Poll: U.S. should engage with terrorists

WASHINGTON, Aug. 21 (UPI) -- A majority of U.S. terror experts favor engaging with terror groups enjoying popular support at the ballot box, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, says a new survey.

The results point up the shifting and morally nuanced character of much counter-terror strategy, according to former CIA official Robert Baer.

The survey, published this week by the Center for American Progress and Foreign Policy magazine, asked more than 100 U.S. terror and national security experts which of five policy options they would advocate in relation to a series of Islamic groups defined as terrorists by the U.S. government.

The options ranged from capturing or killing members, to isolating them with sanctions and boycotts, all the way to treating the governments they run “like any other sovereign country’s government.”

With regard to Hamas, a majority (53 percent) said the United States should “selectively engage more moderate leaders … in an effort to drive a wedge between moderates and extremists.” Nineteen percent favored even more engagement than that, while only 24 percent favored isolation or capturing and killing.

With regard to Hezbollah, the largest group (47 percent) favored selective engagement, while 18 percent would go further and less than a third (29 percent) favored either isolation or capturing and killing.

“It’s one indication that, after six years, we may be entering a new chapter in the war on terror,” said a statement from the survey’s authors.

"In the 1990s (Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan) Nasrallah was a bloody-handed monster, a terrorist killer of the first order,” Baer told United Press International. “But he's evolved into something else."

Hezbollah, a legal political party in Lebanon, has seats in the Parliament there and a role in government. Baer says that Hezbollah is the only organization doing serious reconstruction work following last year's Israeli bombardment of the country. "The (international aid) money being sent to the Lebanese government is being stolen."

"Should we now hold him accountable for what he did 10 years ago? Or should we deal with him as what he's become. That's a decision I leave to the moralists and philosophers."

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Shaun Waterman, UPI Homeland and National Security Editor