AS THE WORLD SQUIRMSã
Bush “Plan” Eliminated Obstacle to
Gaza Assault
Inter
Press Service
| Gareth Porter | January 5, 2009
04:45 PM
The Huffington Post January 6, 2009
WASHINGTON, Jan 5 (IPS) - Until mid-2007, there
was a serious political obstacle to a massive conventional war by Israel
against Hamas in Gaza: the fact that Hamas had won free and fair elections for
the Palestinian parliament and was still the leading faction in a fully
legitimate government.
But the George W. Bush administration helped
Israel eliminate that obstacle by deliberately provoking Hamas to seize power
in Gaza. That plan was aimed at getting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to
dissolve the democratically elected Hamas government -- something Bush had
tried unsuccessfully to do for many months.
Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the
Palestinian parliament in the January 2006 elections, and the following month,
the Palestinian Legislative Council voted for a new government under Hamas
Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh. The Bush administration immediately began to use
its control over the "Quartet" (the U.S., European Union, United
Nations and Russia), to try to reverse the results of the election.
The Quartet responded to the Hamas victory by
demanding that Hamas renounce all armed resistance to Israel and even
"disarm" before a political solution was reached. That was in effect
a demand that Israel be allowed to use its military and economic controls over
the West Bank and Gaza to impose its own unilateral solution on the
Palestinians.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration and the
Europeans cut off all financing for the Palestinian government, while Israel
refused to hand over to the Palestinian authorities the VAT and customs duties
it collected on behalf of the Palestinians under the Paris Protocol signed with
the PLO as part of the Oslo Accords.
When Abbas continued to resist U.S. demands
for an end to the elected government, both Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni told him at the United Nations in
September 2006 that they would not accept a Palestinian government with Hamas
participation.
Then Rice was dispatched to Ramallah in early
October 2006 to tighten the screws on the Palestinian president. She demanded a
commitment from Abbas to dissolve the Haniyeh government within two weeks, and
then accepted his promise to do so within four weeks, according to a later U.S.
State Department memorandum published in Vanity Fair magazine.
There was one problem, however, with the U.S.
demand: under Article 45 of the Palestinian Authority's "Basic Law",
Abbas could fire the prime minister, but he could not appoint a new one who did
not represent the majority party in the Palestinian Legislative Council.
Abbas
failed to act on the dissolution promise, so the Bush administration gave him a
memo demanding that Hamas be given a "clear choice, with a clear
deadline" to accept or reject "a new government that meets the
Quartet principles". The memo, published in part last January in Vanity
Fair, said that if Hamas refused that demand, "you should make clear your
intention to declare a state of emergency and form an emergency government
explicitly committed to that platform."
It further demanded that Abbas "strengthen
his team" by bringing in "credible figures of strong standing in the
international community". That was a reference to the long-time director
of Fatah's paramilitary forces, Muhammad Dahlan, who had long been regarded as
the candidate of the Bush administration and its allies. In April 2003, Yasser
Arafat had been under pressure from British Prime Minister Tony Blair and
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to name Dahlan as head of Palestinian
security.
In late 2006, Rice got Egypt, Saudi Arabia
and the United Arab Emirates to agree to provide covert military training and
money to equip a major increase in Dahlan's militia.
But there was another element of the Bush
administration plan. It encouraged Dahlan to carry out attacks against the Hamas
security and political infrastructure in Gaza, which were well-known to be far
stronger than that of Abbas's Fatah faction. In a later interview with Vanity
Fair, Dahlan admitted that he had carried out "very clever warfare"
against Hamas in Gaza for many months.
Other sources said that Dahlan's militia was
carrying out torture and kidnappings of Hamas security personnel.
Alvaro de Soto, then U.N. Special Coordinator
for the Middle East Peace Process, wrote in his confidential End of Mission
Report that the U.S. "clearly pushed for a confrontation between Fatah and
Hamas..." He recalled that the "U.S. envoy" to a Feb. 2, 2007
meeting of the Quartet in Washington had twice declared, "how much I like
this violence", because "it means that other Palestinians are
resisting Hamas."
That U.S. envoy was Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice.
The Bush administration seemed to want Hamas
to know about its plan to help Fatah use force against the Hamas organisation
in Gaza. A Jan. 5, 2007 Reuters story datelined Jerusalem revealed an internal
U.S. document showing that the United States had pledged 86 million dollars to
"strengthen and reform elements of the Palestinian security sector
controlled by the PA presidency" and "dismantle the infrastructure of
terrorism and establish law and order in the West Bank and Gaza".
When Abbas negotiated a new agreement with
Hamas in Mecca in February 2007 on a Palestinian unity government, the Bush
administration responded by drafting a secret "action plan for the
Palestinian presidency" which threatened that the "international
community" would "no longer deal exclusively with the
Presidency" if it did not go along with U.S. demands, and that
"[m]any countries in the EU and the G8" would "start looking for
more credible interlocutors on the Palestinian side who can deliver on key
issues of security and governance".
The plan, dated Mar. 2, 2007, called for
Abbas to "start taking necessary action against groups undermining the
ceasefire with the goal of ensuring all armed groups within Palestine security
institutions in stages (between 2007 and 2008)..." It promised to help
Abbas to "impose necessary order on the Palestinian street" through
"superiority" of Fatah forces over Hamas, after which there would be
new elections in autumn 2007.
Again that U.S. plan was not kept secret but
was leaked in April 2007 by the Jordanian newspaper Al-Majd. That could only
have happened if Jordanian intelligence services, which cooperative very
closely with the United States, made the decision to leak it to the press.
Then, on Jun. 7, 2007 the Israeli daily
newspaper Haaretz revealed that Israel had been asked to authorise the shipment
of dozens of Egyptian armoured cars and hundreds of rockets and thousands of
hand grenades for the Fatah security forces.
The leaked plans for a military buildup were
an open invitation to Hamas to take preemptive action. The day after the
Haaretz story, Hamas launched a campaign which eliminated the Fatah security
presence in Gaza in five days.
The day after the complete defeat of Dahlan's
forces in Gaza, Abbas dissolved the Haniyeh unity government and named his own
prime minister, in violation of the Palestinian charter.
The rout of Dahlan's forces was a predictable
consequence of the Bush administration's policy. As the commander of Fatah's
al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, Khalid Jaberi, told Vanity Fair's David Rose,
"We can only conclude that having Hamas in control serves [the Bush
administration's] overall strategy, because their policy was so crazy otherwise."
But the Bush administration had not only
accomplished its goal of eliminating a Hamas-dominated government; it had also
set up a new argument that could later be used to justify an all-out Israeli
offensive in Gaza: that Hamas had mounted an "illegal coup" in Gaza.
That was the term that Rice used on Jan. 2 in justifying the Israeli operations
against Gaza.
*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian
and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback
edition of his latest book, "Perils of
Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam",
was published in 2006.
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