Contra in Gaza

The always brilliant Kathleen Christison has written a brilliant analysis of the main strategist behind the fiasco(s) in nations neighbouring Israel.

"[Dov] Weisglass later exposed the thinking behind the scheme as it began to evolve a year later into Sharon's plan for so-called disengagement from Gaza. These peace plans, he said, speaking specifically of the disengagement plan, supply "the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians." They "freeze" the political process. "And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda." Weisglass boasted that this had occurred with "a [U.S.] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress." He did not openly credit Abrams, but, as a State Department official once told an interviewer, Abrams is "very careful about not leaving fingerprints."

Abrams has repeated this act multiple times -- not only over the Roadmap and disengagement, but over the issue of Israeli settlement expansion and over Israel's construction of the apartheid wall (on which he has helped plan such minutiae as the placement of gates and some parts of the wall's route) -- each time making it appear that Israel is making concessions, or would do so if it had a decent Palestinian partner for peace, but quietly manipulating the situation so that in the end Israel is enabled to proceed with its plans more or less unimpeded. By thus cooperating with Israel to fine tune its occupation practices, Abrams has acted as a partner of Israel rather than as a U.S. policymaker and has given legitimacy to virtually every aspect of Israel's continuing occupation."

Mr Abrams has his marks all over Central America, even as recent as 2002 in (another) failed coup d'etat attempt on Hugo Chavez. It seems like whenever there needs to be a fix for the sake of democracy (Re: vote for the right guys or suffer the consequences[.doc]), they call in the "cleaner" to right what went wrong. He seems to be in his element now that he has the whole Middle East to play with, as Christison vividly points out:

"Shortly after September 11 and the start of the "war on terror," according to the New Yorker profile, he was so enthusiastic about the prospect of manipulating the Arab world that he exulted that "I feel young again! I love all these battles -- they're so familiar to me." He was back in the fray, as during the era of the Central American wars."

It evokes what a US representative stated to former UN Envoy Alvaro De Soto (who correctly condemned[.pdf] that the West is being a major hurdle during the "peace" process) during the hostilities in Gaza: "I like this violence... it means other Palestinians are resisting Hamas." You could be mistaken that Washington is just playing a game with Arabs as their little playthings to just mold into "moderates" or obliterate if they pose too much of a nuisance. We can just forget that people try to have a normal life in the occupied territories (and beyond). Or better yet, let's just forget that they are people at all.