[world] hezbullah move on to their next step

Three Hezbul Mujahideen terrorists belonging to Barmullah in the Kashmir valley supposedly joined the CRPF and were put on duty outside Manmohan Singh's official residence on Race Course Road, an unnamed Indian news channel claimed on Tuesday night. The antecedents of the three were discovered in an investigation of a carbine which went missing from the Prime Minister's residence in 2004.

Head constable Raj Kumar was later compulsorily retired, while the three terrorists were still serving, the channel said. A CRPF spokesman said that while one of the three men was recruited in 1988 when there was still no terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir, the two others were recruited in 1995 and 1998.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, Hezbollah have certainly got the world in a nervous state.

Meanwhile, Iran is reported to have played a crucial role in advising Hezbollah in constructing elaborate and complex tunnel systems to store its missiles and other military wherewithal. The intended US plan was to coordinate an air campaign with Israel. An anonymous source close to the US Air Force told Seymour Hersh, "The big question for our air force was how to hit a series of hard targets in Iran successfully."

Hersh states, "And so the air force went to the Israelis with some new tactics and said to them, 'Let's concentrate on the bombing and share what we have on Iran and what you have on Lebanon.' The discussions reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld."

Hersh claims Syria has never been regarded as a challenge of the same caliber as Iran to the US or to Israel. That was one reason the template for an air attack on Iran was handed over to Israel by the Bush administration. The thinking in Cheney's office, according to Hersh, was, "We can learn what to do in Iran by watching what the Israelis do in Lebanon."

Naturally, the Whitehouse does not see it this way.

Also, it’s not a given that the Saudis were funding the Hezbollah business. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are three Sunni states fearful of the rising Shi'ite power in their region and though the powerful and indiscriminate killing of Israelis by Hezbollah shifted street opinion in their favour forcing the leaders to tone down their positions, those positions still remain.

As a relic of the Vietnam era, it seems to me that there are striking parallels – an enemy who is unstructured, who blends into the landscape and fades back across its major supporter’s borders, only to reappear, rearmed, in another place. An enemy who merges in with and uses the local populace, who both revere and fear them at the same time; an enemy who use western technology and thinking and who are both coordinated and funded from afar.

Vietnam was never a goer and in the same way, Hezbollah’s tentacles reach into every Arab state and enjoy sympathy from the Muslim world, restrained sympathy in the case of the Sunni world, who now must realize they could be on the end of the next murderous campaign. Hezbollah and the Viet Cong both sustained severe losses of the macro kind and then rebuilt and rearmed, almost at will. Hydra is a good analogy for Hezbollah.

As long as there is an Arab world and Islam stands in its current bastardized, twisted form, seconded for their purposes by the malcontents whose whole life is blowing away as much human life as possible, including themselves, the situation cannot translate itself into a victory for the west.

The big guns and ‘peaceful purposes’ did not work in Vietnam. They won’t work here.

Information drawn from the Hindu, Asia Times and New York Times