Today US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice has given her umpteenth speech on the Israel-Palestine "Peace Process," as the absence-of-peace process has been called for at least the last 40 years. She, President Bush, and - let's not forget him, ex-British PM and sometime Quartet representative - Tony Blair can be counted on to deliver the most upbeat, optimistic prognostications on the prospects for peace-in-their-time, or at least a Palestinian state by the end of 2008. Perhaps. Inshallah. But a glance at the destruction on both sides of the Gaza-Israel border would give anyone pause.
That's why David Rose's article in the April Vanity Fair, "The Gaza Bombshell," is such essential, urgent reading. It's a long article, but well worth plowing through for its wealth of detail on what - as one of the sections is entitled - resembled "Iran-Contra 2.0." It's the story of blowback (see last para) from the US plan to overturn the Hamas parliamentary election victory, and how the backfiring US plan in fact cemented Hamas control of Gaza. (For a condensed but authoritatively annotated comment on the Vanity Fair article, you might also check out Helena Cobban's post in "Just World News," her excellent Mideast news blog.)
I won't even attempt to summarize the story, but suffice it to say that Rose's sources - both named and background - are impressive, and cover the gamut from Palestinian and Israeli to Bush Administration officials. And you will be surprised, perhaps, that some of the fiercest critics are those neocons who are now outside the Administration:
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. The botched plan has rendered the dream of Middle East peace more remote than ever, but what really galls neocons such as Wurmser is the hypocrisy it exposed. “There is a stunning disconnect between the president’s call for Middle East democracy and this policy,” he says. “It directly contradicts it.”
Irony alert: Wurmser is not the only former Administration official exercised over White House meddling in this particular Pandora's box. So is former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton. He deems the plan:
“an institutional failure, a failure of strategy.” Its author, he says, was Rice, “who, like others in the dying days of this administration, is looking for legacy. Having failed to heed the warning not to hold the elections, they tried to avoid the result through Dayton." [note: Lieutenant General Keith Dayton, then U.S. security coordinator for the Palestine Authority]
Okay, the entire story is Byzantine, but shows the limits of American ability to meddle successfully in Middle Eastern affairs. Which brings me back to "blowback." I leave you with the Chalmers Johnson (author of "Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire") definition of the term:
"Blowback" is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a recently declassified report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the US government's international activities that have been kept secret from the American people. The CIA's fears that there might ultimately be some blowback from its egregious interference in the affairs of Iran were well founded. Installing the Shah in power brought twenty-five years of tyranny and repression to the Iranian people and elicited the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolution. The staff of the American embassy in Teheran was held hostage for more than a year. This misguided "covert operation" of the US government helped convince many capable people throughout the Islamic world that the United States was an implacable enemy.
Johnson wrote the above in September 2001, in attempt to explain the "unintended consequences" that led to 9/11. Johnson always stresses that these are "activities that have been kept secret from the American people." Thanks to Vanity Fair and David Rose, that is no longer the case, and at least we now have the backstory to blowback.