The Price of "Military Adventurism"
Hezbollah is planning on hitting Israeli targets anywhere in the world they can find them.
Intelligence agencies in the United States and Canada are warning of mounting signs that Hezbollah, backed by Iran, is poised to mount a terror attack against "Jewish targets" somewhere outside the Middle East.
Intelligence officials tell ABC News the group has activated suspected "sleeper cells" in Canada and key operatives have been tracked moving outside the group’s Lebanon base to Canada, Europe and Africa.
[…]
Suspected Hezbollah operatives have conducted recent surveillance on the Israeli embassy in Ottawa, Canada and on several synagogues in Toronto, according to the officials.
Latin American is also considered a possible target by officials following Hezbollah’s planning.
Being a terrorist organization, they have just one thing on their mind; death.
"They want to kill as many people as they can, they want it to be a big splash," said former CIA intelligence officer Bob Baer, who says he met with Hezbollah leaders in Beirut last month.
"They cannot have an operation fail," said Baer, "and I don’t think they will. They’re the A-team of terrorism."
And what about "The Great Satan"? How about Israeli interests in the United States?
Baer says his Hezbollah contacts told him an attack against the US was unlikely because Iran and Hezbollah did not want to give the Bush administration an excuse to attack.
So then, a terrorist organization, even one where suicide bombing is a major weapon, can still be deterred if there is a credible threat of force. And specifically because of the actions of the Bush administration, this organization (that Michael Chertoff, quoted in the article, says that "they make al Qaeda look like a minor league team") doesn’t want to attack us and we in the United States are safer than, say, an unnamed neighbor to the north who only wants to send their military in when there’s little chance of getting into an actual fight.
I’d rather be feared by the terrorists than get more in France’s good graces. It isn’t enough to simply have a military if you never intend to use it. Osama bin Laden, after we tucked tail and ran out of Somalia when things got the slightest bit hot, came to the conclusion "that the American soldier was just a paper tiger". This emboldened him for the 9/11 attacks, but what he failed to realize is that the "paper tiger" had already finished his 2nd term.
This is not to say that any and every conflict must be entered full force, or that diplomacy makes us less safe. That is not the case. But the anti-war crowd would do well to note Hezbollah’s reticence to come after us. If we’d let Saddam Hussein have Kuwait, or if we’d not responded when he shot almost daily at our planes enforcing the cease-fire, or if we’d ignored the fact that so much of his known WMDs were unaccounted for, or simply rattled the plastic saber of UN resolutions a hundred more times (and have them ignored just as many times), Hezbollah, based on this analysis, would have been more likely to attack us on our soil. Saddam had been subject to the world’s frowns and the UN’s sternly worded letters for over a decade. Diplomacy had had much more than its fair shot at coming to a peaceful conclusion.
Pundits, bloggers and presidential candidates on the Left over the years have said that the Bush Doctrine has not made us safer. The reality is, out of fear of us and due to stepped up anti-terrorism measures, the US and US interests have been safer from terrorist attacks than any 5-year period in a long time. No attacks. And (to torture an analogy) an ounce of an act of terrorism prevented, due to the bad guys’ fear, is worth a pound of spies.
I would urge America not to elect another paper tiger in November. We don’t need to embolden terrorists.
[tags]Hezbollah,terrorism,Bush Doctrine,Saddam Hussein,Iraq,United Nations,war,paper tiger,Osama bin Laden[/tags]
Filed under: Doug • Iraq • Middle East • United Nations • War
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