The disaster in Gaza

Despite my frustration with seeing oppressed people fighting each other, rather than uniting (nonviolently, one would hope) against that oppression, it is absolutely true that the deteriorating situation in Gaza is in no small part due to mismanagement by the U.S. and Israel.

After proclaiming the benefit of elections everywhere, the Bush administration was faced with the realities of popular governance: Sometimes people don't vote the way we'd like them to. Hamas won the elections in the Palestinian territories, a victory that Secretary Rice claimed was entirely unpredicted by the U.S., and subsequent poor strategies and tactics led to a cascade of disaster resulting in a de facto Palestinian civil war.

Following the elections, the U.S. and Israel made every attempt to undermine Hamas, prevent a unity government from forming, cut off international funding, etc. Despite desperate attempts to prop up Fatah with funding and arms, Hamas has exposed Fatah as both politically and militarily inferior. Now, instead of dealing with a unity government, the U.S. and Israel are faced with a dominant Hamas, one which has consolidated political and military power even in the face of blundering efforts to blunt its influence.

As Tony Karon writes, in response to Tony Snow's disgraceful comments on the situation,

Everyone following the conflict in Gaza knows full well that the reason for the violence is not that Palestinians have not "sorted out their politics" -- they've made their political preferences abundantly clear in democratic elections, and later in a power-sharing agreement brokered by the Saudis. The problem is that the U.S. and the corrupt and self-serving warlords of Fatah did not accept either the election result or the unity government, and have conspired actively ever since to reverse both by all available means, including starving the Palestinian economy of funds, refusing to hand over power over the Palestinian Authority to the elected government, and arming and training Fatah loyalists to militarily restore their party's power. Unfortunately, after three days of some of the most savage fighting ever seen in Gaza, that strategy now lies in tatters. Fatah is, quite simply, no longer a credible fighting force in Gaza, where it has long been in decline as a credible political force.

This situation, like others in the Middle East, reinforces the point about justifiability versus wisdom. I suppose it's "justifiable" to refuse to interact with Hamas, based on its terrorist actions and support for eradicating Israel. But taking such a "justifiable" position leads to a terrible result.