Dialogue between west and Hamas, Hizbullah?

Last Wednesday, I went to a 90-minute panel discussion at the U.S. Institute
of Peace titled “How to handle Hamas and Hezbollah”.  One of the main
reasons I went was because my old friend and colleague Ziad Abu Amr
was listed as on the panel.  In the end, though, he “appeared” only
via a slightly dysfunctional speakerphone.  The other speakers
were Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke from an organization called
Conflicts Forum , and Fred Hof a smart and experienced guy from Armitage Associates– that’s the private
consulting firm founded a whole back by the high-profile former Under Secretary
of State Rich Armitage.

It was too bad Ziad wasn’t there.  I think he was speaking from his
home in Gaza, and it sounded as though he was up to his ears in the very long-drawn-out,
on-again-off-again negotiations between Abu Mazen and the Hamas leaders.
 Basically, he expressed the hope that the Palestinians could find a
way to put together a National Unity Government, and that the international
community would then find a way to deal with it.  One observatiopn he
made was that Hamas’s brush with the exercize of governmental power in the
PA– brief and strictly limited though it has been– has already been enough
to corrupt what he had previously seen as the “internal discipline” of their
decision-making process.  (This may or may not ba a bit of an exaggeration.
 What is clear to me is that the current circumstances of tight siege
make it very hard for Hamas’s far-flung leadership to be able
to conduct rational internal communications. This no doubt hampers their internal decisionamking considerably.)  He also said,
“Hamas’s relationship with Iran might turn out not to be a strategic
one for them.”  He made a strong pitch for the superior effectiveness
of “local” mediators between Hamas and Fateh, over regional and internatinal
ones.

Next up was Mark Perry of Conflicts Forum.  (Perry is an interesting guy: a former
journo and historian, he has published a number of well-received books about
US history.  Back in 1994, he published
A fire in Zion: The Israeli-Palestinian Search for Peace
.)  He noted that CF had been involved in dialogue with Hamas for the
past 2.5 years.  He said that Hamas had indeed played by the rules of
the electoral game over that period– but that then the US government had
imposed the three additional requirements on it.  “The Hamas people
say to me, ‘If we do everything the Americans ask of us upfront, then what
is there left to negotiate with the Israelis about?'” he said. He added that
the Hamas leaders indicate fairly strongly that they would be prepared to
meet the three conditions at the end of of a negotiation, but not at the beginning.
 “The Damascus leadership of Hamas has said this, too, ” he said. (Check
my own reporting on these questions, from my trip to Gaza, the West Bank,
and Israel earlier this year,
here.)

Perry defined the sources of Hamas’s political legitimacy as lying in the
fact that it had participated peacefully in and won democratic elections,
that it had exercized responsibility, and had provided services to the people.
 He noted that

In President Bush’s speeches, he mentions Hamas and Hizbullah
a lot as being some kind of threat– much more than al-Qaeda.  But in
the recently leaked National Intelligence Estimate and other intelligence
documents, only Al-Qaeda is mentioned as posing a threat to US interests,
not Hamas or Hizbullah.  In the history of the United States, we have
on occasion fought a war at the wrong time.  But it is rare in American
history that we try to fight the wrong enemy!

Why is this happening?  Maybe we are conflating our own interests with
those Israel?

We should remember that the leaders of both Hamas and Hizbullah condemned
9/11; and both have also themselves been targeted by al-Qaeda.

You know, Harry Truman was extremely smart in the early days of the Cold
War, when he made  a point of engaging with and empowering the socialist
parties in Europe as a way to help deal with and contain the communists.  We
should think about doing something similar with Hamas and Hizbullah…

Then came Crooke, a Brit who was previously Middle East advisor to EU High representative
Javier Solana. He recalled
that he had been in Lebanon throughout the whole of the recent war.  He
said,

It was a big event, with lasting consequences, make no mistake
about that.  It was the first war in which we saw the west losing
the intelligence war at the level of both Human Intelligence and Signals
Intelligence.  Israel found it was impossible to disrupt Hizbullah’s
command and communications– or even, to put their Manar TV station off the
air.

He said his best estimate of Hizbullah’s human losses, which he like various
other researchers in Lebanon based on the public memorial notices and incidence
of “movement” funerals in a society that openly venerates martyrdom, at “around
180.”  (Note that I,
here,
put it at “150 to 170.”)  He asked rhetorically, “Why is the
perception of the Hizbullah victory in the Muslim world so important?  Because
for the first time for a long time an islamist force has stood up to and defied
western hegemony.”

He argued that Hizbullah’s wide popularity in the Arab world marked the
emergence of a new Shia leadership within it, and said

This even further divides the Arab street from their governments.
 It has also broken the consensus that existed previously on the need
to acquiesce with the west in its demands.

He said that in Iran, prior to the war in Lebanon, there had been some doubts
that theories of asymmetrical warfare could work.  

But now these doubts have been dispelled.  The model
now is simply to ignore western airpower.  To dig bunkers deep enough
that you can ride it out, and let it all sweep over you.  And then to
emerge and engage in the prolonged, continuous rocketing of the ‘enemy’ until
this provokes him to send in his ground troops.

Potentially, the success of this model is somethng that could sweep away
many of the landmarks we have come to rely on in the region– in Egypt, Jordan,
Iraq, or Afghanistan.

Crooke was at pains to point out, though, that his interlocutors in Iran
(unidentified) had stressed to him that Iran is open to dialogue.  He
also noted that his interlocutors in Hamas had told him they understood how
different their strategic situation was from Hizbullah’s: primarily because
the terrain of Gaza is almost completely flat, low, and sandy, and offers
none of the advantages Hizbullah has found from using the rocky and hilly
terrain of  South lebanon, and because Hizbullah’s much easier access
to arms supplies and resupplies.

Fred Hof spoke last.  He started by noting that there are different
models of communication with opponents:

The ‘hardliners’ say simply somethng like ‘Country X knows
what it needs to do, and the only issue is whether it does it.’ [This
seems to be Condi Rice’s favorite, very nannyish, way of communicating —
HC]  The ‘Softliners’ urge dialogue all the time.  But dialogue
is a tool that shopuld be used or set aside on a case-by-case basis.

Those who favor dialogue say it gives us many benefits, including gaining
new information about the other party and the possibility fo persuading it.
 However, the hardliners say we should not give uyp the card of ‘engagement’
for nothing– and anyway, the benefits of dialogue are often overdrawn…

If I were in charge, I would have tried to persuade Hamas to engage
in dialogue.  Our preemptive diplomatic disarmament toward them [by which
I think he means the US’s pre-emptive withdrawal of even any offer to engage
diplomatically with them] has only increased Israel’s security challenges
and weakened the US by increasing our problems.

However, regarding Hizbullah, I see Hassan Nasrallah as a part of the Iranian
movement– a sincere believer, not a patsy, or a puppet, or a tool; but still,
a part of their movement.  So why should we talk with Charlie McCarthy
[a well-known American ventriloquist’s dummy from the 1950s] when we could
talk with Edgar Bergen [the ventriloquist]?

I think we would be better served by talking with Iran about our
significant concerns while the US Ambassador in Beirut should deal only
with those Hizbullah members whom he considers to be wholly Lebanese.

There was a short-ish discussion afterwards.  
Bobby Muller
, the President of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, who is an
advisor to Conflicts Forum, spoke a bit about  the role he had played
in 1981 in opening up the very first post-war contacts between Americans and
Vietnamese.  (I wrote half a chapter about Muller’s very inspiring record
in that regard in my 2000 book
The Moral Architecture of World Peace. He is one of my heroes.)  He recalled the first meeting he
had had, in a CF context, with a Hamas leader, “who told me he was constantly
being criticized by the younger people for not killing Americans.”
 Crooke warned against people repeating the mistake Maggie Thatcher had
made when she clung for years to the view that Nelson Mandela was “simply
a terrorist”…

The session was fairly hurried.  Ziad had gone off the line long before.
 The invitation to the event had promised that, ” USIP is convening a roundtable of experts
to explore whether and how to effectively engage Hamas and Hezbollah. The
session will start with an examination of the interests of the two organizations
and their likely negotiating positions. Then, we will explore possible conditions
for and approaches to engagement, based on what we have learned from past
interactions with Hezbollah, Hamas, and other terrorist groups that have entered
political processes.”  Of course, there wasn’t anything like enough
time to get through that ambitious agenda.  Plus, the fact that
Rafi Danziger, the Director of Research and Information at AIPAC, was one of the participants
sitting there eagerly taking notes didn’t exactly create a climate conducive
to a full and frank exploration of these issues…

Oh well, another time!  (Next time, though, maybe they could come up
with a title a little less patronizing and managerialist than “How to
handle Hamas and Hizbullah”?  Maybe “Prospects for a dialogue with…
” or something like that?)