Category: US foreign policy

Anne Gearan of AP is reporting this:

The United States is prepared to join other nations in holding direct talks with Iran on its nuclear program if Iran first agrees to stop disputed nuclear activities that the West fears could lead to a bomb, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday.
“To underscore our commitment to a diplomatic solution and to enhance prospects for success, as soon as Iran fully and verifiably suspends its enrichment and reprocessing activities, the United States will come to the table,” Rice said in remarks prepared for delivery at the State Department.
The Swiss ambassador to the United States was called to the State Department earlier Wednesday to receive a copy of Rice’s remarks for transmission to Iran, U.S. officials said. The United States has had no diplomatic ties with Iran and few contacts at all with its government since Islamic radicals took over the U.S. Embassy in 1979 and held diplomats there for more than a year.
The United States and the European nations that led stalled talks with Iran last year have agreed on the basics of a package of incentives for Iran if it is willing to give up its disputed activities, Rice said.
“We hope that in the coming days the Iranian government will thoroughly consider this proposal,” Rice said.
White House spokesman Tony Snow said the United States will not enter one-on-one talks with Iran. The European talks included Britain, France and Germany.
The United States has refused repeated calls from European nations, other leading diplomats and former U.S. secretaries of state to join the talks or make other diplomatic overtures to Iran.
The agreement to join talks now represents a major shift in policy for the Bush administration, which has been deeply suspicious of Iran’s intentions and the prime mover for tough United Nations action against the clerical regime.
Iran has so far refused to do what the U.S. is now demanding as a first step to talks. Iran did voluntarily suspend those activities while talks were active with the Europeans last year, but resumed and stepped up those activities this spring.

This is a significant new development. When Pres. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote a long letter to Pres. Bush ten days ago, that was the first direct Iranian communication to Washington since 1979. The Bushites immediately tried to publicly deride Ahmadinejad’s letter. But evidently they have since then thought a bitharder about thematter– and indeed about the whole very pro-Iran balance of power in the Gulf region– and have decided to counter with this letter. (Switzerland has acted as the diplomatic go-between for the two governments ever since relations were broken off in 1979.)
This new Rice letter will not immediately open up a direct channel between Washington and Teheran. Indeed, that is not what Rice and Bush are aiming to do at this point… Instead, they are only saying they’ll join unspecified “other nations”– maybe just the EU-3, or maybe also China and Russia?– in holding talks with Teheran… And that, only in response to serious further concessions from Teheran on the nuclear-fuels issue.
Still, what a relief to see the Bushites even starting to move in this direction… This, at a time when the rightwing and neocon networks are all still baying for military action and regime change in Iran.

Earlier this week, Francis Fukuyama of Johns Hopkins University visited the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Turnout was very good, even with students largely gone for the summer. Doing his part to reduce oil demand, Fukuyama arrived at the talk on a sparkling Harley-Davidson. The main hall was packed, as was the overflow room.
So what was the draw? Why has Fukuyama’s recently released book, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy (Yale UP) caused such a sensation? Quite simply, here we have a leading inner member of the neoconservatives in the Reagan and Bush Administrations breaking ranks with his former comrades. His book and his address at UVA explain why and set out a better course for American foreign policy.
In his lively prepared remarks, Fukuyama condensed his book into 30 minutes. He began with an overview of neoconservatism’s roots. Evolving far from its origins on the Trotskyite left in the 1930’s, neoconservatives after World War II retained an idealism about the universality of human rights and were impressed that American power could be used for noble purposes. On the domestic front, neoconservatives focused on counterproductive consequences of government social engineering efforts.
Yet between these two themes emerged a key contradiction and legacy. The same movement so eloquently skeptical of government’s capacity to enact social transformation was as sure in its convictions about the utility of international force to bring about “transformation” for other countries.
Applied then to the post 9-11 world, the Bush neoconservatives made three critical misjudgments. First was the expansion of the doctrine of “pre-emptive war” into that of “preventive war.” After 9/11, Fukuyama agreed that “containment was no longer an option” and invading Afghanistan was necessary – to pre-empt a demonstrated imminent threat. But too many variables of the presumed threat from Iraq were unclear. What imminent threat was to be pre-empted?

Continue reading “Fukuyama at Virginia”

Back in May the US Congress, in its cravenly Israelocentric way, voted huge gobs of money to go into the destabilization of Iran under the so-called “Iran Freedom Support Act”. (Which follows the same strategy the neo-cons used back at the beginning of their project to “con” Americans into invading Iraq. Anyone remember that?)
But how on earth is the administration going to spend all this new IFSA money?
I am sure that the people tasked to do this– who include several longtime neocons from the Pentagon’s infamous former Office of Special Plans— will have lots of “plans” for how to go about it. But one of them may well be to do all kinds of disinformation about the Iranian regime… Including getting their old pal Amir Taheri to pen an op-ed in Canada’s National Post which claims that last Monday, the Iranian parliament passed a law that,

envisages separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct colour schemes to make them identifiable in public…
Religious minorities would have their own colour schemes. They will also have to wear special insignia, known as zonnar, to indicate their non-Islamic faiths. Jews would be marked out with a yellow strip of cloth sewn in front of their clothes while Christians will be assigned the colour red. Zoroastrians end up with Persian blue as the colour of their zonnar.

Scary stuff indeed. Especially coming from a regime whose President has cast public doubts on the facticity of the Holocaust and made some extremely hostile remarks about Israel…
Except that all of Amir Taheri’s scaremongering about these special dress-codes and insignia is constructed out of, well, “whole cloth”. (Which is to say, it is quite baseless.)
But it seems that some “world leaders” are prepared to believe just about anything bad they hear about the Iranian regime, and don’t hesitate to criticise Teheran roundly for its alleged misdeeds even before they do any even basic checking on the veracity of the underlying accusations. Thus, we see in this report in The Australian that,

Australian Prime Minister John Howard said overnight, during an official visit to Ottawa, that “anything of that kind would be totally repugnant to civilised countries, if it’s the case, and something that would just further indicate to me the nature of this regime. It would be appalling.”
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he had only seen reports about the law but that he would not be surprised by them.
“Unfortunately, we have seen enough already from the Iranian regime to suggest that it is very capable of this kind of action,” he said.
“It think it boggles the mind that any regime on the face of the earth would want to do anything that could remind people of Nazi Germany,” he added.
“The fact that such a measure could even be contemplated, I think, is absolutely abhorrent.”

But it wasn’t. It was all just Taheri’s fabrication.
It seems that on May 14, the Iranian parliament did pass legislation dealing with the need to buttress the existing nationwide dress-code and build up an Iranian clothing industry to support it… But colleagues whom I trust who read Farsi assure me that there is nothing in there at all about any special clothing or markers for religious minorities.
Taheri has been a busy person these past few days… If you go to the information page about him on the website of the well-connected neocon “Speakers Bureau” Eleana Benador Associates, you will see that he has published eleven op-ed pieces since May 9. Nearly all of them are virulently anti-Teheran. The main exception to that is this totally non-credible piece of propaganda about how well the US occupation authorities have been doing in Iraq…
Well, Taheri is just one ideological (though probabloy at this very point, very nicely paid) uber-hack. The more serious question is why national leaders like Howard and Harper were so perfectly primed to “respond” so quickly to the very damaging (and baseless) accusation that he had made about a foreign government. Maybe next time they could have their people do some fact-checking before they open their mouths?

Here
is the column I have in the CSM today. It is a plea to Americans (and our leaders) to get back to supporting the UN and its stress on finding nonviolent ways to resolve international differences.

I’ve known Chris Hitchens for, gosh, 35 years now. He was two years ahead of me at Oxford, where we engaged in many of the same political activities. I kept bumping into him over the years that followed. When I was living and working in Beirut, he would come swanning through every so often, on a quick reporting trip. When I moved to DC in 1982, he was already there. He and his then-wife Eleni came to my second wedding, in Washington DC in 1984… etc, etc.
I haven’t, however, seen him in person since that point in the late 1990s when he swung inexplicably around the back-side of the political spectrum and changed from being a fairly moderate lefty to being an extremely bitter and pro-war rightist.
So today, the big issue on Juan Cole’s blog is Was Chris Hitchens drunk when he wrote a vicious piece about Juan on Slate recently– or was he just, as Juan puts it, ‘only an asinine thief’?
Earlier in the day, Juan had put up a lengthy post refuting Chris’s smear-job. In that post, Juan wrote:

How to explain this peculiar behavior on the part of someone who was at one time one of our great men of letters?
Well, I don’t think it is any secret that Hitchens has for some time had a very serious and debilitating drinking problem. He once showed up drunk to a talk I gave and heckled me. I can only imagine that he was deep in his cups when he wrote, or had some far Rightwing think tank write, his current piece of yellow journalism. I am sorry to witness the ruin of a once-fine journalistic mind.

Yes, for a long time Chris Hitchens did have a glib facility with words, though I wouldn’t go as far as to describe him as ever having been, “one of our great men of letters”. Juan overdoes the lapsarian aspect of Chris’s career trajectory quite a bit there.
But still, anyone who’s known Chris for even one-fourth as long as I have would have to admit the guy has long had a very serious drinking problem. Was it ad-hominem for Juan to mention that? Yes, probably, although he was doing so in a quasi-exculpatory way– and Juan, like many of the rest of us, has had solid evidence of Chris’s performance of professional duties having been impaired by his evident drunkenness…
Today, though, Hitchens’ friend Andrew Sullivan wrote on his blog that he was with Chris when he wrote the latest Slate piece, and Chris was not drunk at the time. So Juan was left with no explanation for Chris’s crass writing except that Chris is “an asinine thief.”
The theft issue has to do with something Chris quoted directly in the article there, which was a private contribution Juan had made to a private listserv called Gulf 2000. Juan and I are both members of the, fairly large, membership of this group. Chris Hitchens is not.
Now, the whole point of having this private list is that its members– who include citizens of many different countries, of many political complexions, and with many different areas of Gulf-related expertise– can all explore ideas together in a safe space without the fear that what they write for it will get quoted in the public media. It might sound a little elitist (and probably is). But still, it is a remarkable place, where people who are citizens of many countries, including of course the numerous fairly repressive countries bordering the Gulf, can explore and exchange ideas.
For many list members, the promise of discretion for what they write is a completely necessary element of their personal security against the intrusions (and worse) of authoritarian state bodies.
So Chris Hitchens had just– by some unknown means– gotten hold of something Juan wrote for the list ten days or so ago, and published it there in his Slate article. By doing that, he (and whoever sent him Juan’s contribution there) just blithely violated that requirement for privacy.
Yesterday, and on a few occasions prior to that, I have also cited things posted on the G2K list. But always with the permission of the authors. In fact, when Juan first put up the post in question April 23, I wrote and asked him if I could cite it here– and he wrote back and said No, because he was still finetuning some of his analysis there.
Fair enough.
… Well, I glanced at Chris’s piece. It is mainly a nasty hatchet-job against Juan– blessedly, quite short. Juan does a superb job of refuting it. Hitchens, in the course of his piece, wrote:

Cole is a minor nuisance on the fringes of the academic Muslim apologist community. At one point, there was a danger that he would become a go-to person for quotes in New York Times articles (a sort of Shiite fellow-traveling version of Norman Ornstein, if such an alarming phenomenon can be imagined), but this crisis appears to have passed.

He also attempted– on the basis of his absolutely nul knowledge of the Persian langauge to produce absolute refutation of a translation Juan had done of one of the key recent speeches by President Ahmedinejad.
Hitchens, it goes without saying, is currently part of the rightwing crowd in the US that is baying for some form of large military attack against Iran. Juan, by contrast, is extremely strongly against any such attack … Indeed, the main portion of his first rebuttal of Hitchens was a pained plea for the US not to launch a war against Iran.
As JWN readers know, I have voiced several criticisms of the positions Juan has expressed over the past three years. Including, yesterday. But those criticisms don’t for a moment dent the huge admiration I have for his scholarship and for the personal qualities of caring and commitment that he brings to all his endeavors.
I hope it goes without saying, too, that whereas Juan and I currently have some differences of opinion over US policies toward Iraq, I applaud and completely support the firmly antiwar position he has expressed regarding US policies toward Iran.
As for Chris Hitchens, I have been really saddened to watch his degeneration over the years. I have a number of friends who are recovering alcoholics. Being a recovering alcoholic is something they have to deal with every day of their lives: the alcoholism is so strong a force over them that they have to continue to battle it, every day, for ever. In the US, the main way people do this is through regular and frequent participation in the meetings of Alcholics Anonymous. In those meetings, people go through something called a “12-step program.” The very first step (I think) is to recognize that you have a problem with alcoholism, rather than continuing to deny it or cover it up. Further down, one of the other steps is to recognize the damage you have caused in the world, and to other people, by virtue of your alcoholism.
If Chris Hitchens is not in an AA program, I am sure he needs to get into one. In the meantime, the rest of us should hold him quite accountable for his sleazy actions. Being an alcoholic does not give you a “carte blanche”, or indeed any other kind of an excuse, to disregard the rules of human society and decent behavior. From that perspective, it really does not make any difference whether he had been drinking when he wrote the Slate piece or not. He needs to take full responsibility for his actions.
So, too, more to the point, does Slate, which has been publishing his ramblings for quite a long time now.

Jim Hoagland has a ‘reported’ piece
in the Outlook section of today’s WaPo  that should be deeply
disturbing both to US citizens and to the rest of the world.  It’s
about the Bush administration’s  management (and mismanagement) of
the ‘Global War on Terror’. 

The scariest part of it is his reference to Rumsfeld’s continuing
insistence that the Pentagon be allowed to undertake what his people
euphemistically called “kinetic” operations anywhere around the world
without those teams coordinating their actions with either the local US
embassies (and their bosses back home in the State department) or with
the CIA.

Hoagie helpfully tells us that in today’s Washington, “kinetic”
actually means “war-like”.

Regarding the ongoing turf war between Rumsfeld’s Pentagon and (mainly)
the State Department, Hoagie writes:

The quest for a master plan for
counterterrorism originated in the
need to update or change pre-9/11 laws, presidential policy documents
and bureaucratic structures that treated international terrorism
directed at Americans primarily as a law enforcement problem, not as a
global struggle to be won on foreign battlefields with arms and ideas.

That
review stretched over two years in one form or another and appeared to
have been completed when NSPD 46 [that’s National Security Presidential
Directive] was formally adopted behind closed
doors by the Bush national security team one week before the public
release on March 16 of the administration’s National Security Strategy.
In fact, some crucial unresolved disagreements were simply passed over
in the interests of a show of consensus on “a statement of
aspirations,” in the words of one participant.

The most
contentious issues — particularly how far the Defense Department
should go in carrying out Bush’s direct order to “disrupt and destroy”
jihadist terrorist networks, even if they operate in friendly or
neutral countries — were left to be dealt with in annexes that are
being negotiated by the departments of State and Defense and the CIA…

The struggle for
control was absent in the emergency days after 9/11, when Bush gave the
“disrupt and destroy” order to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
That was followed by an “AQSL Ex. Ord.” — a directive that bin Laden
and 10 other members of al-Qaeda’s senior leadership be brought to
justice by all necessary means, “dead or alive,” as Bush said.

That
was the seed from which grew a broader plan of attack against
al-Qaeda’s networks, other jihadist bands and the jihadist ideology
that loosely unites them. But as the extremist Islamic movement
metastasized through the Middle East, Asia and Europe, Rumsfeld is said
to have pushed for a presidential directive that would contain clearer
definitions and authority for the Pentagon to carry out its “kinetic”
missions abroad.

“This war erases that old bright line
between
conventional warfare and diplomacy,” one official told me. “It has
moved soldiers and foreign policy experts alike up a ladder of
escalation, from trying to bring in bin Laden dead or alive to today’s
mission of destroying the entire jihadist movement and its ideology. We
can’t use old thinking and win. We can’t wait and win.”

A State
Department official put it differently: “We have been through the
immediate responses we can make and are now in a moment of looking
around, of focusing on the long term. It is important to assign the
right roles and responsibilities to the government agencies that will
lead the war on terror.”

I’ll just pause here and note that Hoagie, who worked as a reporter
for some 20 or more years before he moved into the ‘opinion’ department
of the paper, provides no named sources for any of his quotes at
all.  And since he was from the old school of “Daddy knows best”
journalism, he doesn’t even see the need to give any resons for the
anonymity.  (Current practice on the new spages of the NYT, for
example, is to write something like, “a source who agreed to speak only
on conditions of anonymity said… “)

Anyway, even though Hoagie’s attribution to sources is
old-fashioned, and even though I have disagreed with just about all the
opinions he’s
expressed, especially his flag-waving support for the invasion of
Iraq– despite those things, it strilkes me he does know and talk to
some interesting people inside the administration… So it’s good he
deigns to share some of what he learns with the WaPo’s readers, anyway.

So anyway, getting right back to his story there:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
stated her department’s concerns … bluntly during a
videoconference linking Bush’s top aides in mid-January. Letting the
Pentagon operate outside the U.S. ambassador’s control to roll up
extremist networks in foreign countries would make U.S. policy “almost
exclusively kinetic” — that is, warlike — she argued, to Rumsfeld’s
discomfort, according to a briefing given to colleagues by one official
involved in the meeting.

In testimony before the House Armed
Services Committee on April 4, Henry A. Crumpton, the State
Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, made an oblique public
reference to the State Department’s continuing desire to change
relatively little. “Our best means of countering the multilayered
terrorist threat is to engage coordinated networks of interagency
Country Teams operating under the ambassador” in “an intimately
connected whole-of-government approach. We are not there yet, but we
have made progress,” he noted.

They are not there yet, in large
part because far-reaching
proposals from the Pentagon to find and deal
with Islamic extremists in a systematic way — “so that we are
not
chasing rabbits,” said one official — have stirred opposition from the
State Department and the CIA, which fear losing primacy abroad through
the militarization of foreign policy and intelligence operations.

The
New York Times lifted a corner of the veil surrounding the larger
conceptual battles by reporting in March on State and CIA opposition to
the Pentagon’s use of Military Liaison Elements, small teams of Special
Operations forces charged with finding and countering jihadist
networks.[‘Countering’… Now there’s
another intriguing euphemism, don’t you think? ~HC] They work
with local security forces or
on their own in
countries where central authority is weak or nonexistent, such as
Somalia.

“At this point, this would probably
amount to maybe 60
guys in 20 countries,” said one official. Added another, “It works in
the field in most cases, but creates more hierarchal trouble than it
should back here.”

Hoagie finishes the piece by noting that, despite wobbling on the issue
last year, Bush has now decided to “stand firm” with his designation of
the struggle his administration is engaged in as a “Global War on
Terrorism”. 

So the GWOT lives!!! And the rest of us should be very, very
scared…  Scared of those “Military Liasion Elements” who are
apparently roaming round the world, sometimes “liaising” with other
government’s forces and sometimes not… but rarely, it seems, liaising
in any serious way with the political branch of the US presence in the
country, i.e., the local US Embassy.  And scared too– most
especially if we are US citizens– by the continuing signs of disorder,
mismanagament, and factionalism inside and at the heart of the Bush
administration.

Indeed, Hoagie starts his piece with this:

This, from the same guys that brought us the chaotic and dysfunctional
“response” to last September’s Hurricane Katrina.  Except you’d
kinda think that when the challenge they’re facing is the major
challenge the nation faces (or so we have repeatedly been told) in the
field of national security, they’d try to at least get their lines of
responsibility and their basic game plan quite clear, wouldn’t you?

I don’t know, to be frank, which to be more scared of: the Bush
administration pursuing its belligerent (oh, sorry, make that
“kinetic”)  plans all around the world in a focused and
well-coordinated fashion–  or them doing the same thing but in a
chaotic, hopelessly inefficient, but also potentially quite
unsupervised mode…

I think, the latter.  God help us all.

Sy Hersh has a piece in the latest New Yorker, which says that

The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack.

Even more terrifyingly, Hersh writes that

One of the military’s initial option plans, as presented to the White House by the Pentagon this winter, calls for the use of a bunker-buster tactical nuclear weapon, such as the B61-11, against underground nuclear sites. One target is Iran’s main centrifuge plant, at Natanz, nearly two hundred miles south of Tehran…

(Hat-tip to Frank al-Irlandi for that link.)
As Hersh writes, the previous context in which US military planners considered the use of bunker-busting TNWs was against the massive underground complex the Soviets were building outside Moscow during the Cold War. He quotes a retired intel official familiar with that earlier project as arguing that non-nuclear weapons could perhaps perform the task– if the US planners have enough reliable info about the target. But in Iran, they don’t. Hersh continues:

The lack of reliable intelligence leaves military planners, given the goal of totally destroying the sites, little choice but to consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons. “Every other option, in the view of the nuclear weaponeers, would leave a gap,” the former senior intelligence official said. “ ‘Decisive’ is the key word of the Air Force’s planning. It’s a tough decision. But we made it in Japan.”

Hersh indicates that there are serious differences between the generals in the Pentagon and the ever-hawkish civilian officials there over the advisability of using (or even threatening) TNWs against Iran… with the generals portrayed as much, much more reluctant to do so than the “suits” who are their bosses.
He quotes that same retired intel official as saying,

Continue reading “Hersh on possible US nuclear attack on Iran”

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are two of the most important thinkers in the “realist” school of US foreign-policy analysts. Mearsheimer is the Wendell Harrison Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Walt is the Academic Dean at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he holds the Robert and Renee Belfer Professorship in International Affairs.
These two men are not, as you can see, fuzzy-headed liberals who are marginal to the mainstream of policy discourse in the United States.
Now, they have a major new article in the upcoming issue of the London Review of Books on the power and detrimental role that the pro-Israel lobby in Washington has played over the years. (The LRB piece has no footnotes. But you can access a fully documented, PDF version of the longer article from which it was excerpted, if you click here. 211 endnotes, many of them very lengthy, to document just 48 pages of text… These guys are empiricists after my own heart!)
Here is some of what they argue in the LRB version:

Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.
Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

And this:

Continue reading “Major new article on the pro-Israel Lobby”

The WaPo’s Scott Wilson and Glenn Kessler had an intriguing article in today’s paper, in which they described how the Bushies have tried to “secretly” shovel $2 million into Palestine in recent weeks in a last-minute attempt to influence the results of the parliamentary election that will be held there next Wednesday. (Here, also here.)
The idea was to give the now-ruling Palestinian Authority (PA) some small amounts of money to do very public things for which the PA’s ruling party, Fateh, could get credit. Wilson and Kessler write:

In recent days, Arabic-language papers have been filled with U.S.-funded advertisements announcing the events in the name of the Palestinian Authority, which the public closely identifies with Fatah. Some of the events, such as a U.S.-financed tree-planting ceremony here in Ramallah that Abbas attended last week, have resembled Fatah rallies, with participants wearing the trademark black-and-white kaffiyehs emblazoned with the party logo, walls plastered with Fatah candidates’ posters, and banks of TV cameras invited to record the event.
“Public outreach is integrated into the design of each project to highlight the role of the P.A. in meeting citizens needs,” said a progress report distributed this month to USAID and State Department officials. “The plan is to have events running every day of the coming week, beginning 13 January, such that there is a constant stream of announcements and public outreach about positive happenings all over Palestinian areas in the critical week before the elections.”

This is distasteful on so many levels, I don’t even know where to begin.
Maybe by saying that if the US government had truly wanted to bolster the political position of the PA’s Fateh leadership (with at its head that very decent man Mahmoud Abbas), then they could have done a lot more to provide solid political support for him a long, long time ago. Like back in 2003, when he was Prime Minister, and he pleaded and pleaded with the Americans to get serious about the peace negotiations that the Palestinians so urgently need if the dead weight of Israel’s colonial project is to be lifted from all the occupied Palestinian territories.
But they didn’t do a thing.
Or back throughout the whole of the past year, when Abbas was President, and he similarly pleaded with them to throw their weight behind the re-opening of peace negotiatinons. But they did nothing, and just continued shoveling billions of dollars to Israel’s Ariel Sharon even while Sharon steadfastly continued to refue to have anything at all to do with Abbas.
So now, the US “democracy cavalry”– led in its present campaign, according to the WaPo, by “a former U.S. Army Special Forces officer who worked in postwar Afghanistan on democracy-building projects” (name of Larry Sampler)– thinks they can sweep into Palestine at the last minute and buy the election for Abbas with a few tiny, basically meaningless little projects for which the US taxpayers also have to buy publicity in Palestinian newspapers. It beggars belief.
Wilson and Kessler:

Elements of the U.S.-funded program include a street-cleaning campaign, distributing free food and water to Palestinians at border crossings, donating computers to community centers and sponsoring a national youth soccer tournament.

When I read that I said to Bill the spouse, “Do they think Palestinians are stupid? Or cheap? Or what?” He said, “No, it’s not just the Palestinians… They think everyone except themselves are stupid.”
Oh, of course, along the way there it wasn’t only “consultant” Larry Sampler who made out like a bandit. There were also not one but two layers of other for-profit contractors involved. Everyone got a little bit of the skim.
Wilson and Kessler were smart enough to write that,

The program highlights the central challenge facing the Bush administration as it promotes democracy in the Middle East. Free elections in the Arab world, where most countries have been run for years by unelected autocracies or unchallenged parties like Fatah, often result in strong showings by radical Islamic movements opposed to the policies of the United States and to its chief regional ally, Israel. But in attempting to manage the results, the administration risks undermining the democratic goals it is promoting.

Darn right they are.
In connection with the general topic of US-funded support for “democratization” projects around the world, I just quickly read this thought-provoking piece on Open Democracy by Sreeram Chaulia. He provides a fairly good round-up of the work of various US-financed INGOs (international NGOs) and GONGOs (government-reliant NGOs), especially in the recent “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. He has a good quote from Julie Mertus: “It’s not the NGOs driving the government’s agenda; it’s the US government driving the NGO agenda.”
One cavil with Open Democracy: They do carry some interesting articles on their website. But why don’t they put sources and other materials into their online articles? It’s quite pathetic for someone to use a good, poweful quote like that one and not give us a hyperlink to the source.