The Gaza BombshellVF: Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the US and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war...
But the secret plan backfired... Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the US-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 CIA'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; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq...
David Wurmser, the avowed neoconservative, who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney's Middle East adviser in June 2007, a month after the Gaza coup... 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...
Neocon critics of the administration... who until last year were inside it -- blame an old State Department vice: the rush to anoint a strongman instead of solving problems directly. This ploy has failed in places as diverse as Vietnam, the Philippines, Central America, and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, during its war against Iran...
The administration now appears to be rethinking its blanket refusal to engage with Hamas... 'They say they won't talk to Hamas... but in the end they're going to have to. It's inevitable.'
Photo illustration by Chris Mueller; left, by Debbie Hill/Sipa Press; right, by Issam Rimawi/ApaImages/Polaris; background by Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters/Corbis.
