Sunday, March 13, 2005
More On Hezbollah
There is no legitimate way to underestimate the threat this terrorist organization poses to the United States. They are well-equipped, politically savvy, and very, very driven to force us to leave the Middle East.
National Review Online has an interview with Barbara Newman, a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. It’s well worth a read if you want to more fully educate yourself about who Hezbollah is, what they want, and what they’re capable of doing to achieve their goals. Here’s a sample of what you’ll find:
But the unvarnished truth is that Hezbollah is the most dangerous terrorist group in the world. It has about 25,000 armed members and as we saw in the pro-Syrian march in Beirut, it can muster a million in the streets.
It's no coincidence that former Deputy Secretary of State Armitage called them "the A team of terrorism." They are disciplined, highly trained, with incredibly lethal equipment with a frighteningly good counterintelligence network. A former head of the FBI's Hezbollah branch told me that "they are the best light infantry in the world and can strike the United States any time any where." [That general sentiment] was echoed by last week's testimony of both the CIA and FBI directors before the Senate in open hearings.
Hezbollah does have a dozen members in the Lebanese parliament, which shows how smart Hezbollah is; it is trying to go both way by having a political side and a standing terrorist apparatus.
Hezbollah doesn't play politics the way we think of it. Its members are devoutly dedicated to the creation of a theocracy in Lebanon similar to that in Iran and to the eradication of the "Jewish entity" — they don't even say Israel is a state — and to the obliteration of all U.S. influence in the Middle East. We are the "Big Satan" to them and Israel is "the little Satan."
