack, was today in -- traveling in the region, in Ramallah, and told reporters that there is no accuracy to that story.
Q None?
MS. PERINO: No.
Q None at all?
MS. PERINO: That's what he said.
Q Is there?
MS. PERINO: Not that I'm aware of, no. The first I heard of the story was when it showed up this morning. I don't even know if we were contacted. Sean says that he's checked and it is not true. "
Vanity Fair says they have the proof, "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."
Serious students of Middle East policy, particularly in the territories illegally occupied by Israel, are going to have a hard time believing White House denials given that Hamas has all along maintained that they preempted an attempted coup and the evidence of collusion on the part of the US has been swirling for a very long time.
The article goes into chilling detail of the torture wrought on Hamas member Mazen Asad abu Dan by operatives of the US backed "partner for peace", Fatah and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. There's apparently a video: "It shows abu Dan kneeling, his hands bound behind his back, and screaming as his captors pummel him with a black iron rod. 'I lost all the skin on my back from the beatings,' he says. 'Instead of medicine, they poured perfume on my wounds. It felt as if they had taken a sword to my injuries.'"
The goal was to force allegiance to President George W. Bush's "our guy", the Fatah torturers forced their captives to join in an insidious chant: "By blood, by soul, we sacrifice ourselves for Muhammad Dahlan! Long live Muhammad Dahlan!"
In an almost surreal irony the story talks about another person reviled in some quarters, feted in others; a person who himself faces possible War Crime charges in Britain: "Avi Dichter, Israel's internal-security minister and the former head of its Shin Bet security service, was taken aback when he heard senior American officials refer to Dahlan as 'our guy.' 'I thought to myself, The president of the United States is making a strange judgment here,' says Dichter."
Iran-contra 2.0
Perhaps most disheartening is the resemblance to another scheme of old, the Iran-Contra scandal.
"Perhaps the Israelis held the Americans back. Perhaps Elliott Abrams himself held back, unwilling to run afoul of U.S. law for a second time. One of his associates says Abrams, who declined to comment for this article, felt conflicted over the policy—torn between the disdain he felt for Dahlan and his overriding loyalty to the administration. He wasn't the only one: 'There were severe fissures among neoconservatives over this,' says Cheney's former adviser David Wurmser. 'We were ripping each other to pieces.'"
Early in Bush II's administration, even before September 11th, 2001, David Corn wrote about Elliot Abrams for The Nation:
"Not only did Abrams plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts of lying to Congress about the Reagan Administration's contra program, he was also one of the fiercest ideological pugilists of the 1980s, a bad-boy diplomat wildly out of sync with Bush's gonna-change-the-tone rhetoric. Abrams, a Democrat turned Republican who married into the cranky Podhoretz neocon clan, billed himself as a "gladiator" for the Reagan Doctrine in Central America--which entailed assisting thuggish regimes and militaries in order to thwart leftist movements and dismissing the human rights violations of Washington's cold war partners."
The unity government brokered by Saudi Arabia crushed by Condi's "Plan B"
According to the article:
"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."
Not only that, there was a $1.27 billion plan over five years to create an armed force for Fatah sufficient to dislodge Hamas by force. The plan was completely concocted by the United States yet in the end presented as coming from Abu Mazan and the Palestinian Authority. There was only one problem, word got out as serious students of this conflict well know:
"On April 30, 2007, a portion of one early draft was leaked to a Jordanian newspaper, Al-Majd. The secret was out. From Hamas's perspective, the Action Plan could amount to only one thing: a blueprint for a U.S.-backed Fatah coup."
Many of us also read the leaked news from Haaretz that further tipped off Hamas on what was about to happen when they reported "dozens of armored cars, hundreds of armor-piercing rockets, thousands of hand grenades, and millions of rounds of ammunition..." were due to arrive in the territories for Mahmoud Abbas in June.
Hamas believed, rightly it turns out, that there was an American backed plan to destroy them that was imminent:
"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.'"
In the end, even former UN Ambassador John Bolton sounds like a pragmatist when he describes the failure of this latest policy debacle and the failures of such efforts in the past:
"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 [Lieutenant General Keith] Dayton.'"
The administration is being forced to confront reality and Secretary Rice should jump on board herself. Hamas will have to be dealt with fairly as part of the elected government and political process in the Occupied Palestinian Territories or there is no hope ever for a lasting and just peace.
In a move sure to raise the ire of Israel, the article concludes with what has been known by most observers for years, after all Israel nurtured Hamas itself as a counter-weight to the Yasser Arafat days, "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."
So far US attempts at spreading a certain brand of "democracy" - not Jeffersonian democracy that US citizens enjoy by any stretch of the imagination to be sure - have been met with limited success at best. One such attempt was described some years ago by Paul Bremer in a briefing in Iraq before elections there: "What's tidy is dictatorship. We did that here, and that's gone and they're glad it's gone. Now we have democracy and it's untidy, it's complicated."
The US should stay out of the results in a free and fair election regardless of "untidiness". Vanity Fair has revealed that instead, the current US administration is quite comfortable with promoting and arming a coup to change the results of an election outcome they bizarrely claim to not see coming and they did not like when it came.
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