« Holy Terror, Batman | Blog Index | Confronting the NSA Spy Scandal »

Advertisement

recent entries McCain's Big Speech: More Prison Cell Than Policy Best Throw Away Line of the Day MoJo Video: Palin Puts the Party Back in GOP What They're Saying at the RNC (And What They're Not) Things To Do With the Price of Cindy McCain's Outfit Obama Fundraising Goes Bonkers After GOP's Day-Long Attack Palin, Giuliani Mocked Obama's Organizing Work, But It Was Sponsored By The Catholic Church Fact-Checking Sarah Palin Maybe It's Not Sexist, But Let's Leave It Alone Anyway

Starving Hamas

This seems like a strange way to think about democracy in the Middle East:

The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western diplomats.

The intention is to starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections to the point where, some months from now, its president, Mahmoud Abbas, is compelled to call a new election. The hope is that Palestinians will be so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will return to office a reformed and chastened Fatah movement.

Right. "Vote any way you want, really; we'll just make sure you starve if you happen to vote the wrong way..." I'm no fan of Hamas, but this sort of thing seems pretty unlikely to encourage any sort of "moderation" from the governing party. Maybe that's the point. It's not a hugely novel approach either. In 1990, during the elections in Nicaragua, the United States let voters know in no uncertain terms that massive amounts of aid would be forthcoming if they voted the Sandinistas out of office and voted in the U.S.-backed Violeta Chamorro. (And the Reagan administration certainly found ways to "destabilize" the leftist Nicaraguan government during the 1980s.) And all Nicaragua got for going along with this plan was the opportunity to be a guinea pig in a grand neoliberal experiment that devastated the country. Maybe the Palestinians should take note.

Posted by Bradford Plumer on 02/15/06 at 1:23 PM | E-mail | Print | Digg this | de.licio.us

---

Comments

Post a comment

Name:

Email Address:

URL:

Remember personal info?

Comments: