Palestinian
Pinochet
Making His Move?
By Tony Karon
21 May, 2007
Tonykaron.com
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.
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