Obama-era Deal for Hamas Comes Back to Haunt United States

For this report, we have to take a quick drip down memory lane to 2012.

At the time, the Obama administration was recommending that Hamas be permitted to open and operate an office in Doha, Qatar.

Obama, much like Biden now dealing with Iran, had hopes that coddling these terrorists would result in diplomacy, but it has backfired big league.

Thanks, Barack

Obama’s goal was to have a diplomatic channel open with Hamas that could be used for various negotiations.

Qatar would serve as the conduit, only the grand scheme did not quite work out the way that Obama had hoped.

What this did do, however, was give Hamas and Qatar more standing in the Middle East.

Richard Goldberg, the coordinator for the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign on Iran, stated, "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.

"That thesis was disproven on Oct. 7, so whatever has happened in the last few years, it doesn't matter because Oct. 7 now stands as the new reality.

"It disproves anybody's hypotheses that Hamas would somehow become a governing entity, not a terrorist group."

Goldberg concluded, "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.”

Steven Simon, a senior director on the National Security Council (NSC) for the Middle East and North Africa during the Obama administration, also offered some insight on how this benefitted Qatar.

Simon, who now teaches Middle Eastern studies at the University of Washington and serves as a research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, stated, "So it sort of worked in terms of intra-Gulf rivalries… then, it works for Qatar because they, like a lot of these smaller Gulf states, fancies itself a big player, and here was a chance to be a big player because they were a pivotal factor in the policy arena involving Israel and the United States, among others.

"They had leverage. They had some juice, and they kind of liked that."

If you ask me, it sounds like Qatar used Hamas just as much as Hamas has been using Qatar in all of this.

I am really starting to question where Qatar’s loyalties lie, as it would not surprise me one bit to learn somewhere down the road they knew about this attack and planned on using it to raise the global profile of Qatar as a serious player in the Middle East.