P. David Hornik: Apocalypse Soon

P. David Hornik
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
July 26, 2006

The most striking image to emerge so far from the Israel-Hizbullah war is that of missiles (to use the term generically) hitting Haifa. Small Israeli cities—particularly Kiryat Shemona a few decades ago, Sderot and Ashkelon more recently—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.

Israel, at least, has more realistically accepted the need for ground forays into Lebanon and is taking major Hizbullah strongholds there. But whatever the eventual outcome of the war, both Israeli and U.S. intelligence agree that the extent of Hizbullah’s entrenchment in Lebanon—the range and sophistication of its missiles, the depth and density of its underground networks, its surveillance and detection capabilities—went well beyond assessments.

The dangers posed by terror groups with missiles are of course hardly confined to Israel. Geostrategy-Direct.com (by subscription), in a recent dossier on North Korean ruler Kim Jong-Il, cites a four-year study by the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis in Charleston, South Carolina that concluded:

Most important of our observations is that the United States has no effective defense against ballistic missile attack—and absolutely none against terrorists who might purchase short-range ballistic missiles and launch them from ships in international water off our coasts at cities where 75 percent of Americans live.

The article also notes a CIA assessment that “Pyongyang has between 12 and 20 atomic bombs, with the likelihood that North Korea has already designed missile warheads.” Iran’s race toward nuclearization is, of course, in the public eye.

The Israeli case so far can be seen as a microcosm of the imminent dangers and of a Western country’s difficulties in coping with them. Israel’s fecklessness in allowing Hizbullah’s buildup in the six years since Israel pulled out of Lebanon in 2000 is now clear to all. So is the ability of a small terrorist force backed by state sponsors to build up strategically menacing capabilities. But what emerges most starkly is the need for threatened democracies to take a proactive, offensive approach instead of waiting for situations where their armies are humiliated and their citizens come under mass attack.

The Bush administration’s recent apparent shift to a European appeasement-mode in dealing with Iran has upset most clear-headed commentators. If the costliness of the Iraq involvement is what has discouraged Bush from a more assertive posture, then conservative critics of that war’s overambitious nature are reinforced. All that is clear is that the more weeks and months Teheran is handed to keep augmenting its capabilities, the more difficult and dangerous it will become to strike them if that is the plan at all.

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.

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P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Jerusalem. He can be reached at pdavidh2001@yahoo.com.