On Thu, 15 Nov 2001, Seth Ackerman wrote:
> Hezbollah never sent suicide bombers to discos, as far as I know. When
> Israel was invading Lebanon, it did retaliate using rockets against
> Israel, often hitting civilians. It also blew up a lot of Israeli
> occupation soldiers. But I don't think of that stuff as a merely
> "smaller scale" version of what Mohammed Atta did. Besides, it's been
> over with for years. So I still think some explanation is needed for
> why Hezbollah is being targeted by the US "war against terror" while
> the Israeli veterans of Lehi and Stern aren't.
First off, let me say I entirely agree with your position on Hezbollah. I think the best present foreign policy course for the US is to treat it as a legitimate political institution rather than as an outlaw group.
That said, there are a couple explanations why the US still considers Hezbollah a terrorist organization quite aside from timing (more recent, and less fully morphed -- i.e, it still has an armed wing with the same name) and politics (enemy of our ally). To repeat, those are probably most important. But there is also an institutional memory in the US military and intelligence services that absolutely hates Hezbollah for its purported connection to what are, for them personally, the worst acts of terrorism that ever took place against the US in the Middle East: the suicide bombing of the Marine compound in Beirut in 1983, killing 241; and the kidnapping of a dozen or so civilians that took place thereafter -- but especially the kidnapping and torture murder of CIA station chief William Buckley in 1984, which the CIA credits to Imad Mugniyeh, who was at that time Hezbollah security chief. The CIA and the DIA really, really hate Mugniyeh and bear Hezbollah a lasting grudge as well. And those agencies provide politicians with most of their inside dope on terrorism. (Mugniyeh isn't actively part of Hezbollah anymore as far as anyone knows -- he is, as you can imagine, very far underground, and supposedly in Iran according to rumors -- but Hezbollah doesn't denounce him when we demand it, no big surprise there.)
Secondly, there was an attempt before 9/11 to connect Hezbollah to Bin Laden. There was one piece of testimony during the Embassy bombing trial that took place in New York this Spring that asserted that Al-Qaeda operatives trained Somalian fighters in Hezbollah camps in the early 90s. This relates to the abiding charge that Al-Qaeda operatives trained the Somalian fighters who shot down Black Hawk helicopters in Somalia. This has always been the weakest point in the bin Laden charge sheet, and was shown to be such at the trial, where prosecutors largely abandoned it. And even if true, the evidence given wouldn't establish a connection going beyond the early 1990s, i.e., 10 years ago, only a couple of years after we ourselves were allied with ObL. Iran and Afghanistan were at soon at ferocious loggerheads and stayed there ever since, which on the face of it should have put Mugniyeh and ObL on opposite warring sides, quite aside from their Sunni Shiite differences. And for all we know this testimony might have itself been the fruit of one more attempt by the intelligence services to connect their personal worst enemy (Mughniyeh) to the guy who already in 1998 was the United States Public Enemy Number One (ObL). (The were also many rumors floated that Mugniyeh himself was ObL's point man in Somalia, but apparently none of them were considered solid enough to go with by federal prosecutors who showed themselves otherwise quite willing to introduce circumstantial evidence.) But with all those caveats, the testimony is still part of the recent official public record, and is cited by opponents of Hezbollah.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com