Stupid Is As Stupid Does
McClatchy has a nice background piece: How U.S. policy missteps led to a nasty downfall in Gaza
WASHINGTON — Officials in the Bush administration awoke on the morning of January 26, 2006 to catastrophic news.
Hamas, a violent Islamist movement whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel, had won Palestinian parliamentary elections — elections that were deemed free and fair and a cornerstone to President Bush’s initiative to bring more democracy to the Muslim world.
For the next 17 months, White House and State Department officials would undertake an all-out campaign to reverse those results and oust Hamas from power.
Instead of undermining Hamas, though, the strategy helped to exacerbate dangerous political fissures in Palestinian politics that have delivered another setback to the president’s vision of a stable, pro-Western Middle East.
Fatah was corrupt, and the people were tired of the corruption. Anyone who was paying attention would have seen it. The big mistake was not ensuring the election provided the “proper result,” one of the few things the Hedgemony does know how to do. The problem is that when you run a government based on corruption, cronyism, and incompetence, you tend not to note the same traits in other governments. In a way the election in Palestine foreshadowed the 2006 election in the US – people finally had enough.
