Why did we arm the Palestinians???
The victory of Hamas in Gaza is a huge blow - and it underscores how dangerous it is to give weapons to the Palestinians...
Fatah officials here confirmed that Hamas had seized large amounts of weapons and military equipment belonging to Abbas's security forces in the Gaza Strip. Some of the weapons were supplied to the PA in recent weeks by Egypt and Jordan as part of a US security plan to boost Fatah-controlled forces.
Hamas said it had seized thousands of M-16 and Kalashnikov rifles and pistols, communication equipment, armored vehicles, trucks, binoculars, military outfits, tents, sleeping bags, hand grenades, mortars and documents.
Hamas militiamen were seen driving some of the confiscated vehicles that have been decorated with Hamas flags and signs.
posted by GayandRight @ 10:44 PM
3 Comments:
Some additional questions:
Why did we arm Al Quaeda?
Why did we arm Saddam Hussein?
Why did we arm Islam Karimov?
WTF is wrong with our foreign policy?
Anon:
The first two are simple - for the same reason we armed the Soviet Union in WWII, only to have them turn their attention to us once the greater threat was beaten.
The choices made to arm each of these countries or groups was reactive to the situation at at the time and probably without sufficient view of the long term ramifications or maybe just too rosey of a view of the long-term implications. Perhaps believing that people would be grateful for having saved their bacon. (You can see how far that got with the French.)
As for arming the Palestinians - that's a mystery. Firstly, they never seemed to have much trouble finding weapons on their own before, so I am not sure why they needed more.
The best that I can think of is that there was some kind of notion that if you equip their security forces and dress them up like a real, professional army they may start to act like one. A lame idea, but what else could there be?
To allow the peace process to go forward, Fatah had to get control over the Palestinians. They complained that they could not due to insufficient weapons, so weapons were provided. They still did little in the way of securing the areas over which they had control and were eventually voted out in favour of Hamas.
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