If you want to be notified the next time I write something, sign up for FREE email alerts or subscribe to the RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Oh, what a surprise!?

(AFP) - US President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice covertly sought to oust Hamas after the 2006 polls triggering a bloody Palestinian civil war, a US magazine alleged Tuesday.

Vanity Fair (full report below) said it had obtained confidential documents, which had been confirmed by US and Palestinian sources, that Washington sought to arm a Palestinian force led by Fatah loyalists to oust Hamas militants from power.

“But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush,” the magazine wrote.

“Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the US-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.”

The report, which the magazine dubbed Iran-Contra 2.0 in reference to a controversial 1980s arms scheme under late president Ronald Reagan, was swiftly dismissed by State Department spokesman Tom Casey as “false, wrong, untrue, silly, ridiculous.”

Rice, who was in the West Bank on Tuesday trying to save the peace process from collapse, said: “As for the Vanity Fair article that I have not read, I am not going to comment on the article.”

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, also declined further comment, saying only: “Secretary Rice and her spokesman Sean McCormack spoke to this today and said that that article is not accurate”.

The magazine alleged the force was led by Fatah strongman Mohammed Dahlan, who has served as a security advisor to Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.

Dahlan told Vanity Fair he had warned the Bush administration that Fatah was not ready to contest the January 2006 elections. But there was complete dismay and bafflement in the White House when Hamas swept the vote.

Without any contingency plan in place, the US administration was forced onto the offensive.

In October 2006, Rice traveled back to the Middle East and sought to push Abbas into disbanding the Hamas-led government and imposing emergency rule.

A State Department memo prepared around that time said: “If you act along these lines we will support you both materially and politically.

“We will be there to support you,” the memo said, according to Vanity Fair.

State Department spokesman Casey said Tuesday: “We very openly said that we would work with those security forces that were under president Abbas’s authority, just as we said we would work with those institutions within the Palestinian Authority that were under president Abbas’s authority.

“But we always did so out of the firm belief that the only way to have any kind of progress in discussions between Israelis and Palestinians was to have a functioning Palestinian Authority and functioning institutions.”

But Vanity Fair alleged the United States was seeking to boost Fatah security forces in preparation for a feared Hamas backlash by providing both money and arms.

Reacting to the report, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said: “This article confirms the US administration was involved in the events in Gaza. One can talk of a Gazagate.

“These revelations clear Hamas and prove that Fatah, which was used by the Americans, bears the responsibility for what happened,” Abu Zuhri told journalists in Gaza.

Vanity Fair said the US security coordinator for the Palestinians, lieutenant general Keith Dayton, met in November 2006 with Dahlan for a series of Jerusalem talks.

And State Department officials told the magazine that Rice began a round of phone diplomacy among Arab leaders seeking to whip up funds for Fatah.

The first weapons, including 2,000 Egyptian automatic rifles, 20,000 ammunition clips and two million bullets reportedly rumbled across the Israeli-controlled Gaza crossing in December 2006.

After a series of nasty, skirmishes in Gaza, Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in five bloody days of fighting in June.

“Having failed to heed the warning not to hold the election, they tried to avoid the result through Dayton,” former UN ambassador John Bolton told Vanity Fair.

Vanity Fair

The Gaza Bombshell

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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 feet-five bullets each. I spent four months in a wheelchair.”

Abu Dan had no way of knowing it, but his tormentors had a secret ally: the administration of President George W. Bush.

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!”

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Enjoy this post? Get future updates sent to you for free! Join by email or RSS.