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Obama's announcement that he wouldn't meet with members of Hamas strikes me as very bad policy. But it also strikes me as a very good opportunity to link to Daniel Levy's recent TAP article counseling the next president on his Middle East strategy. Some of the closing grafs are particularly relevant:
Recalibrating policy toward Hamas has become central to progress on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Contrary to popular misperception, Hamas and al-Qaeda are adversaries, not allies. Hamas is about ending the occupation and reforming Palestinian society; al-Qaeda, about opposing the West per se and spreading chaos in the Muslim world and beyond. One is reformist, the other revolutionary; one nationalist, the other post-nationalist; one grievance-based, the other fundamentalist. Hamas has signaled that it will accept a Palestinian state alongside Israel. It can be worked with, albeit indirectly for political reasons. Under a new administration, U.S. policy toward Hamas should enter a period of deniable ambiguity, as third parties (principally Arab and European) explore a series of propositions with the Hamas leadership.The Hamas question, though, is about more than the West Bank and Gaza. It touches on whether political Islamists, the Muslim Brothers among them, can be allies and even play a pivotal role in the struggle against al-Qaeda. These non-takfiri Islamists (takfiris, al-Qaeda among them, support an extreme interpretation of Islam, and offensive, not defensive, Jihad) are embroiled in their own bitter fight with the radicals. Democratic Islamists tend to be the big winners when free elections are held in the Arab world, and their very participation in such elections is considered kufr -- an abomination to Islam -- by the takfiri jihadists. They are religiously conservative, sometimes oppressively so, but they are not at war with the West, and America's unwillingness to enter into a dialogue with them over rules of the game for co-existing and rooting out al-Qaeda has been perhaps the most glaring and stubbornly shortsighted omission in U.S. post-September 11 policy.These divisions within political Islam are an unexploited opportunity. Lumping all Islamists together is politically and intellectually lazy and dishonest, helping al-Qaeda to portray America as anti-Muslim. It also exacerbates American reliance on repressive regimes fearful of democratic elections that might displace them.As a quibble, there's evidence -- not least in bin-Laden's statements -- that al Qaeda is substantially more grievance based than Levy gives them credit for. That said, his broader point is sound: You can't lump all Muslim groups together. When Mitt Romney said, "This is about Shi’a and Sunni. This is about Hezbollah and Hamas and al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the worldwide jihadist effort to try and cause the collapse of all moderate Islamic governments and replace them with a caliphate," he was not only talking crazy, not only demonstrating a dangerous ignorance around Middle East affairs, but also unveiling a foreign policy that would be extraordinarily ineffective and even counterproductive. There are groups we can negotiate with, groups we must fight, and groups we can turn. To decide all the myriad Muslim institutions with popular legitimacy are part of one single "enemy," however, is like trying to combat gang activity in Los Angeles by declaring war on the Crips and the city council. It's idiotic.
