The head of American intelligence, Admiral (ret.) Mike McConnell, revealed a secret a week ago: Hezbollah sleeper cells are waiting in the United States for the order to carry out terror attacks. The unclassified version of the intelligence assessment, the one distributed to the public, has been stating for years that Hezbollah has the ability and intentions to act against American targets and assets. However, this description has been vague enough to deceive the public into thinking that attacks are expected only in Lebanon and other places in the Middle East. McConnell, who crafted his speech on the fly while on the way from the White House to another location in Washington, tripped up and let slip what the American intelligence community had discovered from its sources and was trying to hide....
The expected trigger for Hezbollah attacks, both in the secret assessment and the censored version, is if America or Israel crosses what McConnell calls a "red line" as far as Hezbollah is concerned: an attack on Iran. A response to this will shed American blood. Politicians will have to explain to the public, the day after a bombing in Iran and reprisals in Detroit or Los Angeles, why it has brought down this unnecessary trouble, which intelligence had warned about, on the tranquil civilians between the two oceans.
The recent past has taught the Iranians that the Americans, like cold business people [olr short-sighted politicians, ed.], tend to cut their losses and get rid of failed investments. They were defeated and they surrendered after the takeover of the embassy in Tehran. Two attacks on the embassy in Beirut and one on the Marines at the airport at Khaldeh expelled the Sixth Fleet from Lebanon's shores. The kidnapping of its citizens led the Americans, with Israel's help, to sell arms to the Iranians in their war against the Iraqis. You don't have to be Pavlov to recognize a behavior pattern here.
I'm sure Washington is disgusted, as it should be, at the Israeli government's ineptitude in failing to destroy Hezbollah last Summer.
Hezbollah, Iran and Syria are big problems. As this report illustrates (if it is true), these issues extend far beyond Lebanon. Expecting a limited military incursion into Lebanon to "destroy" Hezbollah, given its backing by Iran and Syria, is exactly the kind of mistaken thinking that led Israel to mount that disastrous incursion in the first instance.
The neocons of ZOG told him to do so. Do you think it was an /accident/ that Israel failed to destroy Hezbollah?
And what about the '69 Mets?
Whether success in Lebanon would have hurt Hezbollah cells in the US is unknown - perhaps those cells take orders from Nasrallah, but perhaps from Iran directly. Who knows?
By the way, Hoosier might be onto something. I was wondering what the July 17th Executive Order was all about.
attacks on US soil - Pearl Harbor, 9/11 - tend to trigger different reactions. (I concede the 93 WTC bombing could have encouraged a diff point of view but the reaction to 9/11 should have corrected that misimpression about US sentiment.)
the smart terrorist who wants to shoo the US from the Mideast would focus on raising costs by attacking US interests in the Mideast and encouraging isolationist sentiment here. attacking us here is most likely to result in your death or early retirement to somewhere in pakistan's NW Frontier.
Excpt that they were, IIRC pressuring Israel to quit going after them at all...
Of course, I wish they HAD finished the job, but I wish ANYONE would finish that job - the world would be a better place.
Adeez - "peace is the way"?!? Allow me to give you an old quote: "It needs but one foe to breed a war, not two, Master Warden, and those who have not swords can still die upon them." We can have peace only when thre aren't people dedicated to killing us all. You're talking to the wrong side about peace.
I'm sure Washington is disgusted, as it should be, at the Israeli government's ineptitude in failing to destroy Hezbollah last Summer.
So Hezbollah would be so outraged at an attack on Iran as to retaliate inside the United States, but an attack on Hezbollah itself in Lebanon would not trigger any such retaliation? They care about the Iranians more than they care about themselves?
And what has to be kept in mind is that they are Iranian proxies. They are funded, armed, and trained by the Iranians. And they do what the Iranians tell them to do.
Besides, the one reality that they would face with an attack on us on U.S. soil is that we would go after them in Lebanon. Iran is still very problematic, but these two situations are very different in magnitude. We probably don't have the ground troops right now to take on Iran on the ground, even if we weren't involved in Iraq and Afghanistan. But Hizb'Allah is a much smaller target, and the Israelis presumably have enough intelligence on them that we would likely have a decent chance on pulling it off.
I do though think that it would be strategically unwise for Iran to unleash them on us here if only the Israelis were involved. But then, they probably wouldn't be, even if only Israelis attacked Iran, since they would likely have to fly through U.S. controlled air space to pull off the attack.
Bob Graham voted against the Iraq war because he believed Hezbollah should be the priority in the war on terror.
But others just "knew" Saddam had to be our top priority. Oh, the lengths they went to in order to convince everyone Saddam was the top priority. And so it goes.
By activating their own sleeper cells in the US, of course! =)
without an operational base in S. Lebanon, Hez wouldn't be a threat
Their operational base in Lebanon is only a threat to Israel. They don't need it to threaten the US. If it had been completely eliminated last summer, that would not prevent Iran from establishing sleeper cells here.
the one reality that they would face with an attack on us on U.S. soil is that we would go after them in Lebanon
Iran would just love that. America stuck to yet another piece of flypaper and thus even more unable to go into Iran itself. American troops getting shot up by yet another guerrilla force, and floundering around ineffectively with no prospect of actual victory. America blowing up yet more Arabs live on al Jazeera. Yup, what a great plan. That's so brilliant, the administration might actually do it.
Clue up: Real life doesn't come with cheat codes.
But it does come with 50,000 or so extra lives.
I'm sure they are. They shouldn't be, as it was never going to be possible to destroy Hezbollah in its entirety unless they were willing to occupy Lebanon. They should be disgusted at themselves for greenlighting Israel's over-reaction to the kidnapping of its soldiers that resulted in Hezbollah being more powerful and highly regarded today than it was before the bombing.
I hate to have to say this, but I will be shocked if a) this is true and b) the CIA managed to discover that fact.
And while "peace is the way", there's the slight problem of how you achieve peace with people who want you dead.
Note that technically one can achieve "peace" by killing every last one of your enemies; I don't think you mean to propose that, and I suggest it only as a last resort.
Remember that there was going to be peace in Europe no matter how WW2 ended; as it happened, we got the "peace" where the Nazis didn't control the entire continent with an iron fist and mass-exterminations. But if they'd won? It'd still have been "peace", after all!
Just a reminder that while peace is the goal, what sort of peace is relevant, and not all peaces are the same - the peace of the grave is not so eagerly desired.
(And I'm with Chris C. contra Iran on the likely reaction to Hizbollah attacks in the US; I think the reaction is less likely to be "Oh, we should just leave Iran alone because they killed a bunch of our civilians" and more likely to be "Why haven't we leveled Tehran yet?")
Yes, there is. The managers have explained it several times over the years, but I didn't write it down, since I prefer to read them all. What we need is:
a. Something in the right margin linking to those instructions.
b. Some way to have certain commenters not show up when we are reading comments.
I don't understand what you mean. Are you expressing outrage against the asserted ineptitude, or against the attempt itself? If the latter, how would you propose that the U.S. locate these sleeper cells (if they exist)?
There is another side to it as well. If the US were to attack Iran without any more provocation than exists today, then the Iranian civilian population would rally to their flag. If Iran were to attack the US (either directly or through a proxy) then far more Iranians would see US response as being caused by their own government. The more dramatic and effective the attack on the US is, the more Iranians would blame their own government for the resulting counterattack.
The American self-image is that of Indiana Jones in the battle in the bazaar. Where the guy with the 2 giant swords comes up and brandishes them dramatically, and Indy looks disgusted, pulls out his gun and shoots the guy. The more successful the attack, the more public support there will be in the US for a nuclear counterattack. This is the fatal conceit of the terrorists -- that we respond the way we do because we are terrified by them. We respond the way we do because we are bored and fickle and inconstant and impatient, and the terrorists' behavior hasn't actually broken through our self-absorption and we aren't (yet) reacting to them at all.
I was expressing clumsy sarcasm, something I probably shouldn't do while talking on the phone about a completely different subject. Walking and chewing gum comes to mind. Sorry.
On a more serious note, I have to wonder if it really is possible to defeat such an enemy while maintaining our current standards of privacy. I suspect the answer is unknown since we don't have any experience with this type of enemy.
Since Hezbollah is funded by (and, indeed, is a creature of) Iran and Syria, why would driving them out of S. Lebanon eliminate them as a threat? If, in fact, there are "Hezbollah" sleeper cells in the US, wouldn't these cells simply be activated by Iranian or Syrian agents? Or, at the very least, if Hezbollah could be destroyed in Lebanon, wouldn't these sleeper cells simply extact vengeance for Israel's destruction of Hezbollah by carrying out their planned attacks?
My point is simply this: the problem with Hezbollah, whether we are talking about S. Lebanon or notional sleeper cells in the US, is not Hezbollah. It is Iran, and to a lesser extent, Syria. Unless you solve *those* problems, you can't make Hezbollah go away.
And I'm still wondering what that July 17 E.O. was all about.
And Peace IS the way. Oddly enough, this is coming from someone who lives in the bullseye that is NYC. So, when people wanna trample the Constitution and lose our moral high ground (assuming we still have it) b/c of outright FEAR that "America" is gonna be attacked, it's really a fear mostly borne by those in my hood. DC, SF, and Chicago too, to a lesser extent. And they all tend to share my sentiments. Go figure.
Preferred, without an operational base in S. Lebanon, Hez wouldn't be a threat. From what I've read, the IDF had a longstanding contingency plan to attack Hez from the North and South simultaneously, but Olmert refused to allow it, because (1) his chief of staff told him Hez could be defeated by air power alone; and (2) fear of civilian casualties/world opinion.
It is likely that Olmert rejected the northern approach against Hezbollah since that just might possibly involve a clash with Syria and Olmert wasn't ready for that. Although I do remember some discussion of the possibility.
http://volokh.com/?exclude=DavidB
that didn't work. It turns out that its case sensitive...and that while the instructions note that there are three "davids" (identified as "DavidB, DavidK, and DavidP") you have to enter only lower case letters-- otherwise, there is on impact.
[MAZEL TOV! ed.]
I have an amusing anecdote that may have implications for this discussion.
I understand that the script originally called for an extensively choreographed physical fight that Prof. Jones would have won -- but that the actor, who does his own stunts, was feeling travelers' stomach and couldn't "put out" on the appointed day, so they altered the script to have him get past the swordsman in an equally decisive but less demanding manner.
If it's not true, it should be. Read into this incident the analogy you will, for the current situation.
-dk
Unbelievable.
Yes, see, e.g., WWII killing off Naziism, the Civil War killing off southern secessionism, and so forth and so on.
Just a thought.
In reality, as remarked above by another commenter, all the blood, bombs and bullets do is energize the populations so affected to give more support for hezbollah. Which in turn causes more terrorist attacks (from their perspective, either avenging the deaths of their innocent or legitimate response to agression) on Isreal, which in turn causes more self-defense from Isreal on Lebanon, ad infinitum.
Whats the old saying, if everyone practiced the theory of an eye for an eye, eventually the whole world would be blind??? I think thats apropos to this situation.
Even if you wipe out all of hezbollah in Syria, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, etc... another group not yet dead would simply replace them. Muslim brotherhood, Islamic Jihad, whatever. And the cycle continues. There is no easy solution to this major problem, but brute force, as is demonstrated overwhelmingly in Aghanistan and Iraq, simply aint cutting it. Unless the goal is incitement and recruitment for endless war. Then its a success by all stretches of the imagination.
If this were true, no guerrilla group could ever be defeated. Yet many - in fact, most - insurgencies are defeated.