The West is Losing Because It Thinks Itself The Enemy 

Barry Rubin
June 24, 2007
The Inter-Disciplinary Center Herzliya
Original Source: http://gloria.idc.ac.il/articles/2007/rubin/06_24.html

Why is the West losing the battle against radical Islamist and other forces in the Middle East? 
Simple--because it has people like Alvaro de Soto running things. De Soto, if you hadn't noticed, was a veteran UN official whose last job was as the organization's top Middle East envoy.
De Soto wrote a 52-page secret report on retiring and, duly leaked, it now explains to us that the fault for Hamas's victory in the Gaza Strip--and no doubt just about everything else in the region--lies with the United States and Israel. It is people like de Soto--dare I say over-dressed, over-paid ignoramuses?--who have no idea what they are doing and no understanding of who they are dealing with.
And of course his arguments are published prominently in the mainstream media, thus poisoning yet more minds, printed, for example, uncritically in the June 14 Washington Post for an audience ready to believe anything bad about the current administration.
What does de Soto say? That the UN, United States, and Israelradicalized Hamas by trying to isolate it. This, de Soto explains,hampered peace efforts.
Let us summarize. According to de Soto:
Hamas needs external forces to radicalize it. Thus, it is presumably already moderate.
If Hamas had been given large-scale aid and diplomatic coddling it would have been content to go along. 
That the Quartet which runs Middle East negotiations is too biased toward Israel. In other words, its mistake was not to beevenhanded between Hamas and Israel. 
Where to begin? How about with Paul Berman's analysis in his 2003 book, Terror and Liberalism. Berman explains that there are two basic arguments that make people blind to the realities of the struggle between liberal democracies and totalitarian forces today.
The first is that the claim about there being a radical, intransigent other side is phony. As Berman characterized the argument: the threat is exaggerated by those who have an interest in doing so. This is why the reaction against dealing with reality has been so anti-Jewish and anti-American. Because these are the two groups that want people to think that they are endangered by radical Islamism, Iran, Syria, Hizballah, Hamas, and so on.
The second is to suggest that these movements are not motivated by an extreme doctrine, a thirst for power, and a desire for loot but byunspeakable social conditions through whichsmall groups of exploiters or imperialists, through their terrible deeds, have driven…millions of people out of their minds. Perhaps a population has been humiliated beyond human endurance.
De Soto in effect embraces both arguments. No doubt he would have negotiated Middle East peace now if Hamas leaders had only been feted in Western capitals and given lots of money to run classrooms in which they taught children that their highest ambition should be to be suicide bombers.
Of course, de Soto didn't even get the basic facts right. Despitesanctions the amount of money that went into the West Bank and the Gaza Strip was higher last year than the previous one. And to accept Hamas unconditionally would have showed the movement that it could get everything it wanted without changing anything.
The fact that it was trying to carry out terror attacks against Israel daily and broke every agreement it made counts little for this great diplomat. If Hamas had been given more money it would have used those funds to entrench itself deeper as a permanent regime and to reshape Palestinian society in its image.
And, of course, if anyone deserves blame it is Fatah, a terror-advocating, corrupt, and utterly incompetent group. Here is a simple point of fact: since losing the elections of January 2006 due to its own divisions and poor leadership, Fatah made not a single internal reform and made no leadership or doctrinal changes.
Yet there is still another sin of the de Soto school of diplomacy and statecraft: it robs its supposed social work clients of any identity of their own. According to this world view, Hamas is a blank slate and violence is the result of the United States and Israel scraping their fingers across it.
The real problem here is not that de Soto himself is biased but that he is evidently a fool who knows nothing about the region with which he is playing games. That such a person would be entrusted with a delicate mission of this nature is horrifying.
Hernan de Soto was a great sixteenth-century Spanish adventurer who explored the southeastern United States and discovered uncharted lands. Alvaro de Soto has discovered nothing.