Rice says Carter meeting with Hamas unhelpful

By Sue Pleming

KUWAIT (Reuters) - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice criticized former President Jimmy Carter on Tuesday for holding talks with Hamas and said it would not help the Palestinians reach a peace accord with the Israelis.

"The United States is not going to deal with Hamas and we certainly told President Carter that we did not think that meeting with Hamas was going to help the Palestinians," said Rice on the sidelines of a conference of Iraq's neighbors and major powers.

Carter, who met Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Syria over the weekend, is trying to draw the Islamist group into peace talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

But Rice and other senior U.S. officials have voiced strong concern that Carter's meeting could merely confuse U.S.-brokered peace talks already moving at a slow pace between Abbas and Olmert.

The United States hopes Palestinian statehood talks will result in a deal by the end of President George. W. Bush's term in January, 2009.

"We wanted to make sure there would be no confusion and there would be no sense that Hamas was somehow a party to peace negotiations which Abu Mazen has undertaken with the Israeli prime minister," Rice said, referring to Abbas's nickname.

"So there again is no confusion ... (Abbas) is the Palestinian leadership that is committed to peace that has renounced violence and has negotiated with the Israeli government," said Rice.

Carter said on Monday that the State Department had not advised him against going to the region but Rice contradicted that and said he had been told in firm terms that going there was a bad idea.

"We counseled President Carter against going to the region and particularly against having contact with Hamas," said Rice.

U.S. policy has been to isolate Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip while Abbas runs the occupied West Bank.

But Carter, who helped negotiate a 1979 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, said excluding Hamas, "is just not working" and undertook the trip to try and break the deadlock.

(Editing by Dean Yates)