[Dialogue] US Plotted To Overthrow Hamas After Election Victory

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Tuesday, March 4, 2008 by The Guardian/UK
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/04/usa.israelandthepalestinians?gu
src=rss&feed=worldnews>  

US Plotted To Overthrow Hamas After Election Victory

by Suzanne Goldenberg

The Bush administration, caught out by the rise of Hamas, embarked on a
secret project for the armed overthrow of the Islamist government in Gaza,
it emerged yesterday.
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Vanity Fair reports in its April edition that President George Bush and the
secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, signed off on a plan for the
Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, to remove the Hamas authorities in
Gaza. The plan called for Washington’s allies in the region to funnel arms
and salaries to Fatah fighters who would lead a rising against Hamas.

But the project was controversial even within the administration, the
magazine reports. “There were severe fissures among neoconservatives over
this,” David Wurmser, a former Middle East adviser to the vice-president,
Dick Cheney, told the magazine. “We were ripping each other to pieces.”

Wurmser resigned his post in the vice-president’s office in July 2007, only
weeks after bloody clashes in Gaza between Hamas and Fatah that led to the
Islamist organisation taking total control of the territory. “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,” he said.

The Bush administration plan sought to undo the results of elections in the
West Bank and Gaza in January 2006 which, to the chagrin of White House and
State Department officials, saw Hamas win a majority of seats in the
Palestinian legislature.

The project was approved by Bush, Rice, and Elliott Abrams, the hawkish
deputy national security adviser.

The 2006 election result was seen as an affront to the central premise of
the Bush administration’s policy in the Middle East - that democratic
elections would inexorably lead to pro-western governments.

With the victory of Hamas, Rice moved swiftly to try to persuade Abbas to
take steps to dissolve the Hamas authority in Gaza. When Abbas did not move
quickly enough, the US consul general in Jerusalem, Jake Walles, was
despatched to Ramallah to deliver a curt reminder.

The magazine quotes a memo for Walles’si meeting with Hamas as saying: “You
should make clear your intention to declare a state of emergency and form an
emergency government.”

The central man figure in Washington’s plan was Mohammed Dahlan, who had
been Yasser Arafat’s security chief in Gaza and who had established close
ties with the CIA as early as the 1990s. The magazine cites three
unidentified US officials quoting Bush as saying: “He’s our guy.”

According to the magazine, Rice played a main role in trying to persuade
Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to offer training
and funding to the Fatah fighters. Israeli officials admitted in December
2006 that Egypt had sent weapons to the Fatah faction in Gaza.

The US effort did not end with the establishment of a Palestinian national
unity government. Vanity Fair describes the administration’s plan B, which
called for adding 4,700 new Fatah troops with additional training in Jordan
and Egypt.

A state department memo put the cost for salaries, training and weapons at
$1.27bn (£640m) over five years.

© 2008 The Guardian

Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org 

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/03/04/7450/

 

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