(Washington, DC) - I want to thank the chairs for organizing this joint hearing. Hizballah’s emergence, not only as a Shia militia and political party, not only as an international terrorist organization, but as a strategic proxy for the Iranian theocracy. Hizballah is surely worth the attention of Congress.

     The Hizballah threat, however, is not new. Hizballah has been designated as a terrorist organization by the State Department since 1995 and has been on the list of Specially Designated Global Terrorist Organizations since 2001. More Americans have died at the hands of Hizballah than any terrorist group other than al-Qaeda. The August war, which resulted in hundreds of innocent lives lost, and billions of dollars of destruction, was the just the latest atrocity for which Hizballah bears responsibility.

     Reciting Hizballah’s barbaric and bloody history, denouncing its philosophy of hatred and violence, and detailing its subservience to Iran and subversion of Lebanon’s sovereignty, though appreciable for the satisfaction of condemning the truly vile, is not what we are here for today.
 
      Our problem is not insufficiency of rhetoric or even, atypically, of understanding. Neither Hizballah’s capabilities, nor its wickedness, are in dispute or doubt.

     Our problem is, again and again and again, one of strategy; of developing a plan for applying available means to achieve desired ends. So, we may ask, what resources should the United States have at its disposal to address the challenge posed by Hizballah?

     Ideally, the United States should have strong alliance relationships built on a shared vision for achieving international security. We should have a singular international prestige built upon our position as not only the richest and strongest nation, but also as the leading advocate for international institutions and norms of behavior. We should have the public support of the most important Arab states built upon a shared appreciation of the Hizballah threat to regional peace and stability. Five years after 9/11, we should have broad international consensus on how to define and deal with terrorism in general. We should be militarily unencumbered, or at least, be still able to generate robust and capable forces for any prospective conflict. And, of course, we should have confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our intelligence.
 
     As anyone who has read a newspaper in the past year knows well, we have none of these things. Not one of them.

     Our reputation is in tatters. Right now, Arab leaders would rather have a  photo-op with a child-molester than with the American president. Instead of building a common front against madmen who demand the entire Middle East be stuffed back into a straightjacket of religious dogmatism, we have, by virtue of our own faith-based foreign policy, set the entire region against us.

     In the American version we declare our most fervent hopes and prayers to be facts and then we wait for them to come true. Thus, we have the self-executing Roadmap and the endorsement of Palestinian elections which included Hamas. Thus we have our failure to plan for Iraqi reconstruction, or to consider the implications of dissolving the Iraqi army, or of firing all the members of the Baath party, or of trying to occupy a country the size of California with too few troops. Thus, we have the necessity of subcontracting to the EU-3 the question of Iran’s nuclear weapons program, and to China, North Korea’s nuclear program.
 
     Thus too with Hizballah, we find our high hopes for Security Council Resolution 1701 already foundering, with UNIFIL commanders proudly declaring their intention to do nothing that would frustrate Iran, annoy Syria, or discomfort Hizballah. Should they encounter weapons in proscribed areas, or arms being smuggled, what will they do? They will consult with the government of Lebanon. Who sits in the government of Lebanon? Hizballah. We’d better start praying a little harder.

     No President gets to operate in a perfect world, and as our Secretary of Defensiveness has declared, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you want. But clearly, by virtue of the choices we have made and the priorities we have chosen, we are much worse off now than we were five years ago. We have less acceptability, less flexibility, less capacity, less capability, and most of all, less credibility. In light of these unfortunate conditions, none of which were inevitable, I’m looking forward to hearing from our witnesses what options remain available to us for dealing with the threat from Hizballah. 

###

Return to Gary's Homepage