A tragédia do Libano sob o Hezbollah - Balance of Power (Bloomberg)

 

Welcome to Balance of Power, bringing you the latest in global politics. If you haven’t yet, sign up here. For months, world powers have been increasingly concerned about the prospect of an all-out war between Israel and Hezbollah. Those fears have become far more justified in recent days: Israel escalated its campaign against the Iran-backed militant group with a massive bombardment of its positions in Lebanon yesterday. The strikes killed almost 500 people — including around 100 women and children — and wounded 1,650, according to Lebanese officials. Civilians are panicking in the south of the country and the Bekaa region in the north-east, with thousands of cars clogging roads to the capital, Beirut. Israel says it had no choice but to act more aggressively after months of diplomacy — including by the US, France and Germany — failed to get Hezbollah to stop its missile and drone attacks. Those are being carried out in support of Hamas in the devastating war in Gaza. Last week, Israel made enabling the return of tens of thousands of displaced civilians to the country’s north an official war objective. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that can’t happen unless Hezbollah moves its fighters back around 20 miles (32 kilometers) from the border with Lebanon. He seems to hope Israel’s aerial campaign will be enough to achieve that without a ground offensive, which his government knows could bog down its troops for months, if not longer, and come at a huge human and economic cost. It could also trigger a fierce retaliation from Hezbollah. Iran would likely act if it felt the existence of Hezbollah — its most important proxy group — as a military force was in question. The US, for its part, may have to back Israel even more than it’s done for the war in Gaza. There is a growing danger that the current clashes will spiral into the regional war the rest of the world is so keen to avoid. — Paul Wallace

Israel’s bravery has exposed the lie at the heart of Starmer’s foreign policy - Allister Heath (The Telegraph)

Israel’s bravery has exposed the lie at the heart of Starmer’s foreign policy

The battle that Jerusalem faces is not just defending the Jewish state.  It is abou upholding civilization itself.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/09/18/israel-hezbollah-exploding-beepers-devices-war-hamas/

The Telegraph, 18 September 2024

By Allister Heath

“Robbed of its moral bearings, bereft of any sense of right and wrong, incapable of distinguishing heroes from villains, the West can no longer celebrate when good triumphs over evil. 

Israel’s brilliantly audacious booby-trapping of thousands of Hezbollah pagers, followed by the blowing up of the terror group’s walkie-talkies, is a stunning fillip for the forces of civilisation worldwide. 

A tiny nation of just 9.3 million, of which 7.2 million are Jewish, living in a country the size of Wales, reeling from the worst anti-Semitic pogroms since the Holocaust, Israel is leading the war against barbarism, its young conscripts doing a job that would once have required intervention by a Western coalition acting as global policeman. 

The fact that so many in Britain, Europe and America, especially the young, no longer take Israel’s side in this existential combat exemplifies our cultural, intellectual and ethical degeneration. 

The Biden administration is obsessed with preventing “escalation”, even though that is what is required if Iran is to be stopped from gaining the means to wage a nuclear World War III. All too predictably, America, seemingly determined to ensure the survival of every regional terror group, appeared upset at the successful attack on Hezbollah. David Lammy, our foreign secretary, is delivering speeches claiming climate change is a worse threat than terrorism; in a rational world, Lammy would be privately congratulating his Israeli counterparts for the most successful surgical operation ever conducted against a terrorist organisation, with few civilian casualties, and pledging Britain’s help. 

Instead, Keir Starmer has turned against Israel, banning the sales of some weapons – a policy that Germany appears intent on following – and refusing to oppose lawsuits against the Jewish state, in an unforgivable moral inversion. 

Labour has placed Britain on the side of those nihilists masquerading as human rights lawyers who negate the essential distinction between victims and aggressors, between rule-bound, democracies desperate to minimise civilian casualties, and bloodthirsty dictatorships for whom their people are pawns to be sacrificed. 

Hezbollah is funded and controlled by the Iranian regime, an obscurantist, fascistic, millenarian tyranny that persecutes minorities, women and dissidents. Violating human rights and plotting war crimes is Hezbollah’s raison d’être: its 150,000 missiles point towards civilian centres and, like Hamas and Iran itself, it seeks Israel’s liquidation, guaranteeing the massacre, expulsion or subjugation of Jews. Hezbollah has forced some 63,473 Israelis to flee their homes since October 7. This is unsustainable and explains why a major Israeli response is looming; obscenely, this will trigger widespread condemnation of the Jewish state.

Western foreign policy is a mishmash of cowardice, delusion and contradictions. Iran is a threat to the world; its alliance with Russia is deepening. Turkey, led by the despot Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has threatened Israel with invasion, yet remains part of Nato. Qatar, which puts up senior Hamas terrorists in luxury hotels, is a major non-Nato ally of the US, home to a crucial Western military base and a major investor in London. Egypt, a recipient of US aid, has tolerated myriad tunnels to southern Gaza, refused to let in any Palestinians and, bizarrely, is not held responsible for supplying Gaza with provisions, that task falling to Israel. None of the three latter regimes face sanctions: global ire is reserved for Israel. 

One reason Western elites have become so Israelophobic is that, infected by wokery, they increasingly loathe Europe’s and America’s history and traditions, and view the Jewish state as a standout example of a Western model they reject. 

Winston Churchill would be convicted for crimes against humanity today, as would Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry Truman. D-Day would be ruled illegitimate because so many French civilians died during the Battle of Normandy.

Democracies might as well not bother with nuclear weapons, for detonating one, even in retaliation for an unprovoked attack, would be deemed a war crime. I’m in favour of much stricter rules than those governing World War II, of doing everything possible to protect civilians, but this is madness. 

The Just War is a foundational principle. States have the right to defend themselves. Every civilian life lost as collateral damage is a tragedy, but pacifism is a deluded utopia that fails to grasp the reality of the human condition. It is madness to criminalise all warfare, and despicable to focus on that conducted by democracies and ignore that advanced by our enemies.

It is equally stupid to entrust so much power to legal activists. Much historic anti-Semitism has been ratified by kangaroo courts, including during the 1930s. The Trial of the Talmud took place in France in 1240, with rabbis forced to defend religious texts against trumped-up accusations of blasphemy and obscenity. 

Other bigot-fests masquerading as ordinary trials include the Disputations of Barcelona and Tortosa, the Damascus Affair, the Dreyfus affair that prompted Emile Zola’s seminal J’accuse, and the trial of Mendel Beilis in Ukraine in 1913. It is a well-established model that hasn’t gone out of fashion in far-Left quarters. They no longer explicitly single out religious beliefs or individuals but leverage lawfare to delegitimise what just happens to be the only Jewish state. 

The fact that the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice have the trappings of a legitimate legal setting does not mean they necessarily embody justice. The fact that their rulings are deemed legitimate by Left-wing elites doesn’t automatically make them such. The fact that today’s blood libels take on the language of “human rights” doesn’t make them less monstrous. The fact that it is possible for a country as unjustly governed as South Africa to lead a genocide case against Israel proves that the entire system is rotten. The case is backed by Iran, Brazil’s far-Left president, Ireland and Egypt: we must have been transported into an alternative, Kafkaesque universe. 

Israel is the supreme embodiment of law-bound national, democratic sovereignty, of peoplehood, of matching a nation to a state, of post-imperialism, of capitalism and technology, and of the continued relevance of the monotheistic religions. If you tear down Israel, you destroy the very ideas that underpin the West, the international order implodes and the autocracies triumph. 

The stakes are thus unbelievably high. We must support Israel, and allow it to finish the job of annihilating Hamas and defeating Hezbollah.”

Hezbollah e Venezuela: tudo a ver? - Vanessa Neumann (Foreign Policy Research Institute)

Foreign Policy Research Institute - www.fpri.org

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THE NEW NEXUS OF NARCOTERRORISM:

HEZBOLLAH AND VENEZUELA

by Vanessa Neumann

December 26, 2011

Vanessa Neumann is a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy

Research Institute and is co-chair, with FPRI Trustee Devon

Cross, of FPRI's Manhattan Initiative.

Available on the web and in pdf format at:

http://www.fpri.org/enotes/2011/201112.neumann.narcoterrorism.html

             THE NEW NEXUS OF NARCOTERRORISM:

                 HEZBOLLAH AND VENEZUELA

                    by Vanessa Neumann

Press stories, as well as a television documentary, over the

past two months have detailed the growing cooperation

between South American drug traffickers and Middle Eastern

terrorists, proving that the United States continues to

ignore the mounting terrorist threat in its own "backyard"

of Latin America at its own peril. A greater portion of

financing for Middle Eastern terrorist groups, including

Hezbollah and Al Qaeda, is coming from Latin America, while

they are also setting up training camps and recruiting

centers throughout our continent, endangering American lives

and interests globally. Some Latin American countries that

were traditional allies for the U.S. (including Venezuela)

have now forged significant political and economic alliances

with regimes whose interests are at odds with those of the

U.S., particularly China, Russia and Iran. In fact Iran and

Iran's Lebanese asset, "the Party of God," Hezbollah, have

now become the main terror sponsors in the region and are

increasingly funded by South American cocaine.

Venezuela and Iran are strong allies: Venezuelan President

Hugo Chavez and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

publicly call each other "brothers," and last year signed 11

memoranda of understanding for, among other initiatives,

joint oil and gas exploration, as well as the construction

of tanker ships and petrochemical plants. Chavez's

assistance to the Islamic Republic in circumventing U.N.

sanctions has got the attention of the new Republican

leadership of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, resulting

in the May 23rd, 2011 announcement by the US State

Department that it was imposing sanctions on the Venezuelan

government-owned oil company Petroleos de Venezuela (PDVSA)

as a punishment for circumventing UN sanctions against Iran

and assisting in the development of the Iran's nuclear

program.

Besides its sponsored terrorist groups, Iran also has a

growing direct influence in Latin America, spurred by three

principal motivations: 1) a quest for uranium, 2) a quest

for gasoline, 3) a quest for a base of operations that is

close to the US territory, in order to position itself to

resist diplomatic and possible military pressure, possibly

by setting up a missile base within striking distance of the

mainland US, as the Soviets did in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

FARC, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda all have training camps,

recruiting bases and networks of mutual assistance in

Venezuela as well as throughout the continent.

I have long argued that Latin America is an increasing

source of funding for Middle Eastern terrorism and to

overlook the political changes and security threats in the

region with such geographic proximity to the US and its

greatest source of immigrants is a huge strategic mistake.

It was inevitable that South American cocaine traffickers

and narcoterrorists would become of increasing importance to

Hezbollah and other groups. While intelligence officials

believe that Hezbollah used to receive as much as $200

million annually from its primary patron, Iran, and

additional money from Syria, both these sources have largely

dried up due to the onerous sanctions imposed on the former

and the turmoil in the latter.

A recent New York Times front-page article (December 14,

2011) revealed the extensive and intricate connections

between Hezbollah and South American cocaine trafficking.

Far from being the passive beneficiaries of drug-trafficking

expats and sympathizers, Hezbollah has high-level officials

directly involved in the South American cocaine trade and

its most violent cartels, including the Mexican gang Los

Zetas. The "Party of God's" increasing foothold in the

cocaine trade is facilitated by an enormous Lebanese

diaspora. As I wrote in my May 2011 e-note, in 2005, six

million Muslims were estimated to inhabit Latin American

cities. However, ungoverned areas, primarily in the Amazon

regions of Suriname, Guyana, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador,

Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil, present easily exploitable

terrain over which to move people and material. The Free

Trade Zones of Iquique, Chile; Maicao, Colombia; and Colon,

Panama, can generate undetected financial and logistical

support for terrorist groups. Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru

offer cocaine as a lucrative source of income. In addition,

Cuba and Venezuela have cooperative agreements with Syria,

Libya, and Iran.

Some shocking revelations into the global interconnectedness

of Latin American governments and Middle Eastern terrorist

groups have come from Walid Makled, Venezuela's latter-day

Pablo Escobar, who was arrested on August 19, 2010 in

Cucuta, a town on the Venezuelan-Colombian border. A

Venezuelan of Syrian descent known variously as "El Turco"

("The Turk") or "El Arabe" ("The Arab"), he is allegedly

responsible for smuggling 10 tons of cocaine a month into

the US and Europe-a full 10 percent of the world's supply

and 60 percent of Europe's supply. His massive

infrastructure and distribution network make this entirely

plausible, as well as entirely implausible the Venezuelan

government did not know. Makled owned Venezuela's biggest

airline, Aeropostal, huge warehouses in Venezuela's biggest

port, Puerto Cabello, and bought enormous quantities of urea

(used in cocaine processing) from a government-owned

chemical company.

After his arrest and incarceration in the Colombian prison

La Picota, Makled gave numerous interviews to various media

outlets. When asked on camera by a Univision television

reporter whether he had any relation to the FARC, he

answered: "That is what I would say to the American

prosecutor." Asked directly whether he knew of Hezbollah

operations in Venezuela, he answered: "In Venezuela? Of

course! That which I understand is that they work in

Venezuela. [Hezbollah] make money and all of that money they

send to the Middle East." A prime example of the importance

of the Lebanese diaspora in triangulating amongst South

American cocaine and Middle Eastern terrorists, is Ayman

Joumaa, a Sunni Muslim of the Medell¡n cartel with deep ties

with Shiites in the Hezbollah strongholds of southern

Lebanon. His indictment made public on Tuesday "charges him

with coordinating shipments of Colombian cocaine to Los

Zetas in Mexico for sale in the United States, and

laundering the proceeds" (NY Times, Dec. 14, 2011).

The growing routes linking South American cocaine to Middle

Eastern terrorists are primarily from Colombia through

Venezuela. According to an April 2011 report by the United

Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) the Bolivarian

Republic of Venezuela is the most prominent country of

origin for direct cocaine shipments to Europe, with the

cocaine coming mainly from Colombia, primarily the FARC and

ELN terrorist groups. Shipments to Africa, mostly West

Africa, gained in importance between 2004 and 2007,

resulting in the emergence of a new key trans-shipment hub:

centered on Guinea-Bissau and Guinea, stretching to Cape

Verde, The Gambia and Senegal, thus complementing the

already existing trafficking hub of the Bight of Benin,

which spans from Ghana to Nigeria. As the cocaine is

transported through Africa and into Europe, its safe passage

is guaranteed (much as it was in Latin America) by terrorist

groups-most prominently, Al Qaeda and Hezbollah. The cocaine

can also travel from Latin America's Tri-Border Area

(TBA)-bounded by Puerto Iguazu, Argentina; Ciudad del Este,

Paraguay; and Foz do Iguacu, Brazil-to West Africa

(particularly Benin, Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, with its poor

governance and vast archipelagos) and then north into Europe

through Portugal and Spain or east via Syria and Lebanon.

Hezbollah's traditional continental home has been the TBA,

where a large, active Arab and Muslim community consisting

of a Shi'a majority, a Sunni minority, and a small

population of Christians who emigrated from Lebanon, Syria,

Egypt and the Palestinian territories about 50 years ago.

The TBA, South America's busiest contraband and smuggling

center, has long been an ideal breeding ground for terrorist

groups, including Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda-the

latter since 1995 when Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh

Mohammad first visited.

Hezbollah is still active in the TBA, according to Argentine

officials. They maintain that with Iran's assistance,

Hezbollah carried out a car-bomb attack on the main building

of the Jewish Community Center (AMIA) in Buenos Aires on

July 18, 1994, protesting the Israeli-Jordanian peace

agreement that year. Today, one of the masterminds of those

attacks, the Iranian citizen and Shia Muslim teacher, Mohsen

Rabbani, remains not only at large, but extremely active in

recruiting young Brazilians, according to reports in

Brazilian magazine Veja. This region, the third in the world

for cash transactions (behind Hong Kong and Miami),

continues to be an epicenter for the conversion and

recruitment of a new generation of terrorists who then train

in the Middle East and pursue their activities both there

and in the Americas.

According to Lebanon's drug enforcement chief, Col. Adel

Mashmoushi, as cited in The New York Times, a main

transportation route for terrorists, cash and drugs was

aboard a flight commonly referred to as "Aeroterror," about

which I wrote in my May 2011 e-note for FPRI. According to

my own secret sources within the Venezuelan government, the

flight had the route Tehran-Damascus-Caracas-Madrid, where

it would wait for 15 days, and flew under the direct orders

of the Venezuelan Vice-President, according to the captain.

The flight would leave Caracas seemingly empty (though now

it appears it carried a cargo of cocaine) and returned full

of Iranians, who boarded the flight in Damascus, where they

arrived by bus from Tehran. The Iranian ambassador in

Caracas would then distribute the new arrivals all over

Venezuela.

I wrote in my May 2011 e-note that reports that Venezuela

has provided Hezbollah operatives with Venezuelan national

identity cards are so rife, they were raised in the July 27,

2010, Senate hearing for the recently nominated U.S.

ambassador to Venezuela, Larry Palmer. When Palmer answered

that he believed the reports, Chavez refused to accept him

as ambassador in Venezuela. Thousands of foreign terrorists

have in fact been given national identity cards that

identify them as Venezuelan citizens and give them full

access to the benefits of citizenship. In 2003, Gen. Marcos

Ferreira, who had been in charge of Venezuela's Department

of Immigration and Foreigners (DIEX) until he decided to

support the 2002 coup against Chavez, said that he had been

personally asked by Ramon Rodr¡guez Chac¡n (who served as

both deputy head of DISIP-Venezuela's intelligence service,

now renamed SEBIN-and Interior Minister under Chavez) to

allow the illegal entry Colombians into Venezuela thirty-

five times and that the DISIP itself regularly fast-tracked

insurgents including Hezbollah and Al Qaeda. The newly-

minted Venezuelan citizens during Ferreira's tenure include

2,520 Colombians and 279 "Syrians." And that was only during

three of the past twelve years of an increasingly

radicalized Chavez regime.

While Chavez has done more than anyone to strengthen these

relationships with Middle Eastern terrorists, in an attempt

to use what he calls "the International Rebellion"

(including Hezbollah, Hamas and ETA) in order to negotiate

with the US for power in Latin America, the coziness of the

seemingly strange bedfellows dates back to the fall of the

Soviet Union, when the USSR abandoned Cuba. At the Sao Paulo

Forum of 1990, prominent Venezuelans and international

terrorists were all in attendance, including: then-

Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez (against whom

Chavez attempted a coup in 1992); Al¡ Rodr¡guez, then-

President of PDVSA (Petroleos de Venezuela, the government-

owned oil company); Pablo Medina, a left-wing Venezuelan

politician who initially supported Chavez, but has now moved

to the opposition; as well as Fidel Castro, Moammar Qaddafi

and leaders of the FARC, Tupamaros and Sendero Luminoso

(Shining Path). The extent to which these alliances have

deepened and become institutionalized is exemplified by the

Continental Bolivarian Coordinator, the office that

coordinates all the Latin American terrorists. According to

a well-placed Venezuelan military source of mine, they are

headquartered in the Venezuelan state of Barinas-the same

state that is effectively a Chavez family fiefdom, with

their sprawling family estate, La Chavera, and their total

control of local politics. Their extreme anti-Semitism is

not ideological, but simply out of convenience: to court and

maintain Iranian support.

According to the Congressional Research Service, with

enactment of the sixth FY2011 Continuing Resolution through

March 18, 2011, (H.J.Res. 48/P.L. 112-6) Congress has

approved a total of $1.283 trillion for military operations,

base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs,

and veterans' health care for the three operations initiated

since the 9/11 attacks: Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF)

Afghanistan and other counter terror operations; Operation

Noble Eagle (ONE), providing enhanced security at military

bases; and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF).

Yet for all this massive spending on fighting terrorists and

insurgents in the Middle East, we are leaving ourselves

vulnerable to them here, on a number of fronts. First and

foremost, the United States is under territorial threat

through its Mexican border. Hezbollah operatives have

already been smuggled, along with drugs and weapons, in

tunnels dug under the border with the US by Mexican drug

cartels. Only a week after my October 5th interview by KT

McFarland on Fox, where I specifically warned of a

possibility of this resulting in a terrorist attack carried

out inside the US with the complicity of South American drug

traffickers, the global press revealed a plot by the elite

Iranian Quds Force to utilize the Mexican gang Los Zetas to

assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington in a bombing

that would have murdered many Americans on their lunch hour.

Second, American assets in Latin America are under threat.

Embassies, consulates, corporate headquarters, energy

pipelines and American- or Jewish-sponsored community

centers and American citizens have already been targeted by

terrorist groups all over Latin America for decades: FARC in

Colombia, Sendero Luminoso and Tupac Amaru in Peru and

Hezbollah in Argentina. Al Qaeda is also rumored to have a

strong presence in Brazil.

Third, while American soldiers give their lives trying to

defeat terrorists and violent insurgents in the Middle East,

these same groups are being supported and strengthened

increasingly by Latin America, where they receive training,

weapons and cash. This makes American military engagement

far more costly by any metric: loss of life and financial

cost.

Indeed over the last decade, Latin America is a region

spiraling ever more out of American control. It is a region

with which the United States has a growing asymmetry of

power: it has more importance to the United States, while

the United States is losing influence over Latin America,

which remains the largest source of oil, drugs and

immigrants, both documented and not. Latinos now account for

15 percent of the US population and nearly 50 percent of

recent US population growth, as well as a growing portion of

the electorate, as seen in the last presidential elections.

The discovery of huge new oil reserves in Brazil and

Argentina, that might even challenge Saudi Arabia, and the

2012 presidential elections in Venezuela, make Latin America

of increasing strategic importance to the U.S., particularly

as the future political landscape of the Middle East becomes

ever more uncertain, in the wake of the Arab Spring and the

political rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in previously

secular Arab governments. The growth of transnational gangs

and the resurgence of previously waning terrorist

organizations pose complicated new challenges, as violence

and murder cross the U.S. border, costing American lives and

taking a huge toll on U.S. law enforcement. The United

States needs to develop a smart policy to deal with these

challenges.

So while the US is expending vast resources on the GWOT, the

terrorists are being armed and reinforced by America's

southern neighbors, making the GWOT far more costly for the

US and directly threatening American security. Even though

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez may be removed from the

presidency either through an electoral loss in the October

7, 2012 presidential elections or through his battle with

cancer, certain sectors of the Venezuelan government will

continue to support international terrorism, whose

activities, bases and training camps have now spread

throughout this region. By understanding the dynamics of the

increasingly entrenched narcoterrorist network, the U.S. can

develop an effective policy to contend with these, whether

or not President Chavez remains in power.

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Copyright     Foreign      Policy     Research     Institute

(http://www.fpri.org/).

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The Winter 2012 issue of Orbis, FPRI's Journal of World Affairs

is now available. Orbis is edited by Mackubin (Mac) Owens, Associate

Dean of Academics for Electives and Directed Research and Professor

of National Security Affairs at the Naval War College in Newport,

Rhode Island. A prolific writer on military affairs, Dr. Owens is

a long-time associate of FPRI, where he is a Senior Fellow in

the Program on National Security.

Current issue featuring:

Margin Call: How To Cut A Trillion From Defense

    Kori Schake

China's Naval Rise And The South China Sea: An Operational Assessment

    Felix K. Chang

Confronting A Powerful China With Western Characteristics

    James Kurth

Religious Relations Across The Taiwan Strait: Patterns, Alignments, And

Political Effects

    Deborah A. Brown and Tun-jen Cheng

Jordan: Between The Arab Spring And The Gulf Cooperation Council

    Samuel Helfont and Tally Helfont

The Arab Spring And The Saudi-Led Counterrevolution

    Mehran Kamrava

India's ‘Af-Pak’ Conundrum: South Asia In Flux

    Harsh V. Pant

Intelligence And Grand Strategy

    Thomas Fingar

The Reform Of Military Education: Twenty-Five Years Later

    Joan Johnson-Freese

Complete Table of Contents and links to all articles:

http://www.fpri.org/orbis/

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