Tuesday, March 04, 2008

And the answer is?? Dull Surprise!

It's been a few weeks since I have heard about some sort of knuckledheaded debacle from the Bush Administration. Oh wait..

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.
by David Rose April 2008


So, let me see if I have this straight. The White House decides that it wants elections and a legislative body in the Palestinian terrotories. It forces Abbas to hold those elections, even though the Israeli's and Abbas tell them that they aren't ready and Hamas will win a majority if they go ahead. They hold the elections. Hamas wins over 50%. Go ahead and revel in the stupidity here:

Dahlan says he warned his friends in the Bush administration that Fatah still wasn’t ready for elections in January. Decades of self-preservationist rule by Arafat had turned the party into a symbol of corruption and inefficiency—a perception Hamas found it easy to exploit. Splits within Fatah weakened its position further: in many places, a single Hamas candidate ran against several from Fatah.
Everyone was against the elections,” Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. “Bush decided, ‘I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?”
The elections went forward as scheduled. On January 25, Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council.
Few inside the U.S. administration had predicted the result, and there was no contingency plan to deal with it. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” Condoleezza Rice told reporters. “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.”
“Everyone blamed everyone else,” says an official with the Department of Defense. “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’

Well Condi, other than the Israeli's and Palestinians, who wasn't cauught off guard? Um..everyone who isn't a Fnorktard, which apparently is no one at State or the White House who are supposed to know. And I love the DOD reaction, "who the fuck recommended this?". Well fella's, thats a tough call. There are so many ignorant dumbshits running around the White House, how could you possibly narrow it down? They were probably just relieved it wasn't their fault for once.

The rest of the article is equally bizarre. And just soak in the Hypocrisy of NeoCons like David Wurmser and John Bolten, who gleefully helped push us into Iraq and a monumental debacle, and now have the gall to snipe at Condi Rice and Abrams when they committ a policy screwup, ableit a big one. And now the U.S. will have to talk to and work with Hamas anyway, even after spending the last few years coming up with one demented scheme after another to avoid just that.

You've got to hand it to the bush people, they NEVER disappoint.