Adam Horowitz writes:
When I first read this JTA headline: Top U.S. peace negotiator exits, I hoped that Dennis Ross had finally decided to skip town, but it refers to David Welch, the assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs who resigned on December 19th. His old boss, Condoleezza Rice, praised him:
"most importantly, what we've done in bringing
about the Annapolis process so that Palestinians and Israelis could end
the long, cold interregnum between the effort to make peace at the
beginning of this decade and the now intensive efforts that they are
making to make peace. David Welch has really been at the center of
that, and is in many ways responsible."
Rice
is correct that Welch was in the middle of all things Israel/Palestine,
but it had nothing to do with peace. David Rose's April 2008
blockbuster Vanity Fair
article "The Gaza Bombshell" put an end to that sham. The article
showed how Welch was a key figure behind the US strategy of
instigating civil war within the occupied Palestinian territories, primarily through bolstering Palestinian strongman Muhammad Dahlan as the US "guy". Tony Karon described Dahlan as the "Palestinian Pinochet."
From the Vanity Fair article:
They say this assessment ["He's our guy"] was echoed by other key figures in the
Bush administration, including Rice and Assistant Secretary David Welch, the
man in charge of Middle East policy at the State Department. "David
Welch didn't fundamentally care about Fatah," one of his colleagues
says. "He cared about results, and [he supported] whatever son of a
bitch you had to support. Dahlan was the son of a bitch we happened to
know best. He was a can-do kind of person. Dahlan was our guy."
This support came through arms and military training which led to the failed coup against the elected Hamas government and began the US proxy war in Gaza which continues to this day.
As if that wasn't bad enough, Welch tried to replicate this disaster around the region, most noticeably in Lebanon where he pulled together the "Welch Club." The group, which included the US favorite Saad Hariri and his Future Movement, organized and funded Sunni Islamist terrorist cells to battle Hezbollah. Franklin Lamb broke it down at Counterpunch:
The FM created Sunni Islamist
'terrorist' cells were to serve as a cover for (anti-Hezbollah)
Welch Club projects. The plan was that actions of these cells,
of which Fatah el-Islam is one, could be blamed on al Qaeda or
Syria or anyone but the Club.
To staff the new militias,
FM rounded up remnants of previous extremists in the Palestinian
Refugee camps that had been subdued, marginalized and diminished
during the Syrian occupation of Lebanon. Each fighter got $700
per month, not bad in today's Lebanon.
The first Welch Club funded
militia, set up by FM, is known locally as Jund-al-Sham (Soldiers
of Sham, where "Sham" in Arabic denotes Syria, Lebanon,
Palestine & Jordan) created in Ain-el-Hilwa Palestinian refugee
camp near Sidon. This group is also referred to in the Camps
as Jund-el-Sitt (Soldiers of the Sitt, where "Sitt"
in Sidon, Ain-el-Hilwa and the outskirts pertain to Bahia Hariri,
the sister of Rafiq Hariri, aunt of Saad, and Member of Parliament).
The second was Fateh-al-Islam
(The name cleverly put together, joining Fateh as in Palestinian
and the word Islam as in Qaeda). FM set this Club cell up in
Nahr-al-Bared refugee camp north of Tripoli for geographical
balance.
Of
course this ended with the Lebanese military destroying Nahr-al-Bared,
and Palestinians once again paying the price for the Bush
Administration inducing the "birth pangs of a New Middle East."
If this all sounds slightly familiar, its because the same folks
who were behind the 1980s Contra policy in Nicaragua helped orchestrate
this fiasco as well. Elliott Abrams, who played a role in the 1980s, worked with Welsh to help throw the region into chaos in his role as "National Security Adviser for Global Democracy Strategy"–you know no good can come from a title like that.
With "peace negotiators" like these, who needs warmongers?
The JTA article ends:
Senior career diplomats like Welch routinely resign at the end of an
administration, but many expect to be reassigned. Welch, the former
ambassador to Egypt and a longtime State Department Arabist, chose to
leave for good.
What
will be the future of the Bust Administration characters who laid waste
to a region? Will there ever be accountability? Who knows, but for now
"leaving for good" is probably the best we can hope for.
