JANE’S: U.S. MULLING HIZBULLAH STRIKES

Could the U.S. be plan­ning covert attacks against ter­ror­ists in Lebanon? Jane’s Intelligence Digest thinks so.

US sec­re­tary of defence Donald Rumsfeld is con­sid­er­ing plans to expand the global war on ter­ror­ism with multi-​​pronged attacks against sus­pected mil­i­tant bases in coun­tries such as Lebanon and Somalia…
Sending US troops into law­less Somalia would not be new, nor is it likely to cause seri­ous diplo­matic waves. Covert US forces have peri­od­i­cally infil­trated the coun­try over the past two years in order to con­duct sur­veil­lance and even snatch [Al Qaeda] sus­pects…
However, send­ing US spe­cial forces into Lebanon — and in par­tic­u­lar an area like the Bekaa Valley (which is vir­tu­ally Syrian ter­ri­tory) and where the bulk of Damascus’ mil­i­tary forces in Lebanon are deployed — would be an entirely dif­fer­ent mat­ter. Deployment of US forces in the area would almost cer­tainly involve a con­fronta­tion with Syrian troops.
That may well prove to be the objec­tive, since the Bush admin­is­tra­tion is cur­rently step­ping up pres­sure on the Damascus regime in a bid to force it to cut off all sup­port for rad­i­cal Palestinian groups which have been tar­get­ing Israel dur­ing the three-​​year-​​old intifada. Washington also wants Syria to aban­don its weapons of mass destruc­tion and to with­draw all its forces from Lebanon, a vir­tual satel­lite since Syria moved in with tacit US sup­port in 1990 as part of a strat­egy to end Lebanon’s civil war.
The US admin­is­tra­tion has long con­sid­ered Damascus as a prime can­di­date for ‘regime-​​change’ (along with Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and pos­si­bly even Saudi Arabia). Syria, once a pow­er­house of Arab rad­i­cal­ism that could not be ignored, has been seri­ously weak­ened, both mil­i­tar­ily and polit­i­cally. Washington may feel that the time is com­ing to oust Bashir Al-​​Assad and the rul­ing gen­er­als. Targeting Syria via Lebanon, the only con­crete polit­i­cal influ­ence Damascus has to show fol­low­ing decades of rad­i­cal diplo­macy, could prove to be a means to that end…
Moreover, since the 11 September 2001 attacks, Washington has been keen to prove that Hizbullah has a global reach, and is thus a legit­i­mate tar­get for its war on ter­ror­ism. Thus far, US intel­li­gence ser­vices have been unable to pro­duce com­pelling evi­dence sup­port­ing this claim. So instead of launch­ing mil­i­tary strikes, the Bush admin­is­tra­tion has sought to weaken Hizbullah by putting pres­sure on Iran, the movement’s ide­o­log­i­cal men­tor, and on Syria, which has used the Shia mil­i­tants as what amounts to a proxy force against Israel over the last 20 years…
Washington’s own focus on Hizbullah has inten­si­fied amid claims that the move­ment has links with Al-​​Qaeda (even though Hizbullah is staunchly Shia, while Al-Qaeda’s reli­gious ide­ol­ogy stems from the puri­tan­i­cal Wahhabite sect of Sunni Islam). Whether there is any actual oper­a­tional alliance between Hizbullah and Al-​​Qaeda remains highly questionable.

January 22nd, 2004 | War Update | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.