Complicated Stupid Moves

Here's more from the excellent Vanity Fair article by David Rose about the Gaza coup:

[Khalid Jaberi, a commander with Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades] pauses. He spent the night before our interview awake and in hiding, fearful of Israeli air strikes. “You know,” he says, “since the takeover, we’ve been trying to enter the brains of Bush and Rice, to figure out their mentality. We can only conclude that having Hamas in control serves their overall strategy, because their policy was so crazy otherwise.”

And here's Egyptian President Gamal Nasser, probably at some point during the sixties:

"The genius of you Americans is that you never made clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which makes us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them we are missing."

There's a great deal of continuity in US foreign policy.

—Jonathan Schwarz