Page 2 of
2 No-goodniks and the Palestinian
shootout By Mark Perry and
Alastair Crooke
president, including
prominent neo-conservatives David Wurmser and John
Hannah. The policy was approved by Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice.
The president
then, the authors were told, signed off on the
program in a Central Intelligence Agency "finding"
and designated that its implementation be put
under the control of the CIA.
But the
program ran into problems almost from the
beginning. "The CIA didn't like it and didn't
think it would work," the authors
were
told in October. "The Pentagon hated it, the US
Embassy in Israel hated it, and even the Israelis
hated it." A prominent American military official
serving in Israel called the program "stupid" and
"counter-productive".
The program went
forward despite these criticisms, however, though
responsibility for its implementation was slowly
put in the hands of anti-terrorism officials
working closely with the State Department. The CIA
"wriggled out of" retaining responsibility for
implementing the Abrams plan, the authors have
been told.
Since at least August, Rice,
Abrams and US envoy David Welch have been its
primary advocates, and the program has been
subsumed as a "part of the State Department's
Middle East initiative". US government officials
refused to comment on a report that the program
was now a part of the State Department's "Middle
East Partnership Initiative", established to
promote democracy in the region. If it is,
diverting appropriated funds from the program for
the purchase of weapons may be a violation of
congressional intent - and US law.
The
recipients of US largesse have been Abbas and
Mohammad Dahlan, a controversial and charismatic
Palestinian political leader from Gaza. The US has
also relied on advice from Mohammad Rashid, a
well-known Kurdish/Palestinian financier with
offices in Cairo. Even in Israel, the alliance of
the US with these two figures is greeted with
almost open derision.
While Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert has hesitantly supported the program,
many of his key advisers have made it clear that
they want to have nothing to do with starting a
Palestinian civil war. They also doubt whether
Hamas can be weakened. These officials point out
that since the beginning of the program, Hamas has
actually gained in strength, in part because its
leaders are considered competent, transparent,
uncorrupt and unwilling to compromise their ideals
- just the kinds of democratically elected leaders
that the Bush administration would want to support
anywhere else in the Middle East.
Of
course, in public, Rice appears contrite and
concerned with "the growing lawlessness" among
Palestinians, while failing to mention that such
lawlessness is exactly what the Abrams plan was
designed to create. "You can't build security
forces overnight to deal with the kind of
lawlessness that is there in Gaza, which largely
derives from an inability to govern," she said
during a recent trip to Israel.
"Their
[the Hamas-led PA] inability to govern, of course,
comes from their unwillingness to meet
international standards." Even Middle East experts
and State Department officials close to Rice
consider her comments about Palestinian violence
dangerous, and have warned her that if the details
of the US program become public, her reputation
could be stained.
In fact, Pentagon
officials concede, Hamas' inability to provide
security to its own people and the clashes that
have recently erupted have been seeded by the
Abrams plan. Israeli officials know this, and have
begun to rebel. In Israel, at least, Rice's view
that Hamas can be unseated is now regularly, and
sometimes publicly, dismissed.
According
to a December 25 article in Ha'aretz, senior
Israeli intelligence officials have told Olmert
that not only can Hamas not be replaced, but that
its rival, Fatah, is disintegrating. Any hope for
the success of a US program aimed at replacing
Hamas, these officials argued, will fail. These
Israeli intelligence officials also dismissed
Abbas' call for elections to replace Hamas -
saying that such elections would all but destroy
Fatah. Ha'aretz reported:
Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin told the
cabinet Sunday [December 24] that should
elections be held in the Palestinian Authority,
Fatah's chances of winning would be close to
zero. Diskin said during Sunday's weekly cabinet
meeting that the Fatah faction is in bad shape,
and therefore Israel should expect Hamas to
register a sweeping victory.
Apparently, Jordan's King Abdullah
agrees. On the day that article appeared, December
25, Abdullah kept Abbas waiting for six hours to
see him in Amman. Eventually, Abdullah told Abbas
that he should go home - and only come to see him
again when accompanied by Hamas leader and
Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.
Most recently, Saudi officials have
welcomed Haniyeh to their country for talks,
having apparently made public their own views on
the US program to replace Hamas. And so it is: one
year after the election of Hamas, and one year
after Abrams determined that sowing the seeds of
civil war among a people already under occupation
would somehow advance America's program for
democracy in the Middle East, respect for
America's democratic ideals has all but collapsed
- and not just in Iraq.
Alastair
Crooke is director and founder of Conflicts
Forum. Mark Perry is a director of
Conflicts Forum. This piece originally appeared on
www.conflictsforum.org.
(Copyright
2007 Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry. Used by
permission.)
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