You might wonder why the Hamas leadership seems to have been given a safe haven in Qatar. Why is that country which we call an ally hosting these characters?
Blame Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who asked them to do so.
The U.S. played a direct role in helping set up the Hamas office in Qatar during the Obama administration, seeking appeasement and soft diplomacy but ultimately failing to control the terrorist group as it festered in Gaza. [….]
Qatar’s Ambassador to Washington Meshal bin Hamad Al Thani wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that his government set up the Hamas political office in Doha “after a request from Washington to establish indirect lines of communication” in 2012.
The Qataris said it shouldn’t be interpreted as endorsement, but that they help with “indirect communication” and that they were involved in the hostage negotiations. I wrote earlier about the release of hostages including young Emily Hand, whose father had initially thought she was dead, and the release of the first group of hostages.
Richard Goldberg, the coordinator for the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign on Iran, ripped that Obama administration decision, saying it’s come back to bite us now, “For many years now, both the United States and Israel have been living in a policy fantasy world where we have tolerated Hamas’ existence in Doha and believed that Doha would be a moderating influence.” He said the Oct. 7 attack disproved that.
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Goldberg argued that the Doha office was “clearly a policy that was already in line with the Obama administration’s thinking of how to remake the Middle East in a Muslim Brotherhood image, and the Qataris played right into that.”
He explained that the Qataris viewed it as taking their “longtime client Hamas” and seeking to “help moderate them and help separate them from the Iranians,” selling it as a “win-win for everybody.”
“Well, 11 years later, we’re paying a very, very high price for that fatal mistake of allowing Doha to sell us on this route, and if we do not finally reverse this policy and shut down Qatari support for Hamas, we are guaranteeing ourselves more and more Oct. 7 [attacks] to come in the future,” Goldberg said. [….]
“There has to be a policy decision that we will no longer tolerate a state sponsor or safe harbor for Hamas, period,” Goldberg argued. “If that is the policy of the United States, the next question is: What are the consequences for any state that violates that policy?”
While Steven Simon, a senior director on the National Security Council (NSC) for the Middle East and North Africa during the Obama administration, didn’t agree with everything that Goldberg said, he acknowledged that things were in “crisis management mode.”
“They’re in crisis management mode, they’re in damage limitation mode,” he stressed, saying that there will be an effort to “salvage” the value of the office going forward — whatever that might look like.
How many harmful things from the Obama and Biden administrations have led to this? I’m sure we can find a lot, including their coddling and shoveling money to Iran.
But the question is whether or not they are going to learn from their mistakes.
I wouldn’t bet on it.
