The Wall Street Journal-20080215-Israel Girds for Reprisals From Hezbollah
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Israel Girds for Reprisals From Hezbollah
Full Text (874 words)Israelis went on high alert at home and abroad as Hezbollah's leader warned of an "open war" after the assassination of a top militia commander who also was one of world's most-wanted terrorists.
The counterterrorism bureau of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned Israelis to exercise caution abroad, while the chief of staff for the Israeli military said his forces were on high alert, according to Israel's Army Radio.
Though Israeli officials have neither confirmed nor denied whether they had a hand in the reported bombing Tuesday of Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, the Israeli government and Jewish institutions everywhere are bracing for potential reprisals. Hezbollah, which has blamed Israel, has a long record of bloody retaliatory strikes against government and civilian targets.
Mr. Mughniyeh, who was himself accused of being the architect of vengeance attacks, was killed in Damascus Tuesday night. The U.S. closely tracked Mr. Mughniyeh for years. He was wanted by more than three dozen governments and allegedly was a crucial player in some of the deadliest terrorist attacks of the past quarter-century.
Analysts, including former senior intelligence officials in Israel and the U.S., said Hezbollah most likely would attempt attacks on so- called soft targets outside of Israel. Those tend to be areas more lightly guarded than domestic government installations. They also tend to be targets where casualties can be maximized.
Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, seemed to warn of an attack abroad during a video address played yesterday at Mr. Mughniyeh's funeral in the Shiite stronghold of Dahieh in southern Beirut, Lebanon.
Mr. Nasrallah noted that his group's commander was killed "outside the normal battleground" between Israel and Hezbollah, namely Lebanon. He then declared to Israel: "If you want this kind of open war, then let it be an open war of this kind."
Despite the rhetoric, Mr. Mughniyeh's funeral was peaceful, as were memorials also held in Beirut yesterday to commemorate the third anniversary of the slaying of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister.
Yossi Kuperwasser, who retired in 2006 as the chief of analysis for Israeli military intelligence, said Hezbollah's best and most likely tactical option was to attack Israelis abroad, rather than trying to fire missiles across Israel's northern border, as the militant group did throughout a 34-day war with Israel in 2006.
"They will do this somewhere else, where they have an infrastructure that is kept for this purpose," Mr. Kuperwasser said. Some current and former U.S. intelligence officials said Hezbollah is perhaps the most capable international terrorist organization when it comes to conducting operations across Europe, Latin America and Asia.
A former Central Intelligence Agency officer who tracked Hezbollah for decades said its operatives regularly conduct surveillance on U.S. embassies in Europe in anticipation of the need for retaliatory strikes.
The U.S. also is concerned. "Whenever there's an event like this involving Hezbollah, we always worry about reaction" either in the Middle East or in other theaters, said a senior Bush administration counterterrorism official.
U.S. officials say they are still seeking to assess whether Hezbollah or its allies were involved in a January attack on a U.S. Embassy convoy in Beirut. No Americans were killed in the bombing. In recent years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has rolled up Hezbollah fund-raising operations in states like Michigan and North Carolina. But many U.S. officials doubt Hezbollah would seek to execute strikes inside the U.S., because of concerns of large-scale American reprisals and fear of losing its U.S. revenue stream.
Israel has long wielded assassination as a tool of state policy and has had to live with the repercussions, raising a question among many Israelis: If this was another assassination, will it do more harm than good? The last time Israel killed such a senior Hezbollah official was on Feb. 16, 1992, when an Israeli missile strike assassinated the group's then-leader, Abbas Musawi, in his motorcade in southern Lebanon.
Following Mr. Musawi's death, Israel got what many see as a far more dangerous adversary: Mr. Nasrallah replaced the slain cleric, according to Israeli analysts and former intelligence officials. And the group struck back -- not once, but twice.
Only 30 days after Mr. Musawi's assassination, 29 people were killed when the Israeli Embassy was bombed in Buenos Aires; 85 more died in the bombing of a Jewish cultural center in the same city more than two years later. Mr. Mughniyeh was accused of being the architect of both attacks.
"Two or three years after the killing of Musawi, most people thought the price was too high and the outcome was too low," said Ephraim Kam, the deputy director of Tel Aviv University's Institute for National Security Studies. Even so, many agreed this week that Mr. Mughniyeh was a far more valuable figure for the terrorist network and hence a potentially irresistible target for its enemies.
In addition to being suspected in the attacks in Buenos Aires, Mr. Mughniyeh was accused of involvement in the 1983 U.S. Embassy bombing in Beirut and the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight. Israeli officials also said he was behind the July 12, 2006, raid that sparked that summer's 34-day war and that he built the militia group's infrastructure in southern Lebanon.
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Nada Raad in Beirut contributed to this article.
