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Enough Mediating. America Should Deploy Its Might Against Hamas

(Washington Post) Roger Zakheim - On Oct. 7, Hamas murdered more than 40 Americans, and five Americans are still being held captive more than 200 days later. Since then, the Biden administration has tried to get the hostages home by playing the role of mediator. This approach fundamentally misunderstands the conflict, as well as the tools required to free captive Americans. It is time to jettison this approach and deploy U.S. might instead. For more than seven months, U.S. officials have treated the Gaza war as if it were a conflict between state actors, employing shuttle diplomacy and negotiating with both sides. They have indulged in the conceit that you can negotiate with a terrorist organization by treating it as an equal party. Yet the mediator approach has applied equal, if not more, pressure on U.S. ally Israel to make concessions than it has on Hamas, the original aggressors. U.S. mediation has achieved little. It is long overdue for the U.S. to shift the paradigm. Over the past 20 years, the U.S. has developed an array of intelligence, economic, and military tools and techniques that can pressure and destroy terrorist networks. They should be deployed against Hamas. For starters, the Treasury Department should aggressively target sanctions on entities that fund and fuel Hamas. At the top of the list should be the Central Bank of Iran. The same should be done for Qatari and Turkish entities that support and aid the terrorist organization. We should also unleash our military and intelligence community's world-class targeting and strike capability. Shifting to a more aggressive stance would also send a powerful signal to Hamas' leadership that the U.S. will hold Hamas directly responsible for how it treats American citizens. The writer, director of the Ronald Reagan Institute, is a former general counsel for the House Armed Services Committee.
2024-05-16 00:00:00
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