Eric Margolis: "The Coup Against Hamas"

THE COUP AGAINST HAMAS

June 25, 2007

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After the huge fiascos in Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia, Washington’s political alchemists are now working their latest magic in the Palestinian Territories, two, giant, open-air prison camps – the West Bank and Gaza - surrounded by Israeli security forces.

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After President George Bush commanded democracy to flower in the Arab World, to his shock and awe, Hamas won a major democratic electoral victory in the region’s second free election. The first, in Algeria in 1991, produced a landslide for the Islamist reformist movement, FIS. Algeria’s French and US-backed army quickly annulled the election and jailed FIS leaders.

Washington quickly sent $80 million of US arms to Dahlan’s Fatah fighters, who were trained and organized by CIA specialists. Mirroring events in Algeria, the Bush Administration and Israel set about planning a coup against the democratically-elected Hamas-led government. Seeing an attack imminent, Hamas struck first, running the US proxy Fatah forces out of Gaza.

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America can always buy local yes-men, but it can’t buy popular support, respect, or peace in the Arab World. But the harsh lessons of Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Somalia seem to have made no impression on the neoconservatives and born-again Christian extremists who are driving the Bush Administration’s hugely destructive Mideast policy.