[Washington Post] Peter Baker - Prior to the Palestinian parliamentary elections scheduled for January 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley sat down with aides at the State Department to consider if the elections should be canceled? Israeli leaders had implored Bush advisers to not let the vote proceed. Hamas, deemed a terrorist group by the U.S., could easily win, they warned. Even Natan Sharansky urged the Americans to postpone the vote, arguing that democracy is about building institutions and civil society, not just holding elections. But Mahmoud Abbas told the Americans that his Fatah party needed the vote for credibility and it had to include his opposition. "We didn't think that postponing the elections would have solved any problems," said Philip D. Zelikow, who was Rice's counselor at the time and attended the meeting. "You would have been conceding Fatah's illegitimacy." It was, they thought, a test of Bush's democracy agenda. The elections went forward and Hamas won big. Now Bush was stuck with an avowed enemy of Israel governing the Palestinian territories.
2007-08-20 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive