A Pilgrim’s Digression

The New York Times has a story that claims America and Israel are already planning “to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again.”

Reading this article, for a moment I thought I had time-warped back to the days when the Reagan Administration took pleasure in attempting to manipulate the governments of oppressed, third-world peoples.

Have we learned absolutely nothing from the past forty years of history? This kind of meddling is exactly why we are so hated in the Middle East and elsewhere. Add the fact that here we are plotting with Israel, no less, to destabilize the Palestinian government, and you have a recipe for brewing a cauldron of decades-long hatred.

Like it or not, these are the people the Palestinians chose to lead them. After all the President’s high-sounding rhetoric about democracy and freedom, are we now going to resort to the same anti-democratic practices as all of George’ Bush’s predecessors, from Kennedy to Reagan?

To quote further from the article, “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.”

Oh yes, that always works well. It worked so well with sanctions on Iraq: make the people suffer, and they will throw the bums out of office.

I guess all the wishful thinking of Conservatives, following the elections last month, has turned into pure bitterness. I recall with glee listening to Neal Boortz, the day after the elections, as he said hopefully that maybe being responsible for trash collection services would “soften” Hamas and control their bigotry.

If I could have called the program, I would have said, “Gee Neal, why don’t we try that with Al Qaeda? Maybe if we help Bin Laden get elected President of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda will soften its stance against us.”

Now, the wishful thinking is at an end, and the President is taking a page from the playbook of previous Administrations. Unfortunately, this always ends badly. Point to one single instance in the past forty years where this kind of interference has met with any kind of success?

It provides the government we dislike with an excuse for its failures, and it provides them with the caricature of the Great Satan with which to drum up nationalism and popular support.

To my mind, the resort to both covert and overt destabilizing tactics points to the utter lack of fresh ideas in an administration grown weary with the one insoluble issue that has come to define it: war.

It may also be indicative of the true hypocrisy that lies just beneath the pale veil of lofty rhetoric that demurely covers this administration’s actions. Democracy is noble and good, as long as people democratically choose the candidates the United States wants them to choose. Choose otherwise, and our government will force you onto the path it wants you to take.

President Bush, this is a good reason why no one who isn’t already ideologically aligned with you believes you when you speak of spreading Democracy.