Disregarding concerns from Israeli officials, President Bush pushed for Palestinian elections in early January 2006.
A White House spokesman made it clear meanwhile that President Bush wanted the elections to go ahead as scheduled, and for voting to take place in East Jerusalem. Mr Bush saw the elections as a step forward in his vision of a two-state solution to the conflict, the spokesman said.
Despite pre-election polls that showed Fatah comfortably ahead, many observers were concerned about Hamas’ strength and potential for victory if the election went ahead.
Posing a question which is exercising several Western governments, a senior Israeli official said last night: “What are the international community going to do if Hamas wins the election? Are they going to deal with them when several countries proscribe Hamas as a terrorist organisation?”
Four days before the election, Scott Wilson and Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post reported that the United States was actively interfering in the Palestinian election.
RAMALLAH, West Bank — The Bush administration is spending foreign aid money to increase the popularity of the Palestinian Authority on the eve of crucial elections in which the governing party faces a serious challenge from the radical Islamic group Hamas.
The approximately $2 million program is being led by a division of the U.S. Agency for International Development. But no U.S. government logos appear with the projects or events being undertaken as part of the campaign, which bears no evidence of U.S. involvement and does not fall within the definitions of traditional development work.
U.S. officials say their low profile is meant to ensure that the Palestinian Authority receives public credit for a collection of small, popular projects and events to be unveiled before Palestinians select their first parliament in a decade.
In this instance, USAID was doing the traditional work of the Central Intelligence Agency (meddling in foreign elections), and the work was coordinated by “a former U.S. Army Special Forces officer who worked in postwar Afghanistan on democracy-building projects.” The episode was another example of how traditional intelligence operations drifted away from the CIA and towards the Pentagon during Bush’s second term. In any case, the USAID program didn’t work, and may have backfired, as Hamas won a plurality of the vote and a majority of the seats. The Bush administration immediately began plotting to reverse the result of the elections. For a complete recounting of the Bush administration’s efforts, please see David Rose’s exposé in the April issue of Vanity Fair. Here’s the teaser:
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, the author 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.
In fact, the administration’s dirty covert war in Gaza resulted in total humiliation. Hamas defeated Fatah over a week of fighting in June 2007, and took complete control of the Gaza Strip.
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.”
