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Friday, June 15, 2007          Reader Comments

'Shock and awe' for White House as Fatah folds

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration has been stunned by Hamas's capture of the Gaza Strip.

Officials said the defeat of forces aligned with PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas took the administration by surprise. They said that neither the administration nor the U.S. intelligence community expected Fatah to collapse.

"There is shock and awe," an official said. "It's a major blow to the administration's policy."

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At one point, the administration urged Egypt to send troops into the Gaza Strip to save Fatah, according to Middle East Newsline. Officials said the regime of President Hosni Mubarak refused, and the administration then pressed Abbas to launch a full-scale offensive against Hamas.

"Palestinians are going to have to sort out their politics and figure out which pathway they want to pursue — the pathway toward two states living peaceably side by side or whether this sort of chaos is going to become a problem," White House press secretary Tony Snow said.

Officials said the Fatah collapse has angered those in the administration who felt Israel had withheld military and financial support from Abbas. They said President George Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had planned to press Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to agree to numerous concessions during the latter's scheduled visit to the White House on July 19.

"There will be a lot of bad feelings during the meeting," the official said. "Bush saw an Israeli-Palestinian peace process as having the potential to become a major achievement during his last 18 months in office."

Over the last three months, Israel and the United States disputed the resilience of Fatah forces in the Gaza Strip. Israel warned that Hamas had formed a military force that could easily defeat Fatah in the Gaza Strip.

The administration disagreed. On May 24, U.S. security coordinator Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that Abbas's Presidential Guard and National Security Forces fought well during clashes throughout the Gaza Strip last month.

On Wednesday, the administration, for the first time in nearly two years, sought to distinguish between Hamas's political leadership and the military wing. The State Department said Hamas politicians were not involved in the offensive in the Gaza Strip.

"It is this so-called military wing of Hamas that launched these attacks," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, "started these rounds of violence that has swept up innocent civilians in firefights and gunfights and the shelling and the mortaring just as Egyptian envoys were working to try to bring together elements of Hamas and Fatah — political elements of Hamas and Fatah to come to some sort of political accommodation so they can lower the violence."

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