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Israel Had to Move Against Hizballah's Growing Missile Arsenal

[UPI] Arnaud de Borchgrave - Hizballah chief Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah now says he informed the Lebanese government of the plan to abduct Israeli soldiers for a subsequent prisoner exchange. Israelis have been taken prisoner before, only to be exchanged in 100-to-1 deals that favor terrorist organizations. Israel's massive retaliatory campaign was probably the last thing Hizballah expected. Western intelligence agencies have reported on Hizballah's 10,000 to 15,000 Syrian-supplied Katyusha rockets and Iran-supplied Fajr missiles for at least the past five years. Israel knew it would have to move sooner or later before Hizballah got 30,000 or 50,000 such weapons, including ones that could reach Tel Aviv, Ben-Gurion International Airport, and Jerusalem. Large swaths of southern Lebanon are a maze of tunnels and foliage-covered revetments that conceal truck-mounted batteries of six to eight Katyusha rockets. Israel's retaliatory campaign will be a long, hard slog and a cease-fire is probably still two weeks away. Israel knows that the NATO force it says it would accept to police a buffer zone is beyond NATO's present out-of-theater capabilities, stretched to the limit in Afghanistan and Africa. Dore Gold, a former Israeli UN ambassador, said Israel "is a convenient surrogate for the larger enemy Iran perceives - the West." Gold says Iran is building long-range missiles to cower London and Berlin, not just Tel Aviv. These missiles are designed to force the Europeans to sit on their hands as Iran takes on Israel with its WMD-tipped 1,300-kilometer Shahab missiles.
2006-07-26 01:00:00
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