Thursday, June 14, 2007

White House Seems Ready to Let Hamas Seize Gaza - New York Times

From The New York Times: By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON, June 14 — Bush administration officials said Thursday that they had been discussing the idea of largely acquiescing in the takeover of Gaza by the militant Islamic group Hamas and trying instead to help the Fatah party of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, retain its stronghold in the West Bank....

“The fundamental decision to be made is whether they’re going to say, ‘Gaza, we’ll cut it off and they’ll have to learn to live in utter poverty and isolation,’ ” said Robert Malley, director of the International Crisis Group’s Middle East program.


After all, the Bush Administration has done so well with this issue:
"The solution to all this was back in 2005,” said Aaron David Miller, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former adviser on Arab-Israeli relations at the State Department. “In 2005, Arafat was gone, Abbas had been freely and fairly elected, but we weren’t prepared to empower him. How are we going to take advantage of the opportunities that don’t exist now in 2007 when we wouldn’t take advantage of the opportunities when they existed in 2005?”

No comments: