By
Kenneth
R. Timmerman
FrontPageMagazine.com
| July 27, 2006
Haifa, Israel – Some
have suggested that the latest round of fighting between Israel and
the Iranian-backed Hezbollah organization in Lebanon is the beginning
of World War III.
Think again.
“This is more like the Spanish Civil War,” says Daniel
Seaman, an Israeli government spokesman. “What we are seeing is
a series of conflicts that foreshadow a future world conflict, just
as the Spanish Civil war prefigured the Second World War.”
Seaman’s analogy is worth exploring.
Just as Hitler used Franco as his proxy in Spain to test new military
techniques and equipment on the battlefield, so Iran is using
Hezbollah as its proxy to do the same.
Hezbollah is no longer a rag-tag guerilla group, but a veritable
terrorist army. “They understand complex military tactics, and
are pursuing combined military operations using ground forces,
missiles, intelligence, and the media,” Seaman said.
Over the past six years, following Israel’s unilateral
withdrawal from south Lebanon, Iran began supplying Hezbollah with
massive quantities of long-range artillery rockets of a type never
before used against Israel.
These Iranian-made Fajr-3 rockets have a range of around 43
kilometers, and carry a 50 kilogram warhead packed with thousands of
deadly ballbearings.
These are terrorist
mass-kill weapons,
designed to kill as many civilians as possible. No one standing
within a 50 meter radius of one of these incoming rocket can survive,
Israeli bomb experts say. The Fajr-3 was used with great success in a
July 16 attack that killed eight railway workers at a repair depot in
downtown Haifa.
“When they showed me the small pellets packed inside, I thought
they were showing me a suicide bomber belt,” Haifa mayor Yona
Yahav told me. In fact, Iran modeled the design of the Fajr-3 warhead
on the suicide bomber belts, with the clear aim of maximum its
lethality.
Syria supplied similar rockets to Hezbollah, packed with
ball-bearings. Hezbollah purchased smaller rockets from Communist
China, after they had been similarly modified.
How many terrorist groups can boast an arsenal of over 10,000
long-range rockets? Only those with the backing of a sovereign state,
Iran.¬Ý
Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni explained Hezbollah’s aims
with stark clarity here yesterday.
“While Israel is targeting Hezbollah, and during this
operation, unfortunately it can lead to loss of civilian life,
Hezbollah is targeting our cities in order to hit, in order to target
civilians and to target Israeli population centers. This is a crucial
difference.”
This is a strategy Iran is testing out for a future war. Iran is
testing Israel, probing Israel’s reaction, and testing the
response of the international community.
Let’s recall how this all began. On July 12, a Hezbollah
commando broke through the security fence at the border and snuck
into Israel. In an operation that lasted scarcely five minutes, they
ambushed an Israeli army Humvee on patrol, killed three soldiers,
kidnapped two others, and escaped back across the border.
Shortly afterwards, Hezbollah launched six long-range rockets into
Israel, hitting Haifa, Israel’s third largest city. It was the
first time Haifa had been attacked in such a manner.
How would the Israelis respond? Would they launch a massive ground
assault into Lebanon? That was what the Iranians were hoping, because
they believed it would catalyze the Muslim world against Israel, and
position Iran as the new champion of the Muslim “resistance.”¬Ý
When the Israelis didn’t bite, the Iranians ordered Hezbollah
to step up the rocket attacks against Israeli cities, towns and
villages. On day two, they launched 133 rockets into northern Israel,
108 on day three, and 126 on day four.
In response, Israel launched air strikes deep into Lebanon, striking
the airport, cutting resupply routes into Syria, and attempting to
knock out command bunkers where they believed Hezbollah leader Hassan
Nasrallah was hiding. But none of this deterred Hezbollah, and for
good reason: the Iranians had prepared them to fight a long war,
dispersing their weaponry across Lebanon.
On July 15, Iranian advisors in charge of Hezbollah’s more
sophisticated weapons stunned the Israelis by launching two
sophisticated C-802 anti-shipping missiles against an Israeli SAAR-5
boat cruising some 18 kilometers off the Lebanese coast.
One of the missiles was apparently deflected by Israeli
counter-measures, and hit a Cambodian merchant vessel that was 60 km
from the coast and 44 km down range from the Israeli ship, according
to a technical analysis of the attack published by
the
Israel Resource News Agency on
Tuesday. The second seriously damaged the Israeli corvette, the
INS Ahi-Hanit.
What terrorist groups possess third-generation radar-guided
anti-shipping missiles? The Chinese-built C-802s were first shipped
to Iran in 1995, and at the time generated concern among U.S. naval
commanders in the Persian Gulf because at the time the U.S. had no
defense against them.
The Israelis had electronic countermeasures on board the Ahi-Hanit
that could have deflected the missiles, the experts believe, but
had turned them off for fear of friendly-fire incidents against
Israeli fighters flying overhead.¬Ý
More lessons learned for the Iranians.
And how did Israel respond to the rocket attacks?
Anyone who has been watching television over the past two weeks has
probably heard the eerie wail of the air raid sirens that go off many
times each day in Haifa and in smaller towns and settlements across
northern Israel.¬Ý
As many as 500,000 Israelis have fled the warzone. Most of Israel
north of Haifa is deserted, while those remaining are living in
underground shelters.¬Ý
Haifa Mayor Yona Yahav estimated that the economic impact has been
devastating – “in the billions of shekels” of lost
business for Haifa alone. That’s roughly $500 million.
Israeli officials believe the Iranians gave the go-ahead for the
kidnapping and the rocket war. They point
to
the unannounced arrival in Damascus the night
before Hezbollah
launched its attacks by the head of Iran’s National Security
Council and Iran’s intelligence minister.
For Dr. Michael Oren, author of a forthcoming book on the history of
the U.S. relationship to the Middle East, the current conflict is
just a stage in the war against Iran. “People need to realize
this is not a bilateral conflict. It is part of the broad regional
and international conflict between the West and Islamic
fundamentalism championed by Iran,” he told me.
Dr. Oren is a senior fellow at the Shalem Center for Strategic
Studies in Jerusalem. He is also a major in the Israeli Defense
Forces reserves. He was called up for active duty on July 21, but
asked for a three day extension so he could finish his new book,
Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East from 1776 to
the Present.
He believes the stakes of Israel’s effort to smash Hezbollah as
an effective fighting force in Lebanon go way beyond the immediate
impact on Israeli or Lebanese civilians.
“If we don’t win in Lebanon, Iran will be well on the way
to creating an arc of influence extending from the Indian border to
the Mediterranean,” he said¬Ý.
Those are the stakes.¬Ý
Iran launched this war to
deflect attention from the G-8
summit in Saint
Petersburg from its nuclear weapons program. But at the same time, it
launched this war to try out new weapons and new tactics for future
conflicts.
The next step, should the West fail to step up to the plate: how
about long-range Shahab-3 missiles in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley,
aimed at Europe? And how do you think the Europeans would respond,
seeing the devastating impact far smaller rockets fired into Israel
have had on Israel’s economy?¬Ý
Can you imagine Parisians or Romans taking to the bomb-shelters?
Sending their children to stay with relatives living overseas? Can
you imagine them resisting Iran as Israel is doing?
Unchecked, Iran will continue its march toward nuclear power, and it
will use terrorist proxies to conduct war against the West. In the
future, those proxies will have nuclear weapons.
This is the “hurricane” Iranian president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad promised the world earlier this week in Tehran, in yet
another “mein kampf” statement.
Now is the time to draw the line.
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