Get rid of the Hamas, lock, stock and barrel.
Here is an article on Hesbollah, which indicates that they are, among the "non states", probably our biggest terrorist threat.
FOREIGN AFFAIRS
The Hezbollah Model
By James Kitfield, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Friday, May 17, 2002
As Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's motorcade pulled out of Beirut's airport gates on April 15, it passed by thousands of demonstrators furiously chanting "Death to America!" and "Death to Israel!" Many of the protesters waved pictures of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the popular leader of the Lebanese Islamic militant group, Hezbollah. For Powell, whose rise to the top of America's national security and diplomatic ranks had spanned more than two decades of strife in the Middle East, the not-so-welcome greeting could have revived some bitter memories.
Powell was the senior military assistant to then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in 1983, when a Hezbollah suicide-bomber drove a truck loaded with explosives into a barracks in Beirut filled with U.S. Marines, killing 241 American service members and prompting a hastened U.S. withdrawal from Lebanon. Powell looked on Weinberger as one of his great mentors, and he knew the older man had never fully overcome his regret at being unable to dissuade President Reagan from launching the ill-fated peacekeeping deployment.
Hezbollah also left its indelible mark on the legacy of Ronald Reagan, another patron central to Powell's career. Powell served as Reagan's deputy national security and national security adviser between 1987 and 1989, at the height of that administration's worst scandal -- Iran-Contra. At the instruction of its Iranian overseers, Hezbollah and its associates in the 1980s had begun a kidnapping spree in Lebanon targeted at Westerners. They eventually took 18 Americans hostage and killed three of them, including the CIA's Beirut station chief, William Buckley. Many of the rest were freed, but only after the United States had sold advanced U.S. weaponry to Iran via Israel, a secret swap arranged by Powell's predecessor Robert McFarlane . The administration diverted the profits from the sale to the Nicaraguan Contras, and the revelation of both acts greatly tarnished Reagan's final years in office.
Also, Hezbollah terrorists in 1985 hijacked TWA Flight 847 and murdered U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem, whose body was unceremoniously dumped on the tarmac of the Beirut airport.
In the ethos of the American military, fallen comrades are left behind neither literally nor in memory, and at heart Colin Powell is a soldier. It's very unlikely that he has forgotten Hezbollah's attacks against the United States. And yet there he was last month, breaking off his peace mission to Israel and the West Bank to make an unscheduled trip to Beirut and Damascus, and again the subject was Hezbollah. Powell's task was to persuade Lebanon, Syria, and by proxy Iran to rein in Hezbollah attacks on Israel's northern border and avert turning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a wider regional war.
Indeed, if not for Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim group closely aligned with Iran that proselytizes a form of fundamentalist Islamic theocracy, Powell might not have been in the Middle East at all. Many experts trace the current crisis in Israel and the West Bank to May 2000, when Israeli forces retreated from land they had occupied in southern Lebanon for nearly 20 years in the face of increasingly effective assaults by guerrillas from Hezbollah. The hit-and-run attacks lowered the casualty ratio between Hezbollah guerrillas and Israeli soldiers from 10-to-1 to 1-to-1. The Israeli withdrawal appeared to much of the world, or at least the Arab world, like a defeat.
Many analysts believe that Hezbollah's "victory" in Lebanon convinced Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat that he had another option besides negotiations when he flew to Camp David just two months later. If Arafat didn't get what he wanted from President Clinton , he could resort to armed resistance, terror, and body counts -- tactics that he unleashed with a vengeance when talks collapsed. Since then, the cycle of ever-more-deadly suicide attacks, followed by ever-more-punishing Israeli responses, can be seen in part as a life-and-death struggle to prove or discredit the relevance of the "Hezbollah model" to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"We cannot understand the new character and intensity of this intifada without understanding the influence that Hezbollah has had on the Palestinian resistance movement," said Fawaz Gerges, a MacArthur fellow and professor of Middle East affairs at Sarah Lawrence College. Hezbollah leaders, he said, have skillfully and very publicly argued that Palestinians now have two models from which to choose -- the old ineffective model of negotiations, or the new "victorious" model of armed struggle.
"It's now clear that Palestinian groups such as Hamas and [Arafat's Al] Fatah have adopted the Hezbollah model," said Gerges, author of "America and Political Islam: Clash of Cultures or Clash of Interests?"
"That's tragic," Gerges said, "because it not only represents a severe misreading of the very different circumstances between southern Lebanon and the occupied territories, but it also plays into the hands of the hard-liners on both sides by creating two separate and opposing narratives to the dispute. The Palestinians are inspired to intensify their armed resistance, which only increases Israel's determination to disprove the 'Hezbollah model' and its underlying supposition that they can be defeated by force."
As he left Beirut and Damascus on April 15, Powell issued a stern warning that the United States and Israel would hold Lebanon and Syria responsible for Hezbollah actions. The warning had its desired short-term effect: Since Powell's meetings with Lebanese Foreign Minister Mahmoud Hammoud and Syrian President Bashar Assad, Hezbollah guerrillas have stayed relatively quiet on Israel's northern borders.
When the history of America's war on international terrorism is written, however, Powell's trip may stand as the turning point where the initial momentum created by the September 11 attacks, and the moral clarity of targeting the "evildoers" Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein , became entangled in the moral ambiguity that has long defined the Middle East conflict. And no group has more successfully exploited that gray area between terrorism and legitimate resistance than Hezbollah, a group that the U.S. State Department labels terrorist, but that the Lebanese and much of the Arab world know simply as the "party of God."
Inevitable Showdown
Senior national security, intelligence, and foreign-affairs experts in the Bush administration have anticipated an eventual confrontation with Hezbollah since shortly after the September 11 attacks. That's why the State Department in November strengthened the financial sanctions against the group. It also explains why the FBI placed three Hezbollah members on its list of 22 most-wanted terrorists, released in October 2001, that includes mostly Al Qaeda operatives.
"As they contemplated President Bush's war on terror, I know a number of senior CIA people believed we would have to confront the problem of Hezbollah sooner or later," said a knowledgeable intelligence source. "Mostly they hoped it would be later, because they don't feel ready [for such a confrontation]."
That assessment was confirmed this week by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham, D-Fla. "Al Qaeda is not considered to be the most effective terrorist group in the world," he told USA Today on May 13. "The people who are briefing us say Hezbollah is the A-team of terrorism.... They say they are the most proficient and most violent."
The very fact that the White House is now conducting a Middle East shuttle diplomacy that it had sought desperately to avoid is a clear indication that its plans for the "war on terror" have been profoundly disrupted. After the defeat of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, the White House had hoped to capitalize on this success by building a coalition against the widely disparaged and isolated Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Taking on Iraq, the administration reasoned, would gain further momentum and increase the coercive impact of American power on the remaining state sponsors of terrorism, such as Syria and Iran. Powell's trip signaled a clear recognition that Washington's first foreign-policy priority is now the much thornier issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, along with its prolific offspring of Islamic terror groups, of which Hezbollah is the most powerful and widely emulated.
Certainly, Powell's visit to Damascus and Beirut failed to produce anything resembling the blanket condemnation of terrorism in general, or of Hezbollah in particular, that is central to the Bush doctrine of, "You're either with us, or you're against us in the fight against terror." To the contrary, in a joint news conference held by Powell and Hammoud after the April 15 talks in Beirut, the Lebanese foreign minister described the attacks by Hezbollah on Israel's northern border as legitimate acts of "resistance." Although the United Nations recognizes Israel's complete withdrawal from Lebanon, Syria and some Lebanese factions assert that Israel still is unlawfully holding the Shebaa Farms area that abuts the Syrian and Lebanese borders.
With nine members in the Lebanese parliament, a reputation for political incorruptibility, and an exalted status among Arab publics for its role in "vanquishing" Israeli forces from southern Lebanon, Hezbollah represents a daunting yet possibly unavoidable front in the U.S.-led war against terror. Asked whether they are with the United States or Hezbollah, the overwhelming majority of Arabs would choose the latter.
"Hezbollah is respected more than most, if not all, of the governments in the Middle East based on its 'victory' over Israel and this trajectory that it has followed from strictly a terrorist organization into a disciplined militia, a social welfare group involved in running schools and clinics in Lebanon, and finally into a bona fide political party and movement broadly supported by the Shiite Muslim community," said Bruce Hoffman, the author of Inside Terrorism and a longtime terrorism expert at Rand, a think tank headquartered in Santa Monica, Calif. "Our problem is that Hezbollah's path to 'legitimacy' has been purchased with the blood of over 300 dead Americans, and the model that its leaders are now actively seeking to export challenges the axiom that 'terrorism doesn't work.' As long as the Hezbollah model goes unchallenged, we'll have no hope of persuading other aggrieved groups that terror is a repugnant and useless tool for gaining legitimate political power."
Al Qaeda Redux
There's little question that Hezbollah stands second only to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda on the Bush administration's target list of international terror groups with global reach. According to a 2001 State Department report, the organization operates cells on five continents -- Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. Earlier this year, for instance, four men pleaded guilty to funneling profits to Hezbollah from a cigarette-smuggling operation in North Carolina. Considered the master bomb-builders in the terrorist pantheon, Hezbollah also largely pioneered the suicide bombing tactic employed to such devastating effect in the September 11 attacks on the United States and recently in Israel. And Hezbollah has launched massively destructive bombing attacks far away from its Lebanese base -- in Argentina, for instance.
Yonah Alexander, the director of the International Center for Terrorism Studies at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies in Arlington, Va., has interviewed Hezbollah members and followed the group going back to its formation in Lebanon in the early 1980s. After Al Qaeda, he says, Hezbollah has the most elaborate international network of sister organizations and secret cells around the world. "Especially in the Muslim world, you can find a Saudi Arabian Hezbollah, a Turkish Hezbollah, a Pakistani Hezbollah, and other offshoots. Their agenda has always extended beyond Lebanon, and the goal is to export Iranian-style Islamic revolution. Much like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah operates at this dangerous intersection between theology and terrorism. That makes them a very serious threat."
Although Hezbollah began curtailing its terrorist bombings to focus on guerrilla-type operations against Israel Defense Forces in southern Lebanon beginning in the mid-1990s, U.S. intelligence experts remain greatly worried about its ties and linkages to today's most active Islamic terrorist groups. Al Qaeda operatives involved in the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa have testified in court of meetings between bin Laden and Imad Fayez Mugniyah, the suspected head of Hezbollah's "security apparatus," or terror wing. More recently, senior Israeli officials have charged that Al Qaeda members from Afghanistan are joining Hezbollah in Lebanon after traveling through Iran. Hezbollah officials have also made no secret of their training and arms support for the Palestinian extremist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, two groups behind many of the suicide attacks on Israeli civilians in the past 19 months.
U.S. investigators have not found the fingerprints of suspected Hezbollah operatives on a direct terrorist attack against Americans since the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. service members. And Hezbollah has eschewed the kinds of catastrophic terrorist attacks against U.S. targets outside of the Middle East that have become the focus of Al Qaeda. However, if American or international peacekeeping forces were to deploy to the region to enforce a settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, history suggests that Hezbollah would consider the troops fair game. Certainly, Hezbollah remains staunchly opposed to the Middle East peace process that has now become the United States' most pressing foreign-policy goal, and almost certainly, the group will reject any U.S.-brokered settlement acceptable to Israel. That means that Hezbollah's goals and U.S. national interests are once again on a collision course.
In February, CIA Director George J. Tenet testified that if Palestinian terror groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad "feel that U.S. actions are threatening their existence, they may begin targeting Americans directly, as Hezbollah's terrorist wing already does."
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah is secretary-general of Hezbollah. In a January speech delivered in Arabic, he said: "We all know that Israel is the ally of the United States, without which it cannot continue for one month. And we all know that the miseries and misfortunes of the Arabs are above all because of the United States. America, through its continuous aggression on Afghanistan, its savage killing of the innocent, its practice of hegemony, and its blind bias and support of Israel, has created this awareness in the minds of the Arabs."
From Beirut To Tehran
To understand why so many U.S. intelligence and terrorism experts consider Hezbollah a threat second only to Al Qaeda, it is necessary to go back 20 years to the group's founding in the fertile soil of anarchy, Israeli and Syrian invasions, and the blood feud that was the Lebanese civil war. Almost from the very beginning, these experts say, Hezbollah displayed a deadly determination and willingness to target Americans that was rare even at this epicenter of international terrorism.
When a suicide bomber drove a pickup truck laden with explosives into the lobby of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut on April 18, 1983, he detonated the single deadliest act of terror against the United States up until that time. Sixty-three people were killed, including 17 Americans. Among the dead were six CIA officers who were among the agency's best Middle East experts, the worst one-day loss in CIA history, and a blow from which U.S. intelligence in the Middle East would take many years to recover.
From the beginning, U.S. investigators were struck by two unusual attributes of the attack. First and foremost was the ferocity and devastation of the blast. The lobby of the embassy was literally blasted into powder. The only traces left of the Marine standing guard duty were the melted brass buttons of his tunic. Second, suicide bombings were almost unheard of in 1983. So rare was the phenomenon, in fact, that U.S. embassies and military forces abroad took virtually no precautions against it.
Tragically, neither the bomb-making expertise nor the suicide tactics were flukes. Indeed, six months later, the April 18 embassy bombing would be eclipsed as the most deadly terror attack in U.S. history.
On October 23, 1983, two suicide bombers simultaneously drove trucks into two temporary military barracks -- one holding French paratroopers and the other U.S. Marines -- both part of an international peacekeeping force separating Lebanese Muslim forces from Israeli forces and their Lebanese Christian allies. The first bomb killed 58 French paratroopers. In the case of the Marine barracks, the bomb was truly extraordinary. The 19-ton blast was so powerful that it vaporized the building's windows into a molten spray that left surrounding trees glistening like blown-glass figurines. The building itself was reduced to a pile of heaped concrete, its steel reinforcing beams twisted grotesquely. The 241 service members killed amounted to the largest peacetime loss ever for the U.S. military.
Urgent questions now perplexed U.S. intelligence experts: Who were these terrorists, and how had they become so devastatingly lethal, so fast?
One of those asking was Robert Baer, a CIA field officer in the Middle East. Baer's former superiors at the agency describe him as a bull of an intelligence officer: Put him in the china shop of a Western European embassy, and diplomatic decorum would be trampled and things broken. But put him into the maze of conspiracy and intrigue that is the Middle East, and Baer was considered among the CIA's best. As he investigated the embassy and Marine barracks bombings, and the kidnappings of numerous Western hostages, Baer kept coming across, time and again, the trail of Imad Mugniyah.
Eventually, Mugniyah -- a Hezbollah operative who reportedly moved back to Lebanon from Iran after September 11, and who remains one of the most-wanted terrorists in the world -- would be tied credibly to the Marine barracks bombing, the kidnappings of the CIA's Buckley and other Westerners, and the deadly hijacking of TWA 847. The high court of Argentina has also issued a warrant for his extradition in connection with the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires that killed 29 people and wounded hundreds. The FBI believes that Mugniyah and Hezbollah, working with Iranian diplomats, were also responsible for the 1994 bombing of the Argentine-Jewish Mutual Association building, also in Buenos Aires, that left 86 people dead.
As he sorted through the initial evidence pointing toward Mugniyah, Baer became convinced that the archterrorist was acting with the support and often at the direction of the Iranian Republican Guards, some of whom had been sent to Lebanon specifically to train anti-American terrorists. In his recent book, "See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism ," Baer thus concludes that "the Islamic Republic of Iran had declared a secret war against the United States, and the United States had chosen to ignore it."
"Because Hezbollah was never interested in taking credit or being publicly identified as responsible for its terrorist attacks, there were no clear flow charts identifying its leaders and members that might be involved," Baer told National Journal. "Iranian complicity in many of the attacks on Americans in the Middle East, however, is very clear cut. The problem is that when everyone would get around a table to try and decide what to do about it, the decision was usually that we were better off leaving Iran alone. Do you want to go to war with Iran? Do you want to take a chance that Hezbollah will take its revenge at the next Olympics? Do you want to try and reason with Iranian 'moderates' like Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan did? Basically, Iran is the third rail of American foreign policy."
Terrorist Incubator
Washington's unwillingness, during any presidency, to take a decisive stand against Hezbollah, coupled with the group's nourishment by powerful state sponsors Iran and Syria, largely explains how it developed into one of the world's most lethal and enduring terrorist organizations. According to terrorism experts, the events Baer and his colleagues were watching in the early and mid-1980s were the birth of a terrorist organization in what amounted to an almost perfect incubator.
Much as Al Qaeda did in Afghanistan, Hezbollah flourished in the chaos of a civil war where central government and law enforcement were weak or non-existent. It likewise grew rapidly in expertise by incorporating experienced terrorists such as Mugniyah, who was formerly a commando in Arafat's elite Force 17. Also like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah's members were infused with the religious fervor of radical Islam, and they pioneered the tactic of suicide bombing as part of the jihad ethic.
"In the long term, Hezbollah may prove even more dangerous than Al Qaeda," said James Phillips , a terrorism expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. "It is more entrenched, more experienced at survival, and arguably more sophisticated than Al Qaeda. They are also the undisputed master bombers among terrorists, and they have had close links to Al Qaeda and the Palestinian Islamic groups such as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, despite the fact that these are Sunni Muslim groups."
As a possible result of that collaboration, some terrorism experts point to Al Qaeda's simultaneous 1998 truck bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 258 people and wounded more than 5,000 as closely resembling Hezbollah's parallel attacks on the Marine and French paratrooper barracks in Beirut in 1983. A pivotal point in Hezbollah's work with Hamas came in 1992, when Israel expelled 450 Hamas activists into Lebanon, where they reportedly went on to train at Hezbollah camps in the Bekaa Valley. Since training with Hezbollah and adopting its tactics, Palestinian extremist groups have decreased the ratio of Palestinians-to-Israelis killed in the present intifada from 25-to-1 to just 3-to-1.
Israeli generals were also reportedly stunned when Palestinians destroyed two Israeli-made Merkava tanks in February by detonating sophisticated land mines timed to strike the tanks' vulnerable underbellies. Hezbollah guerrillas had perfected the tactic during their long fight against the Israeli Defense Forces in southern Lebanon. Indeed, according to the Reuters news agency, European intelligence agencies informed Israeli authorities that a Hezbollah agent had infiltrated Palestinian territory with forged papers to advise a joint Fatah-Hamas brigade on the execution of the tank ambush.
"What you find in each of those groups is that they quickly become more lethal and adept in their own bombing and terror operations as a result of their association with Hezbollah," said Phillips. "And despite some strong ideological differences, they are all united by an overriding hostility to Israel and the United States."
Striving For Legitimacy
In 1998, Magnus Ranstorp was sitting in the Hezbollah headquarters in southern Beirut waiting to conduct interviews. As the deputy director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and as an author of "Hizb'allah in Lebanon: The Politics of the Western Hostage Crisis ," Ranstorp arguably knows more about Hezbollah than any other Westerner. For nearly every day of the past 15 years, he has studied the group's inner dynamics. Ranstorp was fascinated that a terrorist organization that very nearly brought down an American presidency during the Iran-Contra scandal, and that wreaked such havoc on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East while killing hundreds of Americans, was so little understood. Still, for all his research, Ranstorp was surprised that the Hezbollah official he met that day was wearing a New York Yankees baseball cap and speaking flawless, American-inflected English.
"When I asked him if he'd learned English at the American University in Beirut, he just laughed and said he learned it in Washington, D.C.," Ranstorp told National Journal. "He said that the Americans may know the top leaders of Hezbollah, but the organization doesn't keep membership lists, and they don't get caught carrying identification cards."
The conversation reminded Ranstorp that Hezbollah, when compared with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, "is really more professional, they know how to operate in the shadows better, and they've been in business for a very long time. That's how Hezbollah managed to evolve from a ragtag militia in the early 1980s into a formidable political and social movement today that commands a great deal of respect for its shrewdness and masterful tactical maneuvering, even from the Israelis. Although its methods have changed, Hezbollah's long-term goals of establishing an Islamic theocracy in Lebanon -- and subverting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process on multiple fronts -- have not. That creates huge problems for the United States."
A turning point in Hezbollah's tactics came in 1990 with the end of the civil war in Lebanon. The group's focus shifted from terrorist acts to translating its broad support in Lebanon's rapidly growing Shiite Muslim community into political power. In a war-torn country with poor to non-existent government services, Hezbollah gained a reputation for efficiency and incorruptibility in running its nine schools, three hospitals, and assorted dental clinics, pharmacies, supermarkets, bookshops, and bakeries.
The group also mastered the art of public relations, running radio stations and multiple Web sites where visitors are regaled with video of Hezbollah militia operations against Israeli Defense Forces in southern Lebanon, complete with a soundtrack of martial music and appeals for money. Hezbollah's satellite TV network al-Manar increased programming from six hours a day in 1990 to 24 hours a day in 2000, and its virulently anti-Israel coverage makes it one of the most watched stations in the Palestinian territories. Hezbollah, which has elected members to the Lebanese parliament, has shrewdly pledged to work toward establishing an Islamic state in Lebanon through political, rather than terrorist, means.
That yearning for legitimacy may offer the United States its best opportunity for persuading Hezbollah to eventually renounce its terrorist activities. The growing influence of Hezbollah's political and social factions, for instance, has already moderated its direct involvement in terrorist operations. The lesson of past struggles with the Irish Republican Army, the Palestine Liberation Organization and others, some experts believe, is that only negotiated settlements will spur them to complete their evolution from traditional terrorist organizations to political entities.
Magnus Ranstorp, however, is not so sure. After Hezbollah achieved its stated goal of forcing Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, he notes, it continued to launch mortar attacks and kidnap Israeli soldiers in the disputed Shebaa Farms area, where the Israeli, Syrian, and Lebanese borders all meet. Although Hezbollah has not launched any recent direct terrorist attacks against Israel, Hezbollah clearly serves as a conduit of expertise and arms to the most-violent Palestinian terror groups. Recently, Hezbollah operatives have reportedly infiltrated Israel-proper in an effort to recruit Israeli-Arabs to their cause.
"The dilemma Hezbollah faces is that this is an organization whose entire history has been based on violence, from terror to kidnapping to guerrilla warfare," Ranstorp said. "Even if Israel reached a peace settlement with the Palestinians, I don't think Hezbollah's support for terrorism would end. In essence, Hezbollah justifies its very existence by confronting Israel."
One person who agrees with that gloomy assessment is Dennis Ross, the former Middle East envoy for both the first Bush and the Clinton administrations. Although Ross supported former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's decision to withdraw Israeli forces from southern Lebanon in May 2000, he believes that Hezbollah's actions since then suggest that regional peace will be impossible until the "Hezbollah model" is ultimately repudiated.
"At the time, everyone was in favor of Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon, and nobody foresaw its full consequences -- not the Israelis, not the United States, and not even the Arabs," Ross told National Journal. "Now we have Hezbollah perceived as this great champion, with this phony model and its implied message that the Arabs don't have to negotiate or concede anything to Israel, but rather they can prevail by simply embracing violence. One of the reasons we have to fight this war on terror is to demonstrate that the 'Hezbollah model' doesn't work. All it does is produce pain, loss, and ultimately defeat. That's why I think our day of reckoning is still coming with Hezbollah." |
