It would make sense for the U.S. government to open up an initially low-level line of communications with Hamas in Gaza and even with Tehran. (It would have been vastly better if either President Bill Clinton or President George W. Bush had had the wisdom to start such a dialog when Muhammad Khatami was president of Iran. But they both seemed determined to throw that opportunity away.)

Also, the Bush administration wasted an opportunity in refusing to reciprocate Syria's highly important intelligence cooperation in rolling up al-Qaida in the year after the 9/11 attacks.

Presumably, former President Carter would agree with all those laudable aims. However, the cold, hard facts are that his efforts in the Middle East over the past week could just make these goals harder to attain than before.

Carter's embrace of Hamas leaders did nothing to help Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas struggling to withstand Hamas' relentless efforts to undermine his authority on the West Bank, and did far too much to legitimate Hamas in the eyes of many Palestinians at Abbas' expense.

Carter's timing of his visit to Gaza was particularly unfortunate coming as it did as a Hamas member of parliament was publicized as vowing to occupy and destroy the city of Rome.

Carter's critics will argue that bungling peace negotiations is nothing new for the former president. His acclaimed achievement of the Camp David I peace conference and the ensuing 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty gave Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin's Likud government enormous loopholes through which it pushed unprecedented Jewish settlement expansion on the West Bank over the following decades.

And Carter's obsession with Camp David left him catastrophically unprepared to anticipate, prevent or ameliorate the impact of the 1978-79 Islamic Revolution in Iran that brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power.

Now the history that occurred as tragedy is repeating itself.

Again his critics will say that his travels around the Middle East are doing nothing to strengthen badly frayed U.S. ties and credibility with traditional, loyal and strong regional allies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority. Instead, they are giving major prestige boosts to Hamas at the expense of Abbas, to Iran at the expense of Saudi Arabia and to Syria at the expense of Jordan.

Time, of course, will tell if former President Carter's initiative helped or hindered the Middle East peace process.