[A-List] Palestinian Pinochet Making His Move?

["Yoshie Furuhashi" <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx>]

<http://tonykaron.com/2007/05/15/palestinian-pinochet-making-his-move/>
Palestinian Pinochet Making His Move?

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.

<http://tonykaron.com/who-is-tony-karon/>
Who Is Tony Karon?

I'm a journalist from Cape Town, South Africa, resident in New York
since 1993. I'm currently a senior editor at TIME.com (although I do
this site on my own time, and am personally entirely responsible for
its content, which in no way reflects the views or outlook of anyone
else). I've worked there since 1997, covering the Middle East, the
"war on terror" and international issues ranging from China's
emergence to the Balkans. I also do occasional op-eds for Haaretz and
other publications, as well as bits of TV and radio punditry for CNN,
MSNBC, and various NPR shows. I did an ever-so-brief stint at Fox News
(measured in months, I swear!) and worked at George magazine in its
startup year. Having majored in economic history, I cut my analytical
teeth in South Africa in the struggle years, where I worked both as an
editor in the "alternative" press and as an activist of the banned
ANC. And in that context, my obsession with understanding global
events took root, as a means of contextualizing the choices and
obstacles we faced in the struggle against apartheid.

In 1990/1, I gave up my activist career almost as soon as Nelson
Mandela was released, the ANC was unbanned and the regime conceded to
a transition to democracy — once we'd achieved a "normality" to
politics in South Africa, and it was not a profession that interested
me. (If you'd been French under occupation, you might well have joined
the resistance, but that didn't mean you'd remain active in party
politics after the Nazis were gone — that was how it was for many of
my generation of South African activists.) I went to work in the
mainstream media at the Cape Times and the Mail&Guardian Weekly,
before leaving for New York in 1993 on what I imagined would be an
extended holiday. A brief research gig at Time Out opened my eyes to
the possibilities of working here — as well as hooking me up to the
first connections of the sort of ever-expanding networks that make
life in the city possible (and if this were an Oscar thank you speech,
I'd be remiss if I didn't give a huge shout-out to Gerda Marie Kenyon,
wherever you are now, who gave me that Time Out gig and started the
snowball rolling). What followed was a mad array of freelance gigs
ranging from the sublime (television work for Britain's Channel 4 that
involved escapades such as spending three days with the rapper
Notorious B.I.G.) to the ridiculous — writing the script for a Geffen
Records "rockumentary" on Manowar, an upstate New York heavy metal
band, really big in Spain and Greece, whose brief spell in the Guiness
Book of records as the world's loudest band underscored their image of
themselves as Norse warriors and Wagner's true inheritors.

While I relished the professional holiday from the serious themes that
had preoccupied me during the 80s, and the opportunity to explore
other interests and passions, I seemed to gravitate back to writing
about geopolitics despite myself. The optimism surrounding the new
paradigms of post-Cold War politics suddenly began to recede, and
familiar patterns began to repeat themselves. Reading the New York
Times on the subway en route to various day jobs, I found myself drawn
back to the big themes. There were things that needed saying, and I
had more to offer than commentaries on the marketing strategies of the
Wu Tang Clan.

In the aftermath of 9/11, I found many friends and acquaintances
asking me to share private observations about the "war on terror" and
related subjects. I started mailing those out to a list of friends and
colleagues, that just kept growing as they forwarded them to others.
And finally, after a substantial hiatus, they've evolved into this web
site.

--
Yoshie