Saturday, 10 January 2009
The incoming Obama administration is prepared to abandon George Bush's doctrine of isolating Hamas by initiating contact with the terror organization, The Guardian quoted sources close to the transition team as saying.
The incoming Obama administration is prepared to abandon George Bush's doctrine of isolating Hamas by initiating contact with the terror organization, The Guardian quoted sources close to the transition team as saying.
"Secret envoys, multilateral six-party talk-like approaches. The total isolation of Hamas that we promulgated under Bush is going to end," Steve Clemons, the director of the American Strategy Programme at the New America Foundation, was quoted as saying.
"You could do something through the Europeans. You could invent a structure that is multilateral. It is going to be hard for the neocons to swallow," he said. "I think it is going to happen."
However, one expert close to the transition team said that "It is highly unlikely that they will be public about it."
Aaron David Miller, a former state department adviser on the Middle East, told the British newspaper that "We will be perceived to be weak and feckless if we are perceived to be on the margins, unable to persuade the Israelis, unable to work with the international community to end this."
"Unless he is prepared to adopt a policy that is tougher, fairer and smarter than both of his predecessors you might as well hang a closed-for-the-season sign on any chance of America playing an effective role in defusing the current crisis or the broader crisis," he reportedly said.
Bruce Hoffman, a counter-terrorism expert at Georgetown University's school of foreign service, told the paper that Obama would initiate contacts with the group only if Hamas's military wing suffers "a real, almost decisive, drubbing."
