Reality vs. Barack Obama

Here's what Barack Obama had to say about George Mitchell's Middle East trip:

U.S. President Barack Obama says "the moment is ripe" for Israelis and Palestinians to achieve a lasting peace, but he stressed that all parties in the region must play a role in the process. [...]

The president says he told Mitchell to use the trip to begin listening to all parties concerned, saying that all too often the U.S. starts the process by "dictating" the terms of the negotiations.

Obama then added, "And by 'all parties' I actually mean 'not all parties'":

Continuing with a Bush administration policy of not talking to Hamas, which the United States considers a terrorist organization, Mitchell is not expected to meet with any members of the movement. Instead, he is expected to focus on talks with the more moderate Palestinian Authority, which holds sway in the West Bank but was ousted from Gaza by Hamas forces in June 2007.

So Obama expects us to believe that by ostracizing the legitimately-elected government of the Palestinians, the U.S. is involving "all parties concerned" and is no longer "dictating" the terms of the negotiations.  And he also apparently expects us to accept the idea that the best path to peace is to sideline Hamas—an organization which is not only the elected government but now the primary resistance force of the Palestinians, against which Israel just initiated a massive military operation, and without whose active participation any extended truce or negotiated settlement will be impossible to implement.

I don't know about you, but I certainly don't see any glaringly obvious fatal flaws in this strategy.

UPDATE: The first citation above is from a VOA article which was later significantly edited.  Here are Obama's actual words, from the transcript:

And so what I told him is start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating -- in the past on some of these issues -- and we don't always know all the factors that are involved. So let's listen. He's going to be speaking to all the major parties involved.

Comments

[KDelphi]

We will only dictate to dictators who supply us with bases and resources..who will, in turn, dictate to us...

[SteveB]

So I guess Hamas is a party, but not a "major" one. Like the Greens or the Libertarians, except that they, you know, won the last election.

[Gekkou]

Uhhh. So Former Sen. Mitchell, who once NEGOTIATED with Sinn Fein in the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement in 1998 is not allowed to talk to Hamas? Because Sinn Fein absolutely had no links to the Provisional IRA (who still had all their weapons 'till recently), well except that anyone on the leadership council for Sinn Fein was also on the leadership council of the Provos. As Wikipedia (that font of all knowledge) notes: The current British Government stated in 2005 that "we had always said all the way through we believed that Sinn Féin and the IRA were inextricably linked and that had obvious implications at leadership level".

And yet, it was OK to negotiate with them. Interesting. I guess we'll only talk to white Christian terrorists.

[John Caruso]

Yes, and it's only made more absurd by this ("Mitchell's message: U.S. to focus efforts on Gaza cease-fire"):

U.S. Mideast envoy George Mitchell is due to arrive in the country Wednesday, and is expected to tell Israeli and Palestinian officials the Obama administration wants to focus on stabilizing the Israel-Gaza cease-fire, rebuilding the Gaza Strip, and countering arms smuggling into Gaza with the help of Israel, Egypt and the European Union.

So Mitchell is going there specifically to "focus on stabilizing the Israel-Gaza cease-fire" (Israel-Gaza?)—rather than addressing other or more general issues—and yet he's not going to talk to one of the two parties that's responsible for some of the fire that's supposed to cease. Makes perfect sense to me.

So much for "America has to talk to its enemies" (not that it even survived the campaign, of course).