19 October 2017

Who wins from casting Hezbollah as a new terror bogeyman?

Middle East Eye

On 10 October, the United States announced multimillion-dollar rewards for "information leading to the location, arrest, or conviction in any country" of Talal Hamiyah and Fu'ad Shukr, said to be "key leaders" of Lebanon's Hezbollah. The bounty for Hamiyah has been set at "up to $7 million"; for Shukr, it’s merely "up to $5 million".
In the accompanying US State Department press briefing on "US efforts to counter Hezbollah", Ambassador-at-large and Coordinator for Counterterrorism, Nathan Sales, and National Counterterrorism Center Director, Nicholas Rasmussen, competed to see who could emit the most words without saying anything of substance.
A couple of takeaways: despite pretending to be a political party in Lebanon, Hezbollah is a "terrorist organisation" that is "rotten to its core", with a decades-long "penchant for violence". Created by Iran to "foment instability… across the world", it is currently "determined to give itself a potential homeland option as a critical component of its terrorism playbook" (translation: Hezbollah is plotting attacks on the US). "[O]ur work related to Hezbollah is every bit as much of a priority as our work against al-Qaeda and ISIS."
And of course, no discussion of the Lebanese group would be possible without trotting out this pet factoid: "Prior to September 11th… Hezbollah was responsible for the terrorism-related deaths of more US citizens than any other foreign terrorist organization"- namely via the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut and the "even more deadly attack on our [Beirut] Marine barracks in October of 1983 which killed 241 Americans."
Leaving aside the fact that Hezbollah didn't officially exist in 1983, the enduring hype over the barracks bombing fails to account for the detail that the Marines are by definition a military force - and as such were perceived as occupiers by certain sectors of the Lebanese population. READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.