The Lessons of Lebanon
RUBIN, MICHAEL
The Lessons of Lebanon Iran and Syria sponsor an ominous arms build-up on Israel's northern border. BY MICHAEL RUBIN The Israel-Lebanon border YELLOW HEZBOLLAH FLAGS fly over the rubble of the...
...When I taught in Iraq last year, my Baghdad University-trained translators consistently failed to comprehend three words: tolerance, compromise, and debate...
...Turkey staged military exercises along the Syrian border...
...Had they been successful, the entire population of Ramat Aviv Gimel—more than 20,000—would have perished in the fireball...
...It should be neither the intifada that is framed by Oslo, nor that which is negotiated by the compromising negotiator in Stockholm...
...Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility from its headquarters in Damascus...
...Sensing Israel's reluctance to hold him accountable for his proxy groups, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad grows increasingly bold...
...It's a shame...
...Three days later, the Iranian government rewarded the group by upping its budget 70 percent...
...sadly, Israel's muddled anti-terrorism policy, like that of the Bush administration, encourages such terror...
...After all, four years ago, Turkey forced Syria to do the same...
...Terrorism is not the result of a cycle of violence...
...Ten thousand deaths would have resulted from the buildings' collapse...
...Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz warned that the Turkish army was "awaiting orders" to attack...
...Syria and Iran saw Israel's retreat not as a gesture of peace, but as a sign of weakness...
...The growth of anti-Israel terror is directly proportional to the decline of Israeli deterrence...
...When urging dialogue and restraint, Secretary of State Colin Powell must understand that willingness to meet any terrorist demand, no matter how small, only rewards violence and indicates U.S...
...Following Israel's May 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon, Hezbollah guerrillas dynamited the cattle pens and vaccination clinics where Lebanese farmers once brought their livestock for immunization...
...In September 1998, Ankara decided it had had enough...
...On June 5, four days after Syria assumed the Security Council presidency, terrorists detonated a car bomb next to a public bus near Megiddo, killing 17...
...On April 26, 2002, Israeli security forces intercepted an explosives-laden car bomb that the PFLP planned to detonate under the Azrieli Towers, Tel Aviv's equivalent of the World Trade Center...
...Damascus once played host to Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) leader Abduallah Ocalan, a man responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in Turkey...
...When a suicide bomber killed 15 at a pool hall in a Tel Aviv suburb, Syria's state-controlled radio declared, "The wonderful and special suicide attacks [are] a practical declaration before the whole world of the way to liberate Arab Palestinian land...
...officials demanding a cessation of Israeli self-defense, state sponsors of terrorism smell blood and sense victory...
...Instead, Arafat launched a war designed to strike not only in disputed territories, but also in Israel...
...Such nuance is dead wrong, since it implies some terror to be permissible...
...When the Damascus-based PFLP assassinated Israel's tourism minister last October, Israel failed to retaliate against the group's headquarters...
...Prior to joining the State Department's policy planning staff, Brook-ings scholar Meghan O'Sullivan argued that the United States should seek a "more nuanced" approach to terrorism, whereby "lesser penalties would apply to lesser levels of state sponsorship...
...President Suleyman Demiral declared, "We are losing our patience and we retain the right to retaliate against Syria...
...BY MICHAEL RUBIN The Israel-Lebanon border YELLOW HEZBOLLAH FLAGS fly over the rubble of the Tourmus agricultural station on the Israel-Lebanon border...
...Rather, it is a result of too little retaliation...
...Second, terrorism is black and white...
...Terror sponsorship cannot be subject to negotiation...
...Less than a month later, terrorists attempted to blow up the Pi Glilot gas storage facility...
...Syria is the brains and Iran is the heart," one counterterrorism expert explained...
...Twice a week, Iran Air cargo planes touch down at the Damascus airport, supplying increasingly sophisticated arms to terrorist camps across the border in Syrianoccupied Lebanon...
...Michael Rubin is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute...
...Rather than enjoy peace, Israeli border towns prepare for renewed terror...
...As scholars such as Daniel Pipes, Efraim Inbar, and Ely Karmon have shown, Turkey's success provides lessons to both Washington and Jerusalem...
...Such concepts simply do not exist in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, nor do they in Syria and Iran...
...The result...
...Washington (and Jerusalem) should not exculpate state sponsors for the actions of their proxy groups...
...The second Palestinian intifada is not a grass-roots uprising, but rather a terror campaign perpetrated largely by Arafat's overlapping Fatah, Tan-zim, Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade, and Force 17, with overt Syrian, Iranian, Saudi, and Iraqi assistance...
...Emboldened by the Israeli withdrawal and United Nations moral equivalency, Hezbollah is determined to further the conflict...
...Palestinian chairman Yasser Arafat concurred...
...weakness...
...Unfortunately, it's a lesson many in the Bush administration do not understand...
...The lessons of Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon are clear...
...With the State Department floating trial balloons of new peace plans predicated upon further Israeli concessions, and self-righteous European Union and U.N...
...In recent weeks, Hezbollah has deployed thousands of missiles capable of striking targets as deep inside Israel as Haifa...
...Hezbollah does not care...
...Syria caved, expelled Ocalan, and closed down PKK offices...
...Disease doesn't know the border, and everyone will suffer because of this," one local farmer said...
...The UNIFIL post ten meters away across the border in Lebanon provides little comfort, especially after the October 2000 incident in which UNIFIL troops concealed evidence of a Hezbollah kidnapping across the UN-certified border...
...Intelligence reports indicate that Iranian Revolutionary Guard brigadier general Ali Reza Tamizr has begun training Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Hamas, and Arafat's Fatah on missiles capable of downing civilian aircraft...
...Clearly, Damascus is flaunting its support for terrorism...
...Residents of Manara, for example, live behind high fences, barbed wire, and watchtowers...
...More than two years after Israel's unilateral withdrawal, peace is increasingly distant...
...First, terrorism can be stopped, but those fighting terror must be willing to go to war to eradicate it...
...The day after the completion of Israel's withdrawal, Hezbollah secretary general Hasan Nasrallah declared, "The road to Palestine and freedom is the road of the resistance and intifada...
...For Damascus, terrorism is a worthwhile policy tool only so long as the regime need not pay a military price...
...Hezbollah does not operate in isolation...
...Just as the key to constraining al Qaeda was toppling the Taliban, the key to constraining groups such as Hezbollah, the PFLP, and the Al Aksa Martyrs Brigade is a willingness to make their hosts pay the ultimate price...
...The tragedy of the situation is that Israel could end Syria's terror sponsorship within one month...
...Two months after Israel's pullback, Arafat turned down Israel's offer of a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem, on 97 percent of the West Bank and Gaza and 3 percent of Israel proper...
...All you need is to follow the way of the martyred people of the past who shook and frightened the entity of this raping Zionist community...
...Adversaries who do not desire peace will further conflict...
Vol. 7 • July 2002 • No. 41
