Middle East Special: US to Engage with Hamas and Hezbollah? (Perry)

Mark Perry writes for Foreign Policy:

While it is anathema to broach the subject of engaging militant groups like Hizballah and Hamas in official Washington circles (to say nothing of Israel), that is exactly what a team of senior intelligence officers at U.S. Central Command --- CENTCOM --- has been doing.

In a "Red Team" report issued on May 7 and entitled "Managing Hizballah and Hamas," senior CENTCOM intelligence officers question the current U.S. policy of isolating and marginalizing the two movements. Instead, the Red Team recommends a mix of strategies that would integrate the two organizations into their respective political mainstreams. While a Red Team exercise is deliberately designed to provide senior commanders with briefings and assumptions that challenge accepted strategies, the report is at once provocative, controversial -- and at odds with current U.S. policy.

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Comments

[Dave]

The people at CENTCOM (quoted in the article) are no different from Jane Fonda. They can go over there and sing praises of terror groups just as Fonda journeyed to Indochina and praised Ho Chi Minh. She too took comfort in knowing that she could leave the war zone. The people at CENTCOM can make themselves comfortable flirting with Israel's enemies because they know they never have to live there.

[Catherine]

RE "The U.S. role of assistance to an integrated Lebanese defense force that includes Hizballah; and the continued training of Palestinian security forces in a Palestinian entity that includes Hamas in its government, would be more effective than providing assistance to entities -- the government of Lebanon and Fatah -- that represent only a part of the Lebanese and Palestinian populace respectively."

Does any Red Team member realise that Fatah and Hamas hate each others' guts and that the efforts by Egyptians and others to get them to reconcile have gone absolutely nowhere because of this deep mistrust and enmity? I find it hard to take seriously "CENTOM thinking" that the US can just waltz in there and get the 2 to kiss and make up. I see more opportunities for Hezbollah to come back into the fold in Lebanon after the last elections, but until Hezbollah disarms, that's not going to happen, and Hezbollah is not going to disarm as long as they maintain their present ties with Iran and Israel maintains its present policy toward Lebanon. And considering the completely ineffective track record of the present and the previous US administration in the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I don't have much hope that the US can be effective in a new endeavour.

[Dave]

Catherine (RE Hezbollah),

Perhaps they could try a decommissioning of weapons scheme -- but a conditional one whereby arms could be returned to Hezbollah if efforts to integrate the group further into civilian government and the military fail. That would be an incentive for all sides to want to co-operate.

[Catherine]

Dave,
I don't know. I think Hezbollah would need to see some concrete advantage that further integration into civilian government and the military would bring that would put them in a more powerful position than they are now with their networks of tunnels, weapons caches, and missles. I also don't see them making any concessions during the current Israeli coalition.