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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (22296)	3/26/2002 8:18:19 PM
From: Dayuhan	Respond to of 281500

Agreed. But I am still hunting for sources that I can trust to tell me about troop movements if and when they happen. US troop movements are usually reported in great detail, even on CNN and the other very superficial outlets. I don't think you have to worry about missing out on a deployment of the scale under discussion. debka has reported on a Hisbullah - Al Qaeda buildup in Lebanon, which other sources have scarcely mentioned. If nobody else has mentioned it, it may be that the reports are unconfirmed: Debka can get away with "according to DEBKAfile's military and intelligence sources", larger publications can't. That doesn't mean Debka is necessarily wrong, or that they are trying to get more mileage from the story than its substance deserves, just that a specialist publication that makes no bones about its ideological bias can get away with being quicker on the trigger. For myself, if I see Debka - and nobody else - reporting on such a buildup, I classify it as I would classify any single-source data point: something to be considered, but not necessarily accepted. I'm not terribly worried about Hizbollah anyway. The Israelis have a very good intelligence net in Southern Lebanon, and I expect that if the threat reaches the unacceptable point the jets will fly and the tanks will roll, and that will be that. Hizbollah cannot stand up to the Israeli armed forces, and the Israeli armed forces would, I suspect, be quite happy to take on a traditional operation. They've showed no hesitation about preemptive strikes in Lebanon before, and I don't think they would now. The Americans would not prevent it; they would probably encourage it, if the threat were clear. Europe would squeal, as Europe does, but nobody would care. The suicide bombings and the intifadeh are much greater threats to Israel than conventional external attack, in my opinion of course.