Enough With the Nation-Building!

The final fruits of our democracy project in the Middle East were plucked from the vine this week, when Mahmoud Abbas dissolved the Palestinian government amidst a full-scale civil war in Gaza, where Hamas has the upper hand. Hundreds have died and more violence is to come:

Fearful that Hamas' momentum could spread to the West Bank, Fatah went on the offensive there, rounding up three dozen Hamas fighters. Angry militants threw office furniture out a third-story window of the Palestinian parliament building in Ramallah, then set fire to the office of three Hamas lawmakers. A Hamas activist was shot and killed in Nablus, the first person to be killed in the West Bank after days of violence in Gaza; the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a violent Fatah offshoot, claimed responsibility.

In Gaza, it was a day of major victories for Hamas and its backers in Iran and Syria — and of devastating setbacks for the Western-backed Fatah. In one particularly humiliating scene, masked Hamas fighters marched agents of the once-feared Preventive Security Service out of their headquarters, arms raised in the air, stripped to the waist and ducking at the sound of a gunshot.

"The era of justice and Islamic rule has arrived," Hamas spokesman Islam Shahawan said.

Gee, it was such a good idea to give the group that says "the era of justice and Islamic rule has arrived" a stirring electoral victory last year, wasn't it? (h/t Garance Franke-Ruta)

Five years ago this month, President Bush stood in the Rose Garden and laid out a vision for the Middle East that included Israel and a state called Palestine living together in peace. "I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror," the president declared.

The takeover this week of the Gaza Strip by the Hamas militant group dedicated to the elimination of Israel demonstrates how much that vision has failed to materialize, in part because of actions taken by the administration. The United States championed Israel's departure from the Gaza Strip as a first step toward peace and then pressed both Israelis and Palestinians to schedule legislative elections, which Hamas unexpectedly won. Now Hamas is the unchallenged power in Gaza [...]

"The less we try to intervene and shape Palestinian politics, the better off we will be," said Robert Malley, an expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the International Crisis Group. "Almost every decision the United States has made to interfere with Palestinian politics has boomeranged."

Elections aren't democracy, and elections without understanding and preparing for the eventual consequences are downright stupid. Hamas grew powerful electorally and they translated it into a military victory over Fatah. This was pretty well known at the time, but we chose to ignore it. And then, we intervened on behalf of Fatah when it was clear they didn't have the support of the people in Gaza. We tried to starve the Palestinian people after the Hamas victory, and we tried to arm Fatah so they could gain through force what they could not gain at the ballot box. And it bounced right back on us in the fastest example of blowback you've ever seen.

We seem to not be able to leave well enough alone in the Middle East, despite our reverse-Midas touch where everything we encounter turns to shit. We don't seem to understand this central truth about the region:

"The people who are moderate are not effective," said David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "And the people who are effective are not moderate."

You wonder where we can go from here, but this Administration is so catastrophically bad when it comes to foreign policy you'd rather they sat in the corner without talking for the next 19 months. But if there is a way forward, it probably lies in a three-state solution at this point, with a Gaza-Hamastan, Fatah/Palestine and Israel. That's untenable, but so is the current situation. This meddling in the internal Palestinian affairs has made the Jewish state far less safe than it was even at the time of Arafat. Any hope that the new generation of Arab and Israeli leaders could work out their differences is gone. Now we're faced with a series of very unattractive policy options. Sound a lot like Iraq to you?