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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. First of all today, thanks to Michael Hill and Nancy Solomon, and the whole Morning Edition team. This is our full membership drive and we're not going to talk about it now except to say that that dollar-for-dollar match is still in effect. This is the only matching period during The Brian Lehrer Show, this whole fall membership drive. Keep those donations coming. Dollar-for-dollar match in effect, listeners who haven't gotten to it yet or who want to up your donations, thank you so much. 888-376-WNYC or at wnyc.org.

We'll begin today with a piece of history of how Hamas came to power in Gaza with one of our frequent guests, Fred Kaplan, who writes about world affairs and military affairs for Slate. His latest article is called George W. Bush Helped Hamas Come to Power. In Bush's naivete about the magic of elections, he ignored a crucial point about democracy. Some of this comes from a book that Fred wrote back in 2008 called Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power and how sad in a way that something Fred documented 15 years ago becomes relevant again today in the way that it has since October 7th. Hi, Fred, welcome back to WNYC.

Fred Kaplan: Good to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Remind us of some basics here. Hamas was elected by the people of Gaza in 2006 without a majority of the votes. What were the basic results?

Fred Kaplan: The basic result was that Hamas won about 44% of the votes. Fatah which is now known as the Palestinian Authority got 41%, but they had a weird electron system like what we have, so Hamas won about 75 seats against Fatah's 41 seats. They couldn't agree on a power-sharing arrangement. There was a war between Fatah and Hamas, a civil war that went on for nearly an year. There was then a unity government but Hamas broke the terms. Started throwing Fatah's officials off the roof of the parliamentary building.

Many of the others fled and Hamas seized control and there hasn't been an election since. When Joe Biden says that Hamas doesn't stand for the Palestinian people, at least historically he's right, at least not for all of them. When people say, "Well, they won an election. All the people there are responsible for whatever they do." A, that's not true, even historically, and B, the median age of people in Gaza is about 18, which means that half the country wasn't born when the last election was held. We don't really know what they think.

Brian Lehrer: Let me pull the lens out for the Bush angle of this, and then we'll dive back in on some of those individual pieces that you just referenced to because some of them are so interesting and important. You write that the 2006 election took place at all in Gaza because of the naivete of President Bush. Naivete that led him to what believe?

Fred Kaplan: Freedom and democracy was the natural states of humanity and that all you had to do was topple a dictator and that democracy as we know it would flow forth like lava from a volcano. He was convinced in this toward the end of his first term, you might remember in his second term, his inaugural address, he talked about his mission of spreading democracy around the world. There were things going on then that looked very encouraging.

There was the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. There was the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon. Iraq had just had its first post-Saddam election. Remember all the voters with their purple thumbs. There had been a territory-wide election in Gaza and the West Bank which Fatah had won. They were now the Palestinian Authority. Israel was pulling out of Gaza. Ariel Sharon, who is really one of the most hawkish prime ministers Israel had ever had, just decided it wasn't worth the trouble anymore, they were withdrawing, there was going to be a vacuum and George W. Bush persuaded Fatah, the Palestinian Authority to hold an election, parliamentary election.

In the election that they had just won, Hamas and Islamic Jihad had boycotted the election. They didn't boycott this one. Fatah tried to get the United States to talk Israel into canceling the election. They didn't. The results were there. There was even a Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick who later became the president of the World Bank who told Secretary of State Condi Rice, listen we've got to encourage Israel to do certain things that will help Fatah, like get rid of some checkpoints, have some aid come in, let Abbas, the head of Fatah take credit for it. Secretary Rice said, "No I don't think we should put our fingers on the scale." She thought that democracy, the good guys would win the election and well, they didn't.

Brian Lehrer: Well one really interesting thing in your article is that you have Bush being influenced by the renowned, Russian dissident who became an Israeli government member Natan Sharansky. Sharansky himself had written a book called The Case for Democracy but you make it seem like Bush only read the first chapter. What's the Natan Sharansky connection here?

Fred Kaplan: Well, Sharansky, he was one of the great dissidents in the Soviet Union. He was a colleague of all the other great dissidents. He was put in jail for nine years in the Gulag, was let out when Gorbachev came to power, immigrated to Israel, became a hero, not only to Israel but also among neoconservatives in the United States. He gave a speech at an American Enterprise Institute forum saying that the tensions between Israel and Arabs are not some tribal conflict, but the first chapter of the 21st-century world war between democracy and terrorism.

Which oversimplified things but Dick Cheney was at that speech. He introduced him to Bush and Bush was very influenced by this. However, one point that Sharansky made was that look, democracy doesn't just mean elections. You need democratic institutions, courts, a free press, a civil society. The whole plan of democracy is that you have institutions and entities that can mediate conflicts peacefully. If you don't have that, elections might even make things worse, might make things less democratic. Yes, as you say, Bush didn't read that chapter.

Brian Lehrer: You remind us that Sharansky resigned from the Israeli government in 2005 in protest over Israel's decision at that time to withdraw from Gaza. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon wanted to be done with that occupation and all the trouble it brought. What was Sharansky's case for continuing it as somebody who had just written a book called The Case for Democracy?

Fred Kaplan: Sharansky wanted to make the withdrawal contingent on steps by the people running Gaza at the time to start democratizing, to start instituting some of these entities, these courts, or things that would express the will of the people. Sharon, again as you said, he just wanted out of place. It was becoming a mess. It was becoming a burden. Sharansky resigned. It was very controv-- People don't remember this, Sharon, he was in charge, he was the Minister of Defense back in 1982 when Israel invaded southern Lebanon to get rid of the PLO there.

He was so violent in his methods that the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament banned Sharon from ever again becoming Minister of Defense. Nobody thought that he might become Prime Minister one day. He was Prime Minister, but even Sharon said, "Gaza is just too much of a mess. We're getting out." By getting out, not only did he withdraw the occupation troops, he evicted 8,000 Jewish settlers. He paid them a lot of money and a lot of them resettled in the West Bank, but he just wanted to be done with it.

In a way, Sharansky was right. That left a big hole. Nobody else was going to fill it. Egypt, which is on the southern border of Gaza, and by the way, it's worth noting, have been blockading Gaza ever since 2007, just as Israel has from the north. Nobody wanted this problem. You leave problems alone, they start to fester, you create a situation where the worst elements take over the place and it becomes even worse.

Brian Lehrer: You write that Bush and a lot of other people were surprised that Hamas won the election. What did they think would happen and why?

Fred Kaplan: Well, see again, they thought you have elections that people who are like us win. They had this assumption, and I know this sounds oversimplified, but really you can go back and read Bush's speeches and some of Condi Rice's remarks at the time. I'm really not exaggerating. They thought that if you held elections in a place that had recently been without elections, that goodness and harmony would win out.

Brian Lehrer: It's funny that Condoleezza Rice also bought this naive view about Hamas and democracy. Didn't we all think Condoleezza Rice was smarter than Bush?

Fred Kaplan: She became much more influenced by Bush than the other way around. It's an interesting thing. She came into the Bush administration as his national security adviser, pretty hard-headed realist, real politic. She gave a speech saying we're going to be shifting to great power competition. These little wars in the Third World won't matter.

Then 9/11 happened. She bought on to the view, which has validity, that conflict is often determined as much by what's going on inside a country as the balance of power between countries. She then infused that with her own childhood recollection. She grew up in the South. She was friends with the four girls who were killed in that church bombing in Birmingham. She infused that with like, "Yes, we have to start emphasizing morality and democracy and things like that." Not to put any of that down, but she lost sight of the geopolitical wisdom that she had learned from some of her other teachers.

Brian Lehrer: Interesting. Palestinians in the West Bank at that time had just handily elected, as you remind us in your article, the more moderate Fatah Party, which had recognized Israel's right to exist and supported negotiations for a two-state solution. Why did Hamas win the plurality in Gaza? Was it because Gazans just wanted to drive Israel into the sea more than Palestinians in the West Bank did?

Fred Kaplan: They had boycotted the earlier election. Hamas and Islamic Jihad had boycotted the first election. It gave a very misleading impression of what the real balance of opinion was.

Brian Lehrer: Then Bush refused to recognize the elected Hamas government. Was that a mistake too? If you're going to sponsor an election, don't you have to recognize the winning party, even if you consider them to be horrible terrorists, and then try to build productive relations for all involved from there after you supported the process that elected them?

Fred Kaplan: Well, it's hard to say. In retrospect, what Bibi Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel has tried to do for the last decade is to co-opt Hamas, to buy them off, to let Qatar bring in a lot of aid, to give 15,000 of its residents work permits so that they can cross into Israel every day and bring back wages, to promote the economy. Every once in a while, as he put it, you had to go mow the lawn.

There were some exchanges of rocket fire, but otherwise, he thought he had Hamas under control and as did the intelligence agencies. They thought that Hamas was pretty much under control. They had been co-opted by this nice arrangement. The real problems were protecting the settlers in the West Bank. That's one reason why it turned out they were wrong, that Hamas had been bluffing all this time. It's one reason why they took their eye off the ball.

Brian Lehrer: That's all very interesting history sadly relevant again after you had written much of this in your book Daydream Believers in 2008. Before you go, Fred, one thing to bring it up to the present and that's how might this end? President Biden reportedly is urging Israel to learn from the mistakes the US made after conquering Iraq in 2003. Maybe Biden read your book. Do you see differences between how Israel thinks this should end and how Biden does?

Fred Kaplan: The thing is Israel, and this is one thing that Biden discovered when he went over there last week, they don't really have a clear picture of how it ends. Their goal, and listen, it's a valid goal, is to crush Hamas so that it is no longer a power in Gaza and that it cannot threaten Israel again. We cannot live under this shadow ever again. A reasonable goal. Is it feasible without killing tens of thousands of Gazan civilians, and by the way, Israeli soldiers at the same time? Nobody quite sees how that's possible. Hamas has taken a lot of this money that Qatar has given them and built this network of tunnels all over in Gaza City. It's going to be horrific urban warfare.

One thing that Biden told the war cabinet in Jerusalem based on his own experiences with watching the war in Iraq, which he initially supported was, "Look, what are you going to do the day after the war?" They didn't know. He goes, "You can't do this. You can't go into a war like this without having your goals set. Who's going to control this place after you wipe it out? Are you just going to leave it a mess for, if it's not called Hamas, some successor to Hamas to come along and do the same thing? What are you going to do with all this? Also, what are you going to do to make sure the hostages are released?" That was very important to him.

I do think that if Biden had not had this meeting, and there's no way to prove this one way or the other, but I think the invasion would have begun by now if Biden had not put this pressure on. We could be seeing real disaster not only in Gaza but with Hezbollah retaliating by firing rockets into Israel from southern Lebanon. Then we have two aircraft carriers and 2000 marines in eastern Mediterranean ready to retaliate against that. Then Iran has to decide whether it's going to step into this. This is a real powder keg. It's a situation requiring the most delicate balance of force and diplomacy, and I think Biden is doing quite a good job at that. We'll see whether it works. It might not work. Sometimes people do good jobs at this kinds of things, and it doesn't hold anyway.

Brian Lehrer: Fred Kaplan's column in Slate is called War Stories. He's the author of many books including Daydream Believer from 2008, Sadly, so relevant again, and his most recent The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War. Fred, thanks a lot.

Fred Kaplan: Sure. Thanks.

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