Worth the five minute read:
"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 Hamas�??whose 1988 charter committed it to the goal of driving Israel into the sea�??won control of the parliament, Bush made another, deadlier miscalculation.
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.
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.
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.�??"
The freedom agenda is exposed as hypocrisy, maybe it once had a bit of truth to it. And, if further proof were needed, more evidence of the titanic foreign policy incompetence of this administration.