Recently, John McCain has been harping about the fact that Hamas leadership has expressed a preference for Barack Obama as president. Skipping for the moment the fact that John McCain supported a war that pissed away universal goodwill for the US after 9/11 and created the most effective recruiting and training environment for terrorists in several lifetimes, I find there are several problems with his logic.

McCain seems to (deliberately, perhaps) misunderstand three things.

• Terrorists sometimes want a specific political goal, or at least claim to want it, but they usually want different things in private and public. A public announcement that terrorists will rejoice in a particular outcome in the presidential election has, at best, no correlation with what they actually want.


• Terrorism is completely ineffective at achieving any end except fostering conflict. Well organized terrorists like Hamas want conflict above all other things. Israel and United States are not up to the task of wiping out organizations like Hamas with violence--if they were, Hamas would have been history long ago, given the superior firepower and training of Israeli forces. A violent religious extremist doesn't blow himself up in a public square hoping there won't be a retribution--he is counting on a retribution, and he is counting on that retribution to be severe and generalized; this radicalizes moderates, undermines his enemy's political position, and forces other co-religionists to choose sides, with his side at an advantage. A belligerent mad bomber such as McCain and Clinton at least portray themselves to be is ideal from their point of view.


• Historically, the least belligerent party to a given terrorist group has been the most effective at countering that group. Among the major party candidates, Jose Luis Zapatero of Spain, Tony Blair of Britain, and Yitzhak Rabin of Israel were the least belligerent to their terrorist opponents. In all three cases, they were the far more effective against ETA, the IRA, and Palestinian terrorists than their more belligerent opponents. None of these candidates were prepared to make concessions directly to their terrorists opponents, but all of them drove wedges between the terrorist organizations and the moderate members of their constituencies.

In general, I seriously doubt that Hamas will benefit from the election of Barack Obama or suffer from the election of John McCain in the least. There may be rational reasons to vote for John McCain over his three likely general election opponents (though I can't think of any at the moment), but a perceived endorsement by the leader of Hamas for his likely Democratic opponent is one of the dumbest reasons to do so that I can imagine.