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Palestinian Pinochet Making
His Move?
By Tony Karon
05/17/07 "Rootless
Cosmopolitan" --- - There’s something a
little misleading in the media reports that routinely describe
the fighting in Gaza as pitting Hamas against Fatah forces or
security personnel “loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas.” That
characterization suggests somehow that this catastrophic civil
war that has killed more than 25 Palestinians since Sunday is a
showdown between Abbas and the Hamas leadership — which simply
isn’t true, although such a showdown would certainly conform to
the desires of those running the White House Middle East policy.
The Fatah gunmen who
are
reported to have initiated the breakdown of the Palestinian
unity government and provoked the latest fighting may
profess fealty to President Abbas, but it’s not from him that
they get their orders. The leader to whom they answer is
Mohammed Dahlan, the Gaza warlord who has long been Washington’s
anointed favorite to play the role of a Palestinian Pinochet.
And while Dahlan is formally subordinate to Abbas, whom he
supposedly serves as National Security Adviser, nobody believes
that Dahlan answers to Abbas — in fact, it was suggested at the
time that Abbas appointed Dahlan only under pressure from
Washington, which was irked by the Palestinian Authority
president’s decision to join a unity government with Hamas.
If Dahlan takes orders from anyone at all, it’s certainly not
from Abbas. Abbas has long recognized the democratic legitimacy
and popularity of Hamas, and embraced the reality that no peace
process is possible unless the Islamists are given the place in
the Palestinian power structure that their popular support
necessitates. He has always favored negotiation and cooperation
with Hamas — much to the exasperation of the Bush
Administration, and also of the Fatah warlords whose power of
patronage was threatened by the Hamas election victory — and
could see the logic of the unity government proposed by the
Saudis even when Washington couldn’t. Indeed, as the
indispensable Robert Malley and Hussein Agha note,
nothing has hurt
Abbas’s political standing as much as the misguided efforts of
Washington to boost his standing in the hope of undermining the
elected Hamas government.
Needless to say, only an Administration as deluded about its
ability to reorder Arab political realities in line with its own
fantasies — and also, frankly, as utterly contemptuous of Arab
life and of Arab democracy, empty sloganizing notwithstanding —
as the current one has proved to be could imagine that
the Palestinians could be starved, battered and manipulated into
choosing a Washington-approved political leadership. Yet,
that’s exactly what the U.S. has attempted to do ever since
Hamas won the last Palestinian election, imposing a financial
and economic chokehold on an already distressed population,
pouring money and arms into the forces under Dahlan’s control,
and eventually adapting itself to funnel monies only through
Abbas, as if casting in him in the role of a kind of
Quisling-provider would somehow burnish his appeal among
Palestinian voters. (As I said, their contempt for Arab
intelligence knows no bounds. )
But while the hapless Abbas is little more than a reluctant
passenger in Washington’s strategy — and will, I still believe,
repair to his former exile lodgings in Qatar in the not too
distant future —
Mohammed Dahlan is its point man, the warlord who commands
the troops and who has been spoiling for a fight with Hamas
since they had the temerity to trounce his organization at the
polls on home turf.
Dahlan’s ambitions clearly coincided with plans drawn up by
White House Middle East policy chief, Elliot Abrams — a veteran
of the Reagan Administration’s Central American dirty wars — to
arm and train Fatah loyalists to prepare them to topple the
Hamas government. If Mahmoud Abbas has been reluctant to
embrace the confrontational policy promoted by the White House,
Dahlan has no such qualms. And given that Abbas has no political
base of his own, he is dependent entirely on Washington and
Dahlan.
Seeing the disastrous implications of the U.S. policy, the
Saudis appeared to have put the kibosh on Abrams’ coup plan by
drawing Abbas into a unity government with Hamas. And as
Mark Perry at Conflict Forum detailed in an excellent analysis
Dahlan was just about the only thing that the U.S. had going for
it in terms of resisting the move towards a unity government.
Although his fretting and sulking in Mecca couldn’t prevent the
deal, the U.S. appears to have helped him fight back afterwards
by ensuring that he was appointed national security adviser, a
move calculated to provoke Hamas, whose leaders tend to view
Dahlan as little more than a torturer and a de facto enforcer
for Israel.
But Dahlan appears to have made his move when it came to
integrating the Palestinian Authority security forces (currently
dominated by Fatah) by drawing in Hamas fighters and subjecting
the forces to the control of a politically neutral interior
minister. Dahlan simply refused, and set off the current
confrontations by ordering his men out onto the street last
weekend without any authorization from the government of which
he is supposedly a part.
The new provocation appears consistent with a
revised U.S. plan, reported on by Mark Perry and Paul Woodward,
that emphasized the urgency of toppling the unity government.
They suggest the plan emanates from Abrams, who they say is
operating at cross purposes with Condi Rice’s efforts to appease
the Arab moderate regimes by reviving some form of peace
process. They note, for example, that Jewish American sources
have told the Forward and Haaretz that Abrams recently briefed
Jewish Republicans and made clear to them that Rice’s efforts
were merely a symbolic exercise aimed at showing Arab allies
that the U.S. was “doing something,” but that President Bush
would ensure that nothing would come of them, in the sense that
Israel would not be required to make any concessions.
Whatever the precise breakdown within the Bush
Administration, it’s plain that Dahlan, like Pinochet a quarter
century, would not move onto a path of confrontation with an
elected government unless he believed he had the sanction of
powerful forces abroad to do so. If does move to turn the
current street battle into a frontal assault on the unity
government, chances are it will be because he got a green light
from somewhere — and certainly not from Mahmoud Abbas.
But the confrontation under way has assumed a momentum of its
own, and it may now be beyond the capability of the Palestinian
leadership as a whole to contain it. If that proves true, the
petulance that has substituted for policy in the Bush
Administration’s response to the 2006 Palestinian election will
have succeeded in turning Gaza into Mogadishu. But it may be too
much to expect the Administration capable of anything different
— after all, they’re still busy turning Mogadishu into Mogadishu
all over again.
Who Is Tony
Karon?
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