Why the Middle East Crisis Isn't Really About Terrorism

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Moreover, by casting the battle against Hizballah as part of the war on terrorism, the Administration is obscuring the real questions in this crisis and depriving the American public of a debate over them: How much should we do for Israel, and what should we do to Iran, Hizballah's main source of funding, training and weaponry? The fundamental problem with Hizballah is not that it is a terrorist group, as the President has said repeatedly in recent weeks. The fundamental problem the U.S. should have with Hizballah is that it refuses to stop fighting our principal ally in the region, despite Israel's complete withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. And Hizballah can keep up the fight because it is sponsored by a state that, with its nuclear program, really does present a danger to the U.S. The backers of the Administration argue that the U.S., through Israel, needs to slap back Hizballah in order to smack Iran. But does Israel's whacking Hizballah really deliver a blow to Iran on behalf of the U.S. any more than a medieval duel of seconds settles who is the superior of two knights? It's a discussion worth having, if we can sort out our real interests and purposes in this affair.

HOW HAMAS FIGURES IN

If Hizballah's nature doesn't square with that of the global war on terrorism, then the Palestinian group Hamas is an even worse fit, although Bush routinely lumps it in with the global jihadists. This green-lights whatever response, however harsh, Israel makes to provocations, like the kidnapping by hard-liners within Hamas of an Israeli corporal in June. That may or may not make sense, but the justification cannot be that Hamas is a threat to the world or to the U.S. The group, born in the Gaza Strip in 1987 to resist the Israeli occupation, has no global reach. What's more, it has never targeted Americans.

Hamas is a Sunni organization, but it has no known ties to al-Qaeda. When bin Laden's band tried to instruct Hamas on how to proceed after it won Palestinian elections in January, the group--which takes pride in its homegrown, independent character--told al-Qaeda to buzz off, according to Hamas and Israeli intelligence sources. Hamas accepts limited assistance from Iran, and some of its leaders take sanctuary in Syria, but the group holds both countries at arm's length.

Al-Qaeda essentially wants, through terrorism, to intimidate the U.S. and other Western powers into leaving the Middle East entirely and revoking support for the region's current rulers and Israel. Al-Qaeda's demands are nonstarters, to say the least, and the group's history is about nothing but murder. Hizballah and Hamas are more complex organizations. They want to destroy Israel but have shown some signs of temperance on that point. They seek Islamic states in their spheres of influence, but their political parties have worked with secular parties in government. And those extreme aims are not their only agendas. Both run extensive social-welfare networks. After Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, Hizballah rolled back its destroy-Israel rhetoric and justified its continued militancy by harping on bogus claims that Israel still occupied a sliver of Lebanese territory. Hizballah's political party today holds 14 seats in the Lebanese Parliament and has two members in the Cabinet.