Michael Totten talks with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg about The Real Quagmire in the Middle East.

MJT: You have talked to Hamas people. Should the Israelis or Americans talk to them?

Goldberg: I don’t know what they’d get out of it.

MJT: What did you get out of it when you did it?

Goldberg: A first-hand understanding of how they think. People in the United States find it hard to understand how people in Hamas and Hezbollah think. It’s alien. It’s alien to us. The feverish racism and conspiracy mongering, the obscurantism, the apocalyptic thinking – we can’t relate to that. Every so often, there’s an eruption of that in a place like Waco, Texas, but we’re not talking about 90 people in a compound. We’re talking about whole societies that are captive to this kind of absurdity.

So it’s very important – and you know this better than almost anyone – to go over there yourself and tape it, get it down on paper, and say “this is what they actually say.”