Mid East Boomerangs

"Almost every decision the United States has made to interfere with Palestinian politics has boomeranged."
~Robert Malley

The above quote is from
Takeover by Hamas Illustrates Failure of Bush's Mideast Vision
by Glenn Kessler in the Washington Post

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.

After his reelection in 2004, Bush said he would use his "political capital" to help create a Palestinian state by the end of his second term. In his final 18 months as president, he faces the prospect of a shattered Palestinian Authority, a radical Islamic state on Israel's border and increasingly dwindling options to turn the tide against Hamas and create a functioning Palestinian state.

"The two-state vision is dead. It really is," said Edward G. Abington Jr., a former State Department official who was once an adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

The two-state vision in Palestine is not the only thing that's dead, the entire neocon/Bush administration strategy of Democracy at gunpoint in dead. The infamous "purple finger" elections in Iraq only resulted in more violence as did the elections in Lebanon. In Iraq the Americans are blamed for the non-stop death and violence and the people are saying if this is Democracy we don't want it.

As Christopher J. Fettweis said the other day about Iraq;

...the war itself was a catastrophic mistake. It was a faulty grand strategy, not poor implementation. The Bush administration was operating under an international political illusion, one that is further discredited with every car bombing of a crowded Baghdad marketplace and every Iraqi doctor who packs up his family and flees his country.

The same can be said about the entire Middle East.