If Israel is...

Essentially our 51st state (and our most important one, ask Joe Lieberman) and all that you would think the actions of the Bush Administration, who's fuck ups in the region have made it far worse off than it would have been would get some reporting.

And this from Vanity Fair is the story of the fuck up of all fuck ups:

[Palestinian national-security adviser Muhammad] Dahlan says he warned his friends in the Bush administration that Fatah still wasn’t ready for elections in January. Decades of self-preservationist rule by Arafat had turned the party into a symbol of corruption and inefficiency—a perception Hamas found it easy to exploit. Splits within Fatah weakened its position further: in many places, a single Hamas candidate ran against several from Fatah.

“Everyone was against the elections,” Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. “Bush decided, ‘I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?”

The elections went forward as scheduled. On January 25, Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council.

Few inside the U.S. administration had predicted the result, and there was no contingency plan to deal with it. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” Condoleezza Rice told reporters. “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.”

“Everyone blamed everyone else,” says an official with the Department of Defense. “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’”

The who, was the Chimperor Disgustus. And don't you love just another "nobody could have anticipated" claim out of Condi?

And when the elections were held on Bush's insistence and things went from bad to worse, Bush decided to take them to "Holy Shit" level.

Bush didn't like the fact that the elections he demanded produced a result he didn't like, even though everyone had warned him about it. So he decided to try to undermine the democratic election he had demanded, but issuing another demand.

He demanded Fatah declare a state of emergency, when Fatah's leadership wasn't keen enough on this idea, the Decider further decided some more, "SEND 'EM GUNS!"

Amazingly enough, it just isn't easy to play Teddy Roosevelt when your history is like Elliot Roosevelts and you are not surrounded by Commodore Deweys. The Jordanian press reports the arms shipments and just like that, a civil war breaks out between Hamas and Fatah...and Fatah loses (which is why they demurred in the first place). And what arms was Hamas using?

Why the arms the Chimp sent for Fatah.

So Hamas won the election, thanks to Bush.
Hamas won the civil war, thanks to Bush.
Hamas captured and loaded up on American weapons, thanks to Bush.

You know,” says [Khalid Jaberi, a commander with Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades], “since the takeover, we’ve been trying to enter the brains of Bush and Rice, to figure out their mentality. We can only conclude that having Hamas in control serves their overall strategy, because their policy was so crazy otherwise. […]

Now that it controls Gaza, Hamas has given free rein to militants intent on firing rockets into neighboring Israeli towns. “We are still developing our rockets; soon we shall hit the heart of Ashkelon at will,” says Jaberi, the al-Aqsa commander, referring to the Israeli city of 110,000 people 12 miles from Gaza’s border. “I assure you, the time is near when we will mount a big operation inside Israel, in Haifa or Tel Aviv.”

So perpetual war then?

What a fuckin' legacy.

(Quotes cribbed liberally from Sadly, No)