In an op-ed published today in The New York Times, former Obama administration adviser Dennis Ross warns that in formulating a policy to counter the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the United States must “not reach out to Islamists.”

Ross explains that because the ideology fueling Islamists, including the Muslim Brotherhood, Tunisia’s Ennahda party, Hezbollah, Hamas and their patrons Qatar, Turkey and Iran, “is not compatible with pluralism or democracy,” the United States should instead reach out to the Middle East’s non-Islamists:

The non-Islamists include the traditional monarchies, authoritarian governments in Egypt and Algeria, and secular reformers who may be small in number but have not disappeared. They do not include Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria; he is completely dependent on Iran and Hezbollah and cannot make decisions without them.

Today, the non-Islamists want to know that the United States supports them. For America, that means not partnering with Iran against ISIS, though both countries may avoid interfering with each other’s operations against the insurgents in Iraq.

Ross notes that the non-Islamist Middle Eastern countries “favor stability, the free flow of oil and gas, and they oppose terrorism,” and adds that “the forces that threaten us also threaten them.”

Ross’s breakdown of Islamist and non-Islamists is similar to Jonathan Spyer’s observation in Qatar’s Rise and America’s Tortured Mideast Policy, which appeared in the August 2014 issue of The Tower Magazine. Spyer notes that there is a “three way divide in today’s Middle East – moderate and Western-oriented Sunni Arab states, like Egypt, Jordan, UAE, Saudi, Bahrain, Kuwait and others; the Sunni extremists terrorist supporting states, Qatar and Turkey, who fund and promote forces like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas; and the dangerous and radical axis of Iran, Assad, and Hezbollah.” While Ross puts both the Iranian axis and the Muslim Brotherhood group into the same category, both he and Spyer agree that only the moderate Sunni states can serve as a bulwark against the extreme forces threatening the Middle East.

[Photo: nrbelex / WikiCommons ]