Oh yeah. This will work. US wants to train Fatah in West Bank.

US State Department officials, looking to shift US Security Coordinator Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton’s work with Palestinian forces to the West Bank, have begun holding discussions with Congressional staff on how to restructure an $86 million funding program previously allocated to bolster Dayton’s Gaza activities.

The earlier package was whittled down to $59m. before Congress signed off on it and would have gone largely to non-lethal equipment and training for the presidential guard to secure the Gaza border crossings and help Fatah leaders and institutions there. Now the US, caught off-guard by Hamas’s speedy defeat of Fatah forces in Gaza, is scrambling for new ways to strengthen Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah and isolate Hamas in Gaza.

“They have a great appetite to work with Abbas and [PA Prime Minister Salaam] Fayad,” said one Democratic Congressional staffer. “But I don’t think they’ve quite figured out… what that cooperation looks like, where that money ought to go.”

“They don’t have good answers right now,” he said.

Of course, there are always cynical, xenophobic, reactionary naysayers, even to the most brilliant State Department ideas.

“I see no evidence that [Dayton’s mission] succeeded,” said Shoshana Bryen of the Washington-based Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs of efforts to reform the Palestinian security forces and secure the Gaza crossings.

“They simply didn’t fight, they abandoned their posts,” she said of the Fatah forces outgunned but not outnumbered by Hamas. She said, though, that the failure was larger than the battle in Gaza and stemmed from flawed American expectations that any US security coordinator could lead Fatah security services in a direction amenable to US and Israeli interests rather than their own.

Many Israeli security officials said they have been turned off from the whole Dayton enterprise since Fatah forces fell to Hamas, saying that it’s now hard to take his efforts at security reform seriously and interpreting the situation as an example of American inability to grasp the realities of the Middle East.