Vanity Fair: The Gaza Bombshell
“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?’ ”
The bad news is, that's not the bombshell.
Labels: Middle East
Since 1949, Durhamites have slept soundly, secure in the knowledge that, in our town, erection can be depended upon. Now, thanks to the power of the internets, we can spread that security all over the world.
4 Comments:
Interesting that Dahlan is saying that. He's the most corrupt of the US/Israel-supported Fatah crowd and the man who the Gaza coup was principally directed at. As usual, he's trying to put the blame at everyone's doorstep except his own.
Dahlan was in charge of all the security services, ran private gangster-style 'militias' for his own profit and lived in a huge beach-front mansion in Gaza while his people were (and are) hungry, relying on food aid and being bombed the crap out of. He has zero support in Gaza and very little even among Fatah people. Please don't take anything he says seriously.
By
DurhamFood, at 10:13 AM
Maybe VF shouldn't use the words "Gaza" and "bombshell" in the same sentence.
By
Joseph H. Vilas, at 1:32 PM
That would be a good idea. On a (somewhat) unrelated note, it would also be a good idea to have Christopher Hitchens sent to Iraq.
By
DurhamFood, at 5:00 PM
Insert Scotch on the rocks joke here.
By
Barry, at 5:57 PM
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