Hey... Condi's Back In Town

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse in the Middle East, especially between Israel and Palestine, Hamas and Fatah, Condi turns up to add her special kinda diplomacy to the sitchuwashian...

Of course, the fact that she and her idiot savant twin (That's the 'Deciderer' to you) caused this clusterf**k and it is all over the pages of Vanity Fair fills me with huge confidence that her visit will be just fantastic.

"[Palestinian national-security adviser Muhammad] Dahlan says he warned his friends in the Bush administration that Fatah still wasn’t ready for elections in January. Decades of self-preservationist rule by Arafat had turned the party into a symbol of corruption and inefficiency—a perception Hamas found it easy to exploit. Splits within Fatah weakened its position further: in many places, a single Hamas candidate ran against several from Fatah.

“Everyone was against the elections,” Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. “Bush decided, ‘I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?”

The elections went forward as scheduled. On January 25, Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council.

Few inside the U.S. administration had predicted the result, and there was no contingency plan to deal with it. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” Condoleezza Rice told reporters. “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.”

“Everyone blamed everyone else,” says an official with the Department of Defense. “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’”"

(h/t Attaturk)

Awe inspiring huh!

Update: Abbas rejects continued peace talks... for now.

"Rejectionists"?

''Negotiations are going to have to be able to withstand the efforts of rejectionists to upset them, to create chaos and violence, so that people react by deciding not to negotiate, '' Rice said in Egypt at the start of two days of Mideast meetings overshadowed by the Gaza crisis. ''That's the game of those who don't want to see a Palestinian state established.''

She finished the presser by stating "Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some shopping to do"

Priorities...