The daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney criticized several elements of the Bush administration’s Middle East policy.
Liz Cheney, speaking Monday before thousands of AIPAC activists, said, “I think the United States was fundamentally mistaken to push for those Palestinian elections in Gaza.”
At the time, she said, Israeli and Palestinian officials did not think those elections, which resulted in Hamas taking power, were a good idea.
“There were few in the United States who thought that they were a good idea,” added Cheney, who served in the Bush administration as deputy assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs.
Two of the U.S. officials who believed the elections were a good idea were Cheney’s boss, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and her father’s boss, President Bush.
Cheney also criticized another U.S. policy enthusiastically backed by Bush and Rice: the current push for an Israeli-Palestinian agreement.
She described the effort as “misguided,” asserting that Middle East policy is a “zero-sum game” in which U.S. resources spent trying to achieve a peace deal for which the Palestinians aren’t ready will ultimately come at the expense of confronting Iran.
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