The disaster of Hamas’ victory wasn’t expected or predicted by our sophisticated and well-equipped intelligence community (IC). Add this to an increasing list of total failures of reporting and insight by the men and women who are paid to do it.
What the hell went wrong? It's not like this is a new group. Hamas has long been the target of the IC's attention. How many open source books have been written about it? How many muslim charities have been shut down in part because of their role in funding Hamas operations? In 1996 we were shocked to see a rag-tag collection of Stone Age tribal goat herders seized control of Kabul. But the Taliban were mostly unknown outside of SW Asia. What's the excuse with Hamas?
It’s 1996 all over again, with senior administration officials shrugging their shoulders and saying, “Idunno,” to events unfolding on the other side of the planet:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice concedes that United States failed to understand depth of hostility among Palestinians toward their longtime Fatah leaders; election victory by military group Hamas has reduced to tatters crucial assumptions underlying American policies and hopes in Middle East; Rice's comments seen reflecting second-guessing over how administration failed to foresee, or factor into its thinking, possibility of victory by Hamas, which US, Israel and European Union consider terrorist organization sworn to Israel's destruction; question is whether administration was so wedded to its belief in democracy that it could not see dangers of holding elections in regions where Islamist groups are strong and democratic institutions weak; Martin Indyk, Middle East negotiator in Clinton administration, blames what he calls 'disaster' on Pres Bush's belief that democracy and elections solve everything; administration officials, including Rice, defend decision to rebuff Israel when it warned that election should not be held as long as Hamas participated while refusing to lay down its arms (Source: NY Times abstract)
The source of this article is the New York Times. As a result, you have the obligatory, worthless second-guessing from a Clinton-era "analysts." It's being blamed on the Administration's naive emphasis on elections and democracy. God knows, six decades of appeasement and accommodation to Middle Eastern kleptocrats has been such a success! As ThreatsWatch points out:
The failure that Hamas’ election represents is not that of the wave brought on largely by the current Bush Administration policies, regardless of one’s opinion of those policies, but rather the maturation of the failures that preceded them.
Hamas didn't pop up out of the Gaza sand. It's been an oozing evil for over a decade, feeding off of official and illegal funds from its rich piggy banks in the West. The failure here isn't "Pres Bush''s belief that democracy and elections solve everything." No, the failure here is in the IC's apparent inability to see the event coming. And since most senior-level IC analysts have been working these issues for decades, I'd like to know what they didn't understand about Hamas.
The failure was -- once again -- a failure of imagination, the kind of imagination that could see a terrorist group in control of a strategic area of the Levant.
(Note: I wrote a good part of the preceding post on January 30th, but chose not to post it until I could calm down. It's good I sat on it, because the extent of the IC's failure is finally sinking in.)
