Obama won't deal with Hamas, 'Post' told

The incoming Obama administration will not abandon President George Bush's doctrine of isolating Hamas, the Obama transition team's chief national security spokeswoman has told The Jerusalem Post. (Snip) "The president-elect's repeated statements [about not dealing with Hamas] are accurate," Anderson said.

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[but he will meet with Iran, who is the state behind Hamas...]

Wrong Story

Below, Michael Ledeen does a good job of describing the nature of the current proxy war between Israel and Iran, and he points out that the strategic failure is not just Israel's, but America's: the failure to recognize that Iran is at war with the civilized world and that we need to win that war.

"Wrong Story," Michael Ledeen, National Review Online, December 30

Everyone in the Middle East knows that the serious component of the Battle of Gaza is all about Iran. The Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, recently warned that Iran is trying to "devour" the Arab world. Mohammed Abdallah Al Zulfa, of the Saudi Arabian Shura Council, reminded Alhurra's viewers that "Iran is the big threat in today's world, supporting all the terrorists from Hamas to Hezbollah to some other terrorists that we don't know their names yet," and that "Iran destabilized the region by supporting all the illegal activities and activists such as Hamas." Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the Egyptian foreign minister, in a press conference in Anakara, ranted against Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah, saying that the Iranian-run terror organization had "practically declared war on Egypt."…

The Israelis know all this, just as they know that the mullahs are building an atomic bomb destined for Israeli territory. But Israel is a small country, despite the paranoid visions of some Western ideologues who think the Israelis run the world through espionage and lobbying. Iran is more than ten times the size of Israel, and even the most feisty Israeli shrinks from the thought of an open war with Tehran. So they are left to contend with the tentacles of the terrorist hydra, while the main body remains untouched. They may chop off a piece of Hamas or Hezbollah, but it will regenerate and grab them again….

Thus, the best Israel can hope to accomplish is to buy time, praying that somehow or other the Iranian regime will fall before the mullahs launch their promised genocidal attack, or that the Israelis will find a way to destroy the atomic weapon before it is used against them, or that the West will, at the eleventh hour, recognize that Iran is a global threat and find a way to thwart it.

It's a hell of a position to be in, and discussions of tactics and methods in Gaza address only a small part of the problem. The real problem isn't even being discussed.

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