To quote:

The United States and Israel are discussing ways to destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again, according to Israeli officials and Western diplomats.

The intention is to starve the Palestinian Authority of money and international connections to the point where, some months from now, its president, Mahmoud Abbas, is compelled to call a new election. The hope is that Palestinians will be so unhappy with life under Hamas that they will return to office a reformed and chastened Fatah movement.

The officials also argue that a close look at the election results shows that Hamas won a smaller mandate than previously understood.

The officials and diplomats, who said this approach was being discussed at the highest levels of the State Department and the Israeli government, spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.

First, of course, the open and outright hostility to Hamas show to date, while completely understandable, in many ways plays into Hamas' hands or rhetoric.

Second, working more or less clearly to bring down the government right from the get-go would rather confirm anti-Western agitprop on the part of Islamists that the West and in particular the US support for democracy is limited only to the folks we like. Further to that, this spin or facile insistence on 'secular' governments can only in reality discredit the same choice by making them appear nothing more than the stalking horses of foreign interests. I am unaware of any people in the world that particularly enjoy having their governments appear to be in the hands of foriegn interests (above all hated ones).