In his State of the Union speech Monday night, President Bush said this: “Our foreign policy is based on a clear premise: We trust that people, when given the chance, will choose a future of freedom and peace.”

Hamas never got the memo.

The Iranian-backed terrorist group—which Palestinians put into power two years ago in free elections, and which violently seized the Gaza Strip and transformed it into a terrorist fortress—has just effectively tripled its base of operations.

Last week, in a coordinated attack, Hamas blew open the border with Egypt and set up shop in northern Sinai.

The feat was huge. In a swoop, Hamas markedly increased its threat not only to Israel, but also to the current Egyptian government. It also shifted the regional balance of power yet deeper into Tehran’s ambit.

Hamas officials revealed that the demolition had been long planned. Operatives were cutting through the heavy metal border blockade for months, preparing for a sequence of bomb explosions that would bring it down in an instant. Hamas also “minutely planned” the subsequent flooding of Gazans into northern Egypt, according todebkafile sources within Egyptian intelligence. The terrorist group had paid $300 to each of the half-million refugees, “which accounts for the shopping spree they could suddenly afford,” debka said (January 29).

The mob included more than just eager shoppers, however. It also held terrorists on a mission. Carrying masses of weapons, they traveled in both directions—into Gaza, and out to specific preordained locations in Egypt.

And patrolmen just sat and watched it all. “Egyptian security men at the border were very passive—they wanted this to happen,” said one terrorist. “They didn’t prevent anything from coming in or going out.”

Why so passive? Interesting story.

Hosni Mubarak’s government had been forewarned about the border bust, and the Egyptian president ordered his troops to let the people through. This mostly reflected his need to appear, in the eyes of his own people, sympathetic to the Palestinians—despite his fear of Hamas’s growing power.

However, wanting to contain the crisis to the Sinai, Mubarak blockaded the Peninsula and the Suez Canal, shutting down shipping and ferry services to the Egyptian mainland. Away from the media glare at the border crossing, in one 24-hour period, Egyptian forces caught 30 Palestinians “on their way to the Suez Canal armed with weapons, explosives and devices for monitoring Egyptian and Israeli security communications,” debka reported.

The Egyptians also caught a second group moving toward the Egyptian-Israeli border—a border that is 137 miles long, fenceless, and porous.

Hamas simply took the opportunity to establish a beachhead in the Sinai. And Egypt let it happen.

Israel has had enough problems dealing with Hamas over the fortified frontier it shares with the Gaza Strip. It promptly responded to the nightmare of a Hamas presence in the northern Sinai by increasing security and blocking huge sections of its southern desert to civilian traffic.

An empty Sinai forms the basis of the peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, in place since 1979. There is largely a power vacuum there; the area is lightly patrolled by Multinational Force and Observers (mfo) forces. That is, until news arrived from Egyptian sources that Hamas “had begun moving some of its elite units into the new stronghold” in the Sinai, debka wrote. Then the mfo, led by the U.S., moved its people and equipment out. Their mission there didn’t say anything about driving back incursions by Palestinian terrorists.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and Hamas and its Iranian patrons surely know what to do with one. They’d apparently been eyeing this particular space for some time.

Now Hamas has squatters’ rights to a chunk of Egyptian soil—not unlike the territory Hezbollah controls in southern Lebanon. In both cases, the conquest traces back to the Islamic Republic.

This all puts Egypt’s enfeebled president in a terrible spot. In fact, it looks an awful lot like checkmate.

Hosni Mubarak’s alliances with both Israel and the United States have trashed his legitimacy in the eyes of his own people. The Rafah border breach has offered Egyptian opposition groups—chief among them the officially banned Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological parent of Hamas—the opportunity to take to the streets in dozens of demonstrations to express solidarity with their Palestinian brothers.

Their obvious message to Mubarak is, any move to secure the border is a betrayal of the Palestinians in favor of Israel. Make a move and we’ll explode.

Mubarak is trying to prevent his country from falling to the Muslim Brotherhood and turning Islamist. This episode shows he’s realizing it’s a losing battle.

Now Mubarak is trying to preserve his regime by playing their game: taking a phone call from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; moving toward re-establishing ties with Iran; condemning the Israeli prime minister; permitting terrorists to cross into Gaza (last month, Egypt allowed thousands of Gazans to return from Mecca back into Gaza without properly checking them, including terrorists who had gone to Iran and Lebanon for military training); meeting with Hamas leaders; and now, looking the other way when Hamas busts into his country and pitches its camel tent there. But this series of token gestures, nakedly aimed at pacifying the maddening throngs, instead only exposes his own surrender to them.

Iran is pressing its advantage.

It is deeply interested in drawing Egypt, a formidable regional counterweight, onside—and in further encircling Israel by adding a presence on its southern border to what it already has in Syria and Lebanon to Israel’s north. In recent months it has been very warm toward Egypt: saying it is ready to reopen its embassy in Cairo, regularly sending and hosting officials. After the Rafah breach, Iran asked Egypt not to reseal the border so it could continue sending aid to Gazans. On Monday, Tehran offered to airlift supplies to El Arish airport, just south of Gaza. This move, debka noted, “would bring Iranian airplanes into the Egyptian-Israeli border region for the first time. Iran would thereby claim a stake in the lives of the Palestinians living around Israel’s borders for the entire Arab world to see” (January 28). Iran is masterfully exploiting the situation to snake its tendrils into the area.

Consider, now, just how much Hamas and Iran owe their terrifying success to the foreign-policy premise elucidated by the U.S. president: “We trust that people, when given the chance, will choose a future of freedom and peace.”

That trust empowered the Palestinians to vote Hamas into government positions. That trust has kept Western aid flowing into Hamas haversacks.

That trust dictated Israel turn control of Gaza over to the Palestinians, and control of Rafah over to Egypt. That trust mandated that Israel remain circumspect in its response to Hamas rocket attacks, and now to this surge into Egypt.

That trust views all these events with stubborn optimism, convinced that, somehow, the choice for freedom and peace is just over the horizon. “By the end of this year … a democratic Israel and a democratic Palestine … side by side in peace,” the president also promised in his speech on Monday.

Here is the reality. That trust enabled Hamas to orchestrate the Rafah rupture and thus catapult three menacing trends forward: the apparent doom of Israel; the fall of Mubarak and subsequent radicalization of Egypt; and the rise of Iran.

All three are trends the Trumpet has forecast for over a decade. The Trumpet’s editor in chief prophesied fully 13 years ago that the enmity between Egypt and Iran would give way to an alliance. (You can read about that in our March Trumpet issue here and here.)

It appears no amount of failure and betrayal will break the trust the president spoke of.

And thus, Hamas and Iran will continue their march, unrestrained.