The wonderful Kathryn Jean Lopez over @ National Review Online has a great interview with Barbara Newman, who is a co-author with Tom Diaz on a very insightful book Lightning Out of Lebanon: Hezbollah Terrorists on American Soil. If you want to learn more about this powerful terrorist group that plagues the Southern half of Lebanon and is attempting to disrupt the Cedar Revolution on behalf of Syria, this book is a must. Anyway, the Q&A is also something of a must as well. Here's a sample:
NRO: Now, in Lebanon: If Syria gets out, does Hezbollah take over? How can Hezbollah’s power be squashed by the Cedar Revolution — does people power have that kind of power?
Newman: I believe that if Syria pulls out of Lebanon now, which — by the way I don't think will happen — because the Bashar Assad regime would collapse — Hezbollah would be the most powerful entity in Lebanon. It could easily smash the Lebanese army. The tragedy of all this is that the Cedar Revolution, the confluence of such previously vicious enemies, the Christians, the Sunnis, and the Druze, is occurring in a power vacuum. The Taif agreement, which ended the Lebanese civil war, forced all militias to disarm with the exception of Hezbollah. In the last ten years it has grown into a behemoth and we have done nothing about it.
How can we forget the fact that in 1983 a Hezbollah suicide driver crashed a one-thousand-pound bomb into the Marine Barracks in Beirut and killed 241 of our best and brightest? What about the hostages they took and tortured? What about the CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley who they kidnapped and slowly drowned to death by forcing a pipe down his throat and flooding him with water. They made tapes of his agony and sent it to the CIA. I'm told that former CIA Director William Casey almost went crazy when he heard them, and this propelled him to Iran-Contra, to try to free the hostages.
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