US moves to counter Hizbollah activities in the Americas

WASHINGTON DC (Kurdistan 24) - A two-day international conference was held earlier this week to counter Hizbollah’s activity in the Americas, the State Department announced on Thursday.

Formally known as the “Law Enforcement Coordination Group (LECG) focused on Countering Hizbollah’s Terrorist and Illicit Activities,” the group met in the Ecuadoran capital of Quito on June 13-14.

That conference, sponsored jointly by the US and Europol, marked the LECG’s sixth meeting and was the first such meeting to focus on the Americas—which the State Department described as “a region where Hizbollah actively engages in the development of infrastructure that can support terrorist activities and associated criminal schemes.”

The issue of Hizbollah’s activities in the region arose last month, when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Rep. Albio Sires (D, New Jersey) was born in Cuba and is the Ranking Member on the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere.

“As part of the Ayatollah’s efforts to export the revolution,” Sires told Pompeo, it seems they “have been building cultural centers” in a number of Latin American countries.

“They started out with ten. Now they’re about 100,” Sires said. “Are we really monitoring to see how much influence they have? Or how many they’re opening?,” he asked.

“I’m aware of this issue,” Pompeo replied, “but I don’t know what monitoring is taking place,” as he promised to get Sires an answer.

The Obama administration placed relatively little emphasis on countering Hizbollah. A major story in Politico charged that because of Obama’s desire for a nuclear deal with Iran, his administration stalled a significant FBI investigation into Hizbollah’s criminal activities—including drug smuggling, weapons trafficking and money laundering—from which it earns as much as $1 billion a year.

However, the Trump administration is doing the opposite and targeting Iran’s aggressive and malign activities.

Last October, the State Department announced it was offering multi-million dollar rewards for information leading to the arrest of Talal Hamiyah, head of Hizbollah’s “External Security Organization”—its international terrorist unit, as well as Fuad Shukr, a senior military commander.

But, oddly enough, the renewed focus on Hizbollah also reveals a basic misunderstanding about terrorism that has crept into US thinking over the years.

On October 23, 1983, the US Marines’ barracks in Beirut were bombed, killing 239 Americans. Minutes later, French paratroopers, part of the same peacekeeping force, were attacked, killing 58 Frenchmen.

Those assaults followed the bombing of the US embassy six months before, in which 63 people died.

At the time, the most senior US officials blamed Iran and Syria. Already the day after the Marine barracks’ bombing, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger said, “There is much that points in the direction of Iran.”

Two days later, President Ronald Reagan told a private group, “I think the evidence that I have is sufficient that this last horrendous act involved Iranian terrorists and they were facilitated in their entry and in the provisions of the munitions by the Syrians,” The New York Times reported.

US officials had an intercept—from Tehran to the Iranian embassy in Beirut! Hence, the speed with which they reached their conclusion and their firmness in sticking to it.

Yet 25 years later, those attacks—planned and organized by Iran and Syria—are routinely attributed to Hizbollah.

That minimizes the responsibility of those states, Col. Norvell DeAtkine, a Middle East expert, retired from the US Army, complained to Kurdistan 24.

Nicholas Rasmussen was Director of the National Counterterrorism Center until December 2017, and he did just that in October, shortly before stepping down, as he described the new US measures against Hizbollah.

Rasmussen attributed the 1983 bombings in Lebanon to Hizbollah—rather than to the states identified by the Reagan administration as having been responsible.

Hizbollah scarcely existed in 1983, DeAtkine explained. It was built up by Iran and Syria, in the years following Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

A retired US intelligence officer concurred. Recalling the bombings in Lebanon against US targets then, he told Kurdistan 24, “The whole Intelligence Community, including the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, attributed those attacks to state sponsors.”

The retired officer blamed Bill Clinton for the widespread confusion. During the Reagan years, there had been a debate about the nature of terrorism, and the consensual view that emerged was that major attacks were highly likely to be state-sponsored: a form of proxy war which gave the attacking state plausible deniability.

Clinton, however, turned terrorism into a law enforcement issue. He responded to terrorist attacks by focusing on the arrest, trial, and conviction of individuals, instead of determining what state was behind the assault and punishing it.

That can be a difficult challenge, DeAtkine noted, and it is “easier” to take the law enforcement route.

“That may not work so well in the long run,” he said, “but in the short term, much easier.”