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Hizbullah Is Everyone's Problem

(New York Times) Bret Stephens - The 2006 Israel-Hizbullah war concluded with a UN resolution that was supposed to disarm the terrorist militia and keep its forces far from Israel's border. The resolution did neither. Instead, a combination of international wishful thinking and the willfulness of Hizbullah's patrons in Tehran have brought us to where we are now. If the U.S. or Europeans want to create a buffer area between Israel and Hizbullah, they should deploy their own troops under a NATO flag, or perhaps invite Arab states to send forces, since the UN peacekeepers did nothing to prevent Hizbullah from placing its forces close to the Israeli border. Otherwise, the re-establishment of the Israeli-controlled security zone in southern Lebanon that existed from 1985 to 2000 might, for all the long-term problems it presents, be the least-bad alternative. The proper role for the U.S. in the crisis is not to seek a diplomatic solution. It's to help Israel win. Until al-Qaeda's attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, no terrorist group had murdered more Americans than Hizbullah. Israel's strike last week in Beirut, which killed Hizbullah commander Ibrahim Aqil, avenged the 1983 attacks there on the U.S. Embassy and Marine barracks, in which 258 Americans perished. Those crimes should neither be forgotten nor forgiven. Nor can it be in the interests of the West for a terrorist group with burgeoning ties to the Kremlin to maintain effective control of a Mediterranean state while it terrorizes its neighborhood. There is an American interest in checking the expansion of the Axis of Repression, that includes Iran, China, Russia and North Korea. We are now in the opening stages of yet another contest between the free and unfree worlds. In that fight, Israel is on our side and Hizbullah is on the other. We can't pretend to be neutral between them.
2024-09-26 00:00:00
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