What is unique about Hezbollah’s war against Israel

David Hornik writes at FrontPage Magazine:

Small Israeli cities … have been hit before by missiles fired by terrorist organizations. Large Israeli cities—Tel Aviv and Haifa—have been hit before, in the Gulf War, by missiles fired by a state. But this marks the first time a large Israeli city has been hit by missiles fired by a terrorist organization.

Hizbullah, as the more pessimistic analyses have emphasized, has been able to keep firing the missiles at Haifa and smaller communities despite two weeks of Israeli bombardment of its positions. In other words, a terrorist fighting force estimated at about eight thousand has been able to keep about a million citizens imperiled, with many living in shelters or fleeing southward, and a country seriously hampered.

… The best reminder of the gravity of the situation is those missiles now hitting Haifa—in other words, a reality that is a WMD-warhead away from catastrophe. Just as the suicide bombings that started to plague Israel in the 1990s eventually spread to much of the world, so will the current missile-terror be a harbinger unless stopped in its tracks. For the U.S. administration, that means allowing Israel to win the current war without lapsing into European “cease-fire” mode, and, even more critically, confronting Teheran and Pyongyang with something more convincing than multiparty talks and the Security Council.

Whether or not either of those regimes would itself fire its nukes, a world in which they can proliferate them to terror groups is one at the brink of apocalypse.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 27, 2006 07:20 AM | Send