<html>
<body>
<font size=3 color="#FF0000"><b><i><u>The Vanity Fair Article
Follows<br><br>
</u></i></b></font><font size=3 color="#191919">Revealed: the US plan to
start a Palestinian civil war <br>
<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9366.shtml" eudora="autourl">
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9366.shtml</a><br><br>
Report, <i>The Electronic Intifada,</i> 4 March 2008 <br><br>
<img src="http://electronicintifada.net/artman2/uploads/2/080304-dahlan.jpg" width=483 height=321 alt="[]">
<br>
Muhammad Dahlan speaks during a Fatah rally in the West Bank town of
Ramallah, 15 January 2006. (Mushir
Abdelrahman/<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/htt://maanimages.com">
MaanImages</a>) <br><br>
United States officials including President George W. Bush and Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice participated in a conspiracy to arm and train
Contra-style Palestinian militias nominally loyal to the Fatah party to
overthrow the democratically-elected Hamas government in the Occupied
Palestinian Territories, an investigative article in the April 2008 issue
of <i>Vanity Fair</i> has revealed. [1]<br><br>
The allegations of such a conspiracy, long reported by The Electronic
Intifada, are corroborated in <i>Vanity Fair</i> with confidential US
government documents, interviews with former US officials, Israeli
officials and with Muhammad Dahlan, the Gaza strongman personally chosen
by Bush.<br><br>
The article, by David Rose, recounts gruesome torture documented on
videotape of Hamas members by the US-armed and funded militias under
Dahlan's control. Hamas had repeatedly alleged such torture as part of
its justification for its move to overthrow the Dahlan militias and take
full control of the interior of the Gaza Strip in June 2007.<br><br>
<i>Vanity Fair</i> reported that it has "obtained confidential
documents, since corroborated by sources in the US 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 magazine
adds that 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."<br><br>
Abrams was one of the key Reagan administration figures involved in the
Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, whereby the US illegally armed militias
in Nicaragua to overthrow the ruling Sandinista government. Abrams was
convicted and later pardoned for lying to Congress.<br><br>
While it has been known that the US engaged in covert activity to subvert
Palestinian democracy and provoke Palestinians to shed each other's
blood, the extent of the personal involvement of top US officials in
attempting to dictate the course of events in Palestine -- while publicly
preaching democracy -- has only now been brought to light.<br><br>
<img src="http://electronicintifada.net/artman2/uploads/2/080304-dahlan-letter.jpg" width=483 height=341 alt="[]">
<br>
Muhammad Dahlan's 13 July 2003 letter to then Israeli defense minister
Shaul Mofaz. <br><br>
Bush met and personally anointed Dahlan as "our guy" in 2003.
In July 2007, The Electronic Intifada
<a href="http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article7116.shtml">reported on
a leaked letter</a> written by Dahlan and sent to the Israeli defense
minister in which he confirmed his role in a conspiracy to overthrow then
Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat for whose replacement Bush
had publicly called. Dahlan wrote: "Be certain that Yasser Arafat's
final days are numbered, but allow us to finish him off our way, not
yours. And be sure as well that ... the promises I made in front of
President Bush, I will give my life to keep."<br><br>
The US planning to overthrow the government elected by Palestinians under
occupation began immediately after the Hamas movement won a clear victory
in the January 2006 election for the Palestinian Legislative Council.
Hamas, however, proved "surprising resilient."<br><br>
At a meeting at Abbas' Ramallah headquarters in October 2006, Rice
personally ordered Abbas to dissolve the government headed by Hamas'
Ismail Haniyeh "within two weeks" and replace it with an
unelected "emergency government."<br><br>
When Abbas failed to act promptly on Rice's order, the US stepped up its
efforts to arm Dahlan in preparation for the attempted coup. Hamas foiled
the coup plot by moving preemptively against Dahlan's gangs, many of whom
refused to fight despite being furnished with tens of millions of dollars
in weapons and training. The US-conceived "emergency
government" headed by a former World Bank official, Salam Fayyad,
was eventually appointed by Abbas, but its authority is limited to parts
of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.<br><br>
While the United States and Israel were the driving forces behind the
civil war and coup plot, others had a hand including several Arab states
and their intelligence services. "The scheme," Rose writes,
"bore some resemblance to the Iran-contra scandal" in that
"some of the money for the [Nicaraguan] contras, like that for
Fatah, was furnished by Arab allies as a result of US
lobbying."<br><br>
<br>
<b>Endnotes<br>
</b>[1] "The Gaza Bombshell," <i>Vanity Fair</i>, April 2008,
(<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804">
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804</a>)<br>
<br>
<br>
</font><h1><b>The Gaza
Bombshell</b></h1><font size=3>
<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804?printable=true¤tPage=all" eudora="autourl">
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804?printable=true¤tPage=all<br>
<br>
</a></font><h2><b>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.<br><br>
<br>
</b></h2><h4><b>by David Rose April 2008 </b></h4><font size=3>The Al
Deira Hotel, in Gaza City, is a haven of calm in a land beset by poverty,
fear, and violence. In the middle of December 2007, I sit in the hotel’s
airy restaurant, its windows open to the Mediterranean, and listen to a
slight, bearded man named Mazen Asad abu Dan describe the suffering he
endured 11 months before at the hands of his fellow Palestinians. Abu
Dan, 28, is a member of Hamas, the Iranian-backed Islamist organization
that has been designated a terrorist group by the United States, but I
have a good reason for taking him at his word: I’ve seen the
video.<br><br>
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.” <br><br>
On January 26, 2007, abu Dan, a student at the Islamic University of
Gaza, had gone to a local cemetery with his father and five others to
erect a headstone for his grandmother. When they arrived, however, they
found themselves surrounded by 30 armed men from Hamas’s rival, Fatah,
the party of Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. “They took us to a
house in north Gaza,” abu Dan says. “They covered our eyes and took us to
a room on the sixth floor.” <br><br>
The video reveals a bare room with white walls and a black-and-white
tiled floor, where abu Dan’s father is forced to sit and listen to his
son’s shrieks of pain. Afterward, abu Dan says, he and two of the others
were driven to a market square. “They told us they were going to kill us.
They made us sit on the ground.” He rolls up the legs of his trousers to
display the circular scars that are evidence of what happened next: “They
shot our knees and feetfive bullets each. I spent four months in a
wheelchair.” <br><br>
Abu Dan had no way of knowing it, but his tormentors had a secret ally:
the administration of President George W. Bush.<br><br>
A clue comes toward the end of the video, which was found in a Fatah
security building by Hamas fighters last June. Still bound and
blindfolded, the prisoners are made to echo a rhythmic chant yelled by
one of their captors: “By blood, by soul, we sacrifice ourselves for
Muhammad Dahlan! Long live Muhammad Dahlan!” <br><br>
There is no one more hated among Hamas members than Muhammad Dahlan, long
Fatah’s resident strongman in Gaza. Dahlan, who most recently served as
Abbas’s national-security adviser, has spent more than a decade battling
Hamas. Dahlan insists that abu Dan was tortured without his knowledge,
but the video is proof that his followers’ methods can be
brutal.<br><br>
Bush has met Dahlan on at least three occasions. After talks at the White
House in July 2003, Bush publicly praised Dahlan as “a good, solid
leader.” In private, say multiple Israeli and American officials, the
U.S. president described him as “our guy.”<br><br>
The United States has been involved in the affairs of the Palestinian
territories since the Six-Day War of 1967, when Israel captured Gaza from
Egypt and the West Bank from Jordan. With the 1993 Oslo accords, the
territories acquired limited autonomy, under a president, who has
executive powers, and an elected parliament. Israel retains a large
military presence in the West Bank, but it withdrew from Gaza in
2005.<br><br>
In recent months, President Bush has repeatedly stated that the last
great ambition of his presidency is to broker a deal that would create a
viable Palestinian state and bring peace to the Holy Land. “People say,
‘Do you think it’s possible, during your presidency?’ ” he told an
audience in Jerusalem on January 9. “And the answer is: I’m very
hopeful.” <br><br>
The next day, in the West Bank capital of Ramallah, Bush acknowledged
that there was a rather large obstacle standing in the way of this goal:
Hamas’s complete control of Gaza, home to some 1.5 million Palestinians,
where it seized power in a bloody coup d’état in June 2007. Almost every
day, militants fire rockets from Gaza into neighboring Israeli towns, and
President Abbas is powerless to stop them. His authority is limited to
the West Bank.<br><br>
It’s “a tough situation,” Bush admitted. “I don’t know whether you can
solve it in a year or not.” What Bush neglected to mention was his own
role in creating this mess. <br><br>
According to Dahlan, it was Bush who had pushed legislative elections in
the Palestinian territories in January 2006, despite warnings that Fatah
was not ready. After Hamaswhose 1988 charter committed it to the goal of
driving Israel into the seawon control of the parliament, Bush made
another, deadlier miscalculation.<br><br>
<i>Vanity Fair</i> 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.)<br><br>
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. <br><br>
Some sources call the scheme “Iran-contra 2.0,” recalling that Abrams was
convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress
during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are
echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.’s 1953 ouster of
an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979
Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which
gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the
contemporary tragedy in Iraq.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.”<br><br>
<br>
</font><h4><b>Preventive Security</b></h4><font size=3>Bush was not the
first American president to form a relationship with Muhammad Dahlan.
“Yes, I was close to Bill Clinton,” Dahlan says. “I met Clinton many
times with [the late Palestinian leader Yasser] Arafat.” In the wake of
the 1993 Oslo accords, Clinton sponsored a series of diplomatic meetings
aimed at reaching a permanent Middle East peace, and Dahlan became the
Palestinians’ negotiator on security. <br><br>
As I talk to Dahlan in a five-star Cairo hotel, it’s easy to see the
qualities that might make him attractive to American presidents. His
appearance is immaculate, his English is serviceable, and his manner is
charming and forthright. Had he been born into privilege, these qualities
might not mean much. But Dahlan was bornon September 29, 1961in the
teeming squalor of Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp, and his education
came mostly from the street. In 1981 he helped found Fatah’s youth
movement, and he later played a leading role in the first intifadathe
five-year revolt that began in 1987 against the Israeli occupation. In
all, Dahlan says, he spent five years in Israeli jails. <br><br>
From the time of its inception as the Palestinian branch of the
international Muslim Brotherhood, in late 1987, Hamas had represented a
threatening challenge to Arafat’s secular Fatah party. At Oslo, Fatah
made a public commitment to the search for peace, but Hamas continued to
practice armed resistance. At the same time, it built an impressive base
of support through schooling and social programs.<br><br>
The rising tensions between the two groups first turned violent in the
early 1990swith Muhammad Dahlan playing a central role. As director of
the Palestinian Authority’s most feared paramilitary force, the
Preventive Security Service, Dahlan arrested some 2,000 Hamas members in
1996 in the Gaza Strip after the group launched a wave of suicide
bombings. “Arafat had decided to arrest Hamas military leaders, because
they were working against his interests, against the peace process,
against the Israeli withdrawal, against everything,” Dahlan says. “He
asked the security services to do their job, and I have done that job.”
<br><br>
It was not, he admits, “popular work.” For many years Hamas has said that
Dahlan’s forces routinely tortured detainees. One alleged method was to
sodomize prisoners with soda bottles. Dahlan says these stories are
exaggerated: “Definitely there were some mistakes here and there. But no
one person died in Preventive Security. Prisoners got their rights. Bear
in mind that I am an ex-detainee of the Israelis’. No one was personally
humiliated, and I never killed anyone the way [Hamas is] killing people
on a daily basis now.” Dahlan points out that Arafat maintained a
labyrinth of security services14 in alland says the Preventive Security
Service was blamed for abuses perpetrated by other units. <br><br>
Dahlan worked closely with the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., and he developed a
warm relationship with Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, a
Clinton appointee who stayed on under Bush until July 2004. “He’s simply
a great and fair man,” Dahlan says. “I’m still in touch with him from
time to time.”<br><br>
<br>
</font><h4><b>“Everyone Was Against the
Elections”</b></h4><font size=3>In a speech in the White House Rose
Garden on June 24, 2002, President Bush announced that American policy in
the Middle East was turning in a fundamentally new direction. <br><br>
Arafat was still in power at the time, and many in the U.S. and Israel
blamed him for wrecking Clinton’s micro-managed peace efforts by
launching the second intifadaa renewed revolt, begun in 2000, in which
more than 1,000 Israelis and 4,500 Palestinians had died. Bush said he
wanted to give Palestinians the chance to choose new leaders, ones who
were not “compromised by terror.” In place of Arafat’s all-powerful
presidency, Bush said, “the Palestinian parliament should have the full
authority of a legislative body.”<br><br>
Arafat died in November 2004, and Abbas, his replacement as Fatah leader,
was elected president in January 2005. Elections for the Palestinian
parliament, known officially as the Legislative Council, were originally
set for July 2005, but later postponed by Abbas until January
2006.<br><br>
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 inefficiencya 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. <br><br>
“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?”<br><br>
The elections went forward as scheduled. On January 25, Hamas won 56
percent of the seats in the Legislative Council. <br><br>
Few inside the U.S. administration had predicted the result, and there
was no contingency plan to deal with it. “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.” <br><br>
“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?’ ”<br><br>
In public, Rice tried to look on the bright side of the Hamas victory.
“Unpredictability,” she said, is “the nature of big historic change.”
Even as she spoke, however, the Bush administration was rapidly revising
its attitude toward Palestinian democracy. <br><br>
Some analysts argued that Hamas had a substantial moderate wing that
could be strengthened if America coaxed it into the peace process.
Notable Israelissuch as Ephraim Halevy, the former head of the Mossad
intelligence agencyshared this view. But if America paused to consider
giving Hamas the benefit of the doubt, the moment was “milliseconds
long,” says a senior State Department official. “The administration spoke
with one voice: ‘We have to squeeze these guys.’ With Hamas’s election
victory, the freedom agenda was dead.” <br><br>
The first step, taken by the Middle East diplomatic “Quartet”the U.S.,
the European Union, Russia, and the United Nationswas to demand that the
new Hamas government renounce violence, recognize Israel’s right to
exist, and accept the terms of all previous agreements. When Hamas
refused, the Quartet shut off the faucet of aid to the Palestinian
Authority, depriving it of the means to pay salaries and meet its annual
budget of roughly $2 billion. <br><br>
Israel clamped down on Palestinians’ freedom of movement, especially into
and out of the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip. Israel also detained 64 Hamas
officials, including Legislative Council members and ministers, and even
launched a military campaign into Gaza after one of its soldiers was
kidnapped. Through it all, Hamas and its new government, led by Prime
Minister Ismail Haniyeh, proved surprisingly resilient. <br><br>
Washington reacted with dismay when Abbas began holding talks with Hamas
in the hope of establishing a “unity government.” On October 4, 2006,
Rice traveled to Ramallah to see Abbas. They met at the Muqata, the new
presidential headquarters that rose from the ruins of Arafat’s compound,
which Israel had destroyed in 2002. <br><br>
America’s leverage in Palestinian affairs was much stronger than it had
been in Arafat’s time. Abbas had never had a strong, independent base,
and he desperately needed to restore the flow of foreign aidand, with
it, his power of patronage. He also knew that he could not stand up to
Hamas without Washington’s help. <br><br>
At their joint press conference, Rice smiled as she expressed her
nation’s “great admiration” for Abbas’s leadership. Behind closed doors,
however, Rice’s tone was sharper, say officials who witnessed their
meeting. 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. <br><br>
Abbas, one official says, agreed to take action within two weeks. It
happened to be Ramadan, the month when Muslims fast during daylight
hours. With dusk approaching, Abbas asked Rice to join him for
<i>iftar</i>a snack to break the fast. <br><br>
Afterward, according to the official, Rice underlined her position: “So
we’re agreed? You’ll dissolve the government within two weeks?”<br><br>
“Maybe not two weeks. Give me a month. Let’s wait until after the Eid,”
he said, referring to the three-day celebration that marks the end of
Ramadan. (Abbas’s spokesman said via e-mail: “According to our records,
this is incorrect.”)<br><br>
Rice got into her armored S.U.V., where, the official claims, she told an
American colleague, “That damned <i>iftar</i> has cost us another two
weeks of Hamas government.” <br><br>
<br>
</font><h4><b>“We Will Be There to Support
You”</b></h4><font size=3>Weeks passed with no sign that Abbas was ready
to do America’s bidding. Finally, another official was sent to Ramallah.
Jake Walles, the consul general in Jerusalem, is a career foreign-service
officer with many years’ experience in the Middle East. His purpose was
to deliver a barely varnished ultimatum to the Palestinian president.
<br><br>
We know what Walles said because a copy was left behind, apparently by
accident, of the “talking points” memo prepared for him by the State
Department. The document has been authenticated by U.S. and Palestinian
officials. <br><br>
“We need to understand your plans regarding a new [Palestinian Authority]
government,” Walles’s script said. “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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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.” <br><br>
Abbas was also encouraged to “strengthen [his] team” to include “credible
figures of strong standing in the international community.” Among those
the U.S. wanted brought in, says an official who knew of the policy, was
Muhammad Dahlan.<br><br>
On paper, the forces at Fatah’s disposal looked stronger than those of
Hamas. There were some 70,000 men in the tangle of 14 Palestinian
security services that Arafat had built up, at least half of those in
Gaza. After the legislative elections, Hamas had expected to assume
command of these forces, but Fatah maneuvered to keep them under its
control. Hamas, which already had 6,000 or so irregulars in its militant
al-Qassam Brigade, responded by forming the 6,000-troop Executive Force
in Gaza, but that still left it with far fewer fighters than
Fatah.<br><br>
In reality, however, Hamas had several advantages. To begin with, Fatah’s
security forces had never really recovered from Operation Defensive
Shield, Israel’s massive 2002 re-invasion of the West Bank in response to
the second intifada. “Most of the security apparatus had been destroyed,”
says Youssef Issa, who led the Preventive Security Service under Abbas.
<br><br>
The irony of the blockade on foreign aid after Hamas’s legislative
victory, meanwhile, was that it prevented only Fatah from paying its
soldiers. “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 <i>should</i> give,” he insists. In Gaza, another
Hamas member tells me the number was closer to $200 million.<br><br>
The result was becoming apparent: Fatah could not control Gaza’s
streetsor even protect its own personnel.<br><br>
At about 1:30 p.m. on September 15, 2006, Samira Tayeh sent a text
message to her husband, Jad Tayeh, the director of foreign relations for
the Palestinian intelligence service and a member of Fatah. “He didn’t
reply,” she says. “I tried to call his mobile [phone], but it was
switched off. So I called his deputy, Mahmoun, and he didn’t know where
he was. That’s when I decided to go to the hospital.”<br><br>
Samira, a slim, elegant 40-year-old dressed from head to toe in black,
tells me the story in a Ramallah café in December 2007. Arriving at the
Al Shifa hospital, “I went through the morgue door. Not for any reasonI
just didn’t know the place. I saw there were all these intelligence
guards there. There was one I knew. He saw me and he said, ‘Put her in
the car.’ That’s when I knew something had happened to Jad.” <br><br>
Tayeh had left his office in a car with four aides. Moments later, they
found themselves being pursued by an S.U.V. full of armed, masked men.
About 200 yards from the home of Prime Minister Haniyeh, the S.U.V.
cornered the car. The masked men opened fire, killing Tayeh and all four
of his colleagues. <br><br>
Hamas said it had nothing to do with the murders, but Samira had reason
to believe otherwise. At three a.m. on June 16, 2007, during the Gaza
takeover, six Hamas gunmen forced their way into her home and fired
bullets into every photo of Jad they could find. The next day, they
returned and demanded the keys to the car in which he had died, claiming
that it belonged to the Palestinian Authority. <br><br>
Fearing for her life, she fled across the border and then into the West
Bank, with only the clothes she was wearing and her passport, driver’s
license, and credit card. <br><br>
<br>
</font><h4><b>“Very Clever Warfare”</b></h4><font size=3>Fatah’s
vulnerability was a source of grave concern to Dahlan. “I made a lot of
activities to give Hamas the impression that we were still strong and we
had the capacity to face them,” he says. “But I knew in my heart it
wasn’t true.” He had no official security position at the time, but he
belonged to parliament and retained the loyalty of Fatah members in Gaza.
“I used my image, my power.” Dahlan says he told Abbas that “Gaza needs
only a decision for Hamas to take over.” To prevent that from happening,
Dahlan waged “very clever warfare” for many months.<br><br>
According to several alleged victims, one of the tactics this “warfare”
entailed was to kidnap and torture members of Hamas’s Executive Force.
(Dahlan denies Fatah used such tactics, but admits “mistakes” were made.)
Abdul Karim al-Jasser, a strapping man of 25, says he was the first such
victim. “It was on October 16, still Ramadan,” he says. “I was on my way
to my sister’s house for <i>iftar.</i> Four guys stopped me, two of them
with guns. They forced me to accompany them to the home of Aman abu
Jidyan,” a Fatah leader close to Dahlan. (Abu Jidyan would be killed in
the June uprising.)<br><br>
The first phase of torture was straightforward enough, al-Jasser says: he
was stripped naked, bound, blindfolded, and beaten with wooden poles and
plastic pipes. “They put a piece of cloth in my mouth to stop me
screaming.” His interrogators forced him to answer contradictory
accusations: one minute they said that he had collaborated with Israel,
the next that he had fired Qassam rockets against it. <br><br>
But the worst was yet to come. “They brought an iron bar,” al-Jasser
says, his voice suddenly hesitant. We are speaking inside his home in
Gaza, which is experiencing one of its frequent power outages. He points
to the propane-gas lamp that lights the room. “They put the bar in the
flame of a lamp like this. When it was red, they took the covering off my
eyes. Then they pressed it against my skin. That was the last thing I
remember.”<br><br>
When he came to, he was still in the room where he had been tortured. A
few hours later, the Fatah men handed him over to Hamas, and he was taken
to the hospital. “I could see the shock in the eyes of the doctors who
entered the room,” he says. He shows me photos of purple third-degree
burns wrapped like towels around his thighs and much of his lower torso.
“The doctors told me that if I had been thin, not chubby, I would have
died. But I wasn’t alone. That same night that I was released, abu
Jidyan’s men fired five bullets into the legs of one of my relatives. We
were in the same ward in the hospital.” <br><br>
Dahlan says he did not order al-Jasser’s torture: “The only order I gave
was to defend ourselves. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t torture, some
things that went wrong, but I did not know about this.”<br><br>
The dirty war between Fatah and Hamas continued to gather momentum
throughout the autumn, with both sides committing atrocities. By the end
of 2006, dozens were dying each month. Some of the victims were
noncombatants. In December, gunmen opened fire on the car of a Fatah
intelligence official, killing his three young children and their driver.
<br><br>
There was still no sign that Abbas was ready to bring matters to a head
by dissolving the Hamas government. Against this darkening background,
the U.S. began direct security talks with Dahlan.<br><br>
<br>
</font><h4><b>“He’s Our Guy”</b></h4><font size=3>In 2001, President Bush
famously said that he had looked Russian president Vladimir Putin in the
eye, gotten “a sense of his soul,” and found him to be “trustworthy.”
According to three U.S. officials, Bush made a similar judgment about
Dahlan when they first met, in 2003. All three officials recall hearing
Bush say, “He’s our guy.” <br><br>
They say this assessment was echoed by other key figures in the
administration, including Rice and Assistant Secretary David Welch, the
man in charge of Middle East policy at the State Department. “David Welch
didn’t fundamentally care about Fatah,” one of his colleagues says. “He
cared about results, and [he supported] whatever son of a bitch you had
to support. Dahlan was the son of a bitch we happened to know best. He
was a can-do kind of person. Dahlan was our guy.” <br><br>
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. <br><br>
Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, who had been appointed the U.S. security
coordinator for the Palestinians in November 2005, was in no position to
question the president’s judgment of Dahlan. His only prior experience
with the Middle East was as director of the Iraq Survey Group, the body
that looked for Saddam Hussein’s elusive weapons of mass destruction.
<br><br>
In November 2006, Dayton met Dahlan for the first of a long series of
talks in Jerusalem and Ramallah. Both men were accompanied by aides. From
the outset, says an official who took notes at the meeting, Dayton was
pushing two overlapping agendas. <br><br>
“We need to reform the Palestinian security apparatus,” Dayton said,
according to the notes. “But we also need to build up your forces in
order to take on Hamas.” <br><br>
Dahlan replied that, in the long run, Hamas could be defeated only by
political means. “But if I am going to confront them,” he added, “I need
substantial resources. As things stand, we do not have the capability.”
<br><br>
The two men agreed that they would work toward a new Palestinian security
plan. The idea was to simplify the confusing web of Palestinian security
forces and have Dahlan assume responsibility for all of them in the newly
created role of Palestinian national-security adviser. The Americans
would help supply weapons and training. <br><br>
As part of the reform program, according to the official who was present
at the meetings, Dayton said he wanted to disband the Preventive Security
Service, which was widely known to be engaged in kidnapping and torture.
At a meeting in Dayton’s Jerusalem office in early December, Dahlan
ridiculed the idea. “The only institution now protecting Fatah and the
Palestinian Authority in Gaza is the one you want removed,” he said.
<br><br>
Dayton softened a little. “We want to help you,” he said. “What do you
need?”<br><br>
<br>
</font><h4><b>“Iran-Contra 2.0”</b></h4><font size=3>Under Bill Clinton,
Dahlan says, commitments of security assistance “were always delivered,
absolutely.” Under Bush, he was about to discover, things were different.
At the end of 2006, Dayton promised an immediate package worth $86.4
millionmoney that, according to a U.S. document published by Reuters on
January 5, 2007, would be used to “dismantle the infrastructure of
terrorism and establish law and order in the West Bank and Gaza.” U.S.
officials even told reporters the money would be transferred “in the
coming days.” <br><br>
The cash never arrived. “Nothing was disbursed,” Dahlan says. “It was
approved and it was in the news. But we received not a single penny.”
<br><br>
Any notion that the money could be transferred quickly and easily had
died on Capitol Hill, where the payment was blocked by the House
Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia. Its members feared that
military aid to the Palestinians might end up being turned against
Israel. <br><br>
Dahlan did not hesitate to voice his exasperation. “I spoke to
Condoleezza Rice on several occasions,” he says. “I spoke to Dayton, to
the consul general, to everyone in the administration I knew. They said,
‘You have a convincing argument.’ We were sitting in Abbas’s office in
Ramallah, and I explained the whole thing to Condi. And she said, ‘Yes,
we have to make an effort to do this. There’s no other way.’ ” At some of
these meetings, Dahlan says, Assistant Secretary Welch and Deputy
National-Security Adviser Abrams were also present.<br><br>
The administration went back to Congress, and a reduced, $59 million
package for nonlethal aid was approved in April 2007. But as Dahlan knew,
the Bush team had already spent the past months exploring alternative,
covert means of getting him the funds and weapons he wanted. The
reluctance of Congress meant that “you had to look for different pots,
different sources of money,” says a Pentagon official. <br><br>
A State Department official adds, “Those in charge of implementing the
policy were saying, ‘Do whatever it takes. We have to be in a position
for Fatah to defeat Hamas militarily, and only Muhammad Dahlan has the
guile and the muscle to do this.’ The expectation was that this was where
it would end upwith a military showdown.” There were, this official
says, two “parallel programs”the overt one, which the administration
took to Congress, “and a covert one, not only to buy arms but to pay the
salaries of security personnel.” <br><br>
In essence, the program was simple. According to State Department
officials, beginning in the latter part of 2006, Rice initiated several
rounds of phone calls and personal meetings with leaders of four Arab
nationsEgypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. She
asked them to bolster Fatah by providing military training and by
pledging funds to buy its forces lethal weapons. The money was to be paid
directly into accounts controlled by President Abbas. <br><br>
The scheme bore some resemblance to the Iran-contra scandal, in which
members of Ronald Reagan’s administration sold arms to Iran, an enemy of
the U.S. The money was used to fund the contra rebels in Nicaragua, in
violation of a congressional ban. Some of the money for the contras, like
that for Fatah, was furnished by Arab allies as a result of U.S.
lobbying. <br><br>
But there are also important differencesstarting with the fact that
Congress never passed a measure expressly prohibiting the supply of aid
to Fatah and Dahlan. “It was close to the margins,” says a former
intelligence official with experience in covert programs. “But it
probably wasn’t illegal.” <br><br>
Legal or not, arms shipments soon began to take place. 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. News of the shipment leaked, and Benjamin Ben-Eliezer,
an Israeli Cabinet member, said on Israeli radio that the guns and
ammunition would give Abbas “the ability to cope with those organizations
which are trying to ruin everything”namely, Hamas.<br><br>
Avi Dichter points out that all weapons shipments had to be approved by
Israel, which was understandably hesitant to allow state-of-the-art arms
into Gaza. “One thing’s for sure, we weren’t talking about heavy
weapons,” says a State Department official. “It was small arms, light
machine guns, ammunition.”<br><br>
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 policytorn 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.”<br><br>
During a trip to the Middle East in January 2007, Rice found it difficult
to get her partners to honor their pledges. “The Arabs felt the U.S. was
not serious,” one official says. “They knew that if the Americans were
serious they would put their own money where their mouth was. They didn’t
have faith in America’s ability to raise a real force. There was no
follow-through. Paying was different than pledging, and there was no
plan.” <br><br>
This official estimates that the program raised “a few payments of $30
million”most of it, as other sources agree, from the United Arab
Emirates. Dahlan himself says the total was only $20 million, and
confirms that “the Arabs made many more pledges than they ever paid.”
Whatever the exact amount, it was not enough.<br><br>
<br>
</font><h4><b>Plan B</b></h4><font size=3>On February 1, 2007, Dahlan
took his “very clever warfare” to a new level when Fatah forces under his
control stormed the Islamic University of Gaza, a Hamas stronghold, and
set several buildings on fire. Hamas retaliated the next day with a wave
of attacks on police stations. <br><br>
Unwilling to preside over a Palestinian civil war, Abbas blinked. For
weeks, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia had been trying to persuade him to
meet with Hamas in Mecca and formally establish a national unity
government. On February 6, Abbas went, taking Dahlan with him. Two days
later, with Hamas no closer to recognizing Israel, a deal was struck.
<br><br>
Under its terms, Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas would remain prime minister
while allowing Fatah members to occupy several important posts. When the
news hit the streets that the Saudis had promised to pay the Palestinian
Authority’s salary bills, Fatah and Hamas members in Gaza celebrated
together by firing their Kalashnikovs into the air. <br><br>
Once again, the Bush administration had been taken by surprise. According
to a State Department official, “Condi was apoplectic.” A remarkable
documentary record, revealed here for the first time, shows that the U.S.
responded by redoubling the pressure on its Palestinian allies.<br><br>
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.” <br><br>
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.<br><br>
Security considerations were paramount, and Plan B had explicit
prescriptions for dealing with them. For as long as the unity government
remained in office, it was essential for Abbas to maintain “independent
control of key security forces.” He must “avoid Hamas integration with
these services, while eliminating the Executive Force or mitigating the
challenges posed by its continued existence.” <br><br>
In a clear reference to the covert aid expected from the Arabs, the memo
made this recommendation for the next six to nine months: “Dahlan
oversees effort in coordination with General Dayton and Arab [nations] to
train and equip 15,000-man force under President Abbas’s control to
establish internal law and order, stop terrorism and deter extralegal
forces.” <br><br>
The Bush administration’s goals for Plan B were elaborated in a document
titled “An Action Plan for the Palestinian Presidency.” This action plan
went through several drafts and was developed by the U.S., the
Palestinians, and the government of Jordan. Sources agree, however, that
it originated in the State Department. <br><br>
The early drafts stressed the need for bolstering Fatah’s forces in order
to “deter” Hamas. The “desired outcome” was to give Abbas “the capability
to take the required strategic political decisions … such as dismissing
the cabinet, establishing an emergency cabinet.” <br><br>
The drafts called for increasing the “level and capacity” of 15,000 of
Fatah’s existing security personnel while adding 4,700 troops in seven
new “highly trained battalions on strong policing.” The plan also
promised to arrange “specialized training abroad,” in Jordan and Egypt,
and pledged to “provide the security personnel with the necessary
equipment and arms to carry out their missions.” <br><br>
A detailed budget put the total cost for salaries, training, and “the
needed security equipment, lethal and non-lethal,” at $1.27 billion over
five years. The plan states: “The costs and overall budget were developed
jointly with General Dayton’s team and the Palestinian technical team for
reform”a unit established by Dahlan and led by his friend and policy
aide Bassil Jaber. Jaber confirms that the document is an accurate
summary of the work he and his colleagues did with Dayton. “The plan was
to create a security establishment that could protect and strengthen a
peaceful Palestinian state living side by side with Israel,” he
says.<br><br>
The final draft of the Action Plan was drawn up in Ramallah by officials
of the Palestinian Authority. This version was identical to the earlier
drafts in all meaningful ways but one: it presented the plan as if it had
been the Palestinians’ idea. It also said the security proposals had been
“approved by President Mahmoud Abbas after being discussed and agreed
[to] by General Dayton’s team.”<br><br>
On April 30, 2007, a portion of one early draft was leaked to a Jordanian
newspaper, <i>Al-Majd.</i> 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.<br><br>
<br>
</font><h4><b>“We Are Late in the Ball Game
Here”</b></h4><font size=3>The formation of the unity government had
brought a measure of calm to the Palestinian territories, but violence
erupted anew after <i>Al-Majd</i> published its story on the Action Plan.
The timing was unkind to Fatah, which, to add to its usual disadvantages,
was without its security chief. Ten days earlier, Dahlan had left Gaza
for Berlin, where he’d had surgery on both knees. He was due to spend the
next eight weeks convalescing.<br><br>
In mid-May, with Dahlan still absent, a new element was added to Gaza’s
toxic mix when 500 Fatah National Security Forces recruits arrived, fresh
from training in Egypt and equipped with new weapons and vehicles. “They
had been on a crash course for 45 days,” Dahlan says. “The idea was that
we needed them to go in dressed well, equipped well, and that might
create the impression of new authority.” Their presence was immediately
noticed, not only by Hamas but by staff from Western aid agencies. “They
had new rifles with telescopic sights, and they were wearing black flak
jackets,” says a frequent visitor from Northern Europe. “They were quite
a contrast to the usual scruffy lot.” <br><br>
On May 23, none other than Lieutenant General Dayton discussed the new
unit in testimony before the House Middle East subcommittee. Hamas had
attacked the troops as they crossed into Gaza from Egypt, Dayton said,
but “these 500 young people, fresh out of basic training, were organized.
They knew how to work in a coordinated fashion. Training does pay off.
And the Hamas attack in the area was, likewise, repulsed.” <br><br>
The troops’ arrival, Dayton said, was one of several “hopeful signs” in
Gaza. Another was Dahlan’s appointment as national-security adviser.
Meanwhile, he said, Hamas’s Executive Force was becoming “extremely
unpopular I would say that we are kind of late in the ball game here, and
we are behind, there’s two out, but we have our best clutch hitter at the
plate, and the pitcher is beginning to tire on the opposing team.”
<br><br>
The opposing team was stronger than Dayton realized. By the end of May
2007, Hamas was mounting regular attacks of unprecedented boldness and
savagery. <br><br>
At an apartment in Ramallah that Abbas has set aside for wounded refugees
from Gaza, I meet a former Fatah communications officer named Tariq
Rafiyeh. He lies paralyzed from a bullet he took to the spine during the
June coup, but his suffering began two weeks earlier. On May 31, he was
on his way home with a colleague when they were stopped at a roadblock,
robbed of their money and cell phones, and taken to a mosque. There,
despite the building’s holy status, Hamas Executive Force members were
violently interrogating Fatah detainees. “Late that night one of them
said we were going to be released,” Rafiyeh recalls. “He told the guards,
‘Be hospitable, keep them warm.’ I thought that meant kill us. Instead,
before letting us go they beat us badly.”<br><br>
On June 7, there was another damaging leak, when the Israeli newspaper
<i>Haaretz</i> reported that Abbas and Dayton had asked Israel to
authorize the biggest Egyptian arms shipment yetto include dozens of
armored cars, hundreds of armor-piercing rockets, thousands of hand
grenades, and millions of rounds of ammunition. A few days later, just
before the next batch of Fatah recruits was due to leave for training in
Egypt, the coup began in earnest. <br><br>
<br>
</font><h4><b>Fatah’s Last Stand</b></h4><font size=3>The Hamas
leadership in Gaza is adamant that the coup would not have happened if
Fatah had not provoked it. Fawzi Barhoum, Hamas’s chief spokesman, says
the leak in <i>Al-Majd</i> convinced the party that “there was a plan,
approved by America, to destroy the political choice.” The arrival of the
first Egyptian-trained fighters, he adds, was the “reason for the
timing.” About 250 Hamas members had been killed in the first six months
of 2007, Barhoum tells me. “Finally we decided to put an end to it. If we
had let them stay loose in Gaza, there would have been more violence.”
<br><br>
“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.” <br><br>
Zahar and I speak inside his home in Gaza, which was rebuilt after a 2003
Israeli air strike destroyed it, killing one of his sons. He tells me
that Hamas launched its operations in June with a limited objective: “The
decision was only to get rid of the Preventive Security Service. They
were the ones out on every crossroads, putting anyone suspected of Hamas
involvement at risk of being tortured or killed.” But when Fatah fighters
inside a surrounded Preventive Security office in Jabaliya began
retreating from building to building, they set off a “domino effect” that
emboldened Hamas to seek broader gains.<br><br>
Many armed units that were nominally loyal to Fatah did not fight at all.
Some stayed neutral because they feared that, with Dahlan absent, his
forces were bound to lose. “I wanted to stop the cycle of killing,” says
Ibrahim abu al-Nazar, a veteran party chief. “What did Dahlan expect? Did
he think the U.S. Navy was going to come to Fatah’s rescue? They promised
him everything, but what did they do? But he also deceived them. He told
them he was the strongman of the region. Even the Americans may now feel
sad and frustrated. Their friend lost the battle.”<br><br>
Others who stayed out of the fight were extremists. “Fatah is a large
movement, with many schools inside it,” says Khalid Jaberi, a commander
with Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which continue to fire rockets
into Israel from Gaza. “Dahlan’s school is funded by the Americans and
believes in negotiations with Israel as a strategic choice. Dahlan tried
to control everything in Fatah, but there are cadres who could do a much
better job. Dahlan treated us dictatorially. There was no overall Fatah
decision to confront Hamas, and that’s why our guns in al-Aqsa are the
cleanest. They are not corrupted by the blood of our people.”<br><br>
Jaberi pauses. He spent the night before our interview awake and in
hiding, fearful of Israeli air strikes. “You know,” he says, “since the
takeover, we’ve been trying to enter the brains of Bush and Rice, to
figure out their mentality. We can only conclude that having Hamas in
control serves their overall strategy, because their policy was so crazy
otherwise.”<br><br>
The fighting was over in less than five days. It began with attacks on
Fatah security buildings, in and around Gaza City and in the southern
town of Rafah. Fatah attempted to shell Prime Minister Haniyeh’s house,
but by dusk on June 13 its forces were being routed.<br><br>
Years of oppression by Dahlan and his forces were avenged as Hamas chased
down stray Fatah fighters and subjected them to summary execution. At
least one victim was reportedly thrown from the roof of a high-rise
building. By June 16, Hamas had captured every Fatah building, as well as
Abbas’s official Gaza residence. Much of Dahlan’s house, which doubled as
his office, was reduced to rubble. <br><br>
Fatah’s last stand, predictably enough, was made by the Preventive
Security Service. The unit sustained heavy casualties, but a rump of
about 100 surviving fighters eventually made it to the beach and escaped
in the night by fishing boat. <br><br>
At the apartment in Ramallah, the wounded struggle on. Unlike Fatah,
Hamas fired exploding bullets, which are banned under the Geneva
Conventions. Some of the men in the apartment were shot with these rounds
20 or 30 times, producing unimaginable injuries that required amputation.
Several have lost both legs.<br><br>
The coup has had other costs. Amjad Shawer, a local economist, tells me
that Gaza had 400 functioning factories and workshops at the start of
2007. By December, the intensified Israeli blockade had caused 90 percent
of them to close. Seventy percent of Gaza’s population is now living on
less than $2 a day.<br><br>
Israel, meanwhile, is no safer. The emergency pro-peace government called
for in the secret Action Plan is now in officebut only in the West Bank.
In Gaza, the exact thing both Israel and the U.S. Congress warned against
came to pass when Hamas captured most of Fatah’s arms and
ammunitionincluding the new Egyptian guns supplied under the covert
U.S.-Arab aid program. <br><br>
Now that it controls Gaza, Hamas has given free rein to militants intent
on firing rockets into neighboring Israeli towns. “We are still
developing our rockets; soon we shall hit the heart of Ashkelon at will,”
says Jaberi, the al-Aqsa commander, referring to the Israeli city of
110,000 people 12 miles from Gaza’s border. “I assure you, the time is
near when we will mount a big operation inside Israel, in Haifa or Tel
Aviv.” <br><br>
On January 23, Hamas blew up parts of the wall dividing Gaza from Egypt,
and tens of thousands of Palestinians crossed the border. Militants had
already been smuggling weapons through a network of underground tunnels,
but the breach of the wall made their job much easierand may have
brought Jaberi’s threat closer to reality.<br><br>
George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice continue to push the peace process,
but Avi Dichter says Israel will never conclude a deal on Palestinian
statehood until the Palestinians reform their entire law-enforcement
systemwhat he calls “the chain of security.” With Hamas in control of
Gaza, there appears to be no chance of that happening. “Just look at the
situation,” says Dahlan. “They say there will be a final-status agreement
in eight months? No way.”<br><br>
<br>
</font><h4><b>“An Institutional Failure”</b></h4><font size=3>How could
the U.S. have played Gaza so wrong? Neocon critics of the
administrationwho until last year were inside itblame 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.”<br><br>
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.”<br><br>
It is impossible to say for sure whether the outcome in Gaza would have
been any betterfor the Palestinian people, for the Israelis, and for
America’s allies in Fatahif the Bush administration had pursued a
different policy. One thing, however, seems certain: it could not be any
worse.<br><br>
<br><br>
</font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
<font size=3 color="#FF0000">Freedom Archives<br>
522 Valencia Street<br>
San Francisco, CA 94110<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#008000">415 863-9977<br><br>
</font><font size=3 color="#0000FF">
<a href="http://www.freedomarchives.org/" eudora="autourl">
www.Freedomarchives.org</a></font><font size=3> </font></body>
</html>