Word: lebanon
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Hizballah is the wild card. There is always the possibility it could try to order up terrorist attacks against Israeli and Western targets around the world. If pushed to stop fighting, the group could lash out against its critics in Lebanon, unleashing the forces of civil war that ravaged the highly sectarian country for 15 years until 1990, and creating a new field of instability even as the U.S. struggles with crises in places like Iraq and Iran. Israel's strikes against Lebanon have provoked Shi'ite radicals in Iraq, who are threatening to attack U.S. troops in retaliation...
...current battles may have been set off by age-old hatreds between Israel and its Arab enemies, what we're seeing today is not simply a replay of hackneyed set pieces in the Middle East. With new governments in place in the three key nodes of the crisis--Israel, Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority--and fighters within the radical Islamist groups--Hamas and Hizballah--eager to assert their agendas, the region is going through a period of dramatic and in some ways radical change. The volatility has added new fuel to the motivations and ambitions that have defined why they...
Meanwhile, Hizballah, which was created in 1982 to resist Israel's invasion of southern Lebanon, has internal political incentives to act against Israel. In the new Lebanon, genuine independence is trying to take root after popular unrest forced the Syrians to lift their yoke on the country last spring. As a result, whether Hizballah should be allowed to remain armed six years after the Israelis left Lebanon is the most divisive political issue in the country today. Critics argue that only government forces should bear arms. Hizballah counters that given the weakness of the Lebanese Army, a disciplined guerrilla force...
...profit from aggression. Israel holds only three Lebanese prisoners, but the group's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, grandly noted that he also was making the release of Palestinian detainees a condition for freeing his Israeli captives, which would bring him and his group glory, both in the Arab world and Lebanon's Palestinian refugee camps. And following the abduction with a rain of rockets on Israeli towns and villages may have bolstered the group's ability to intimidate Lebanon's government and force it to ignore the U.N. Security Council's demands that Hizballah's fighters be disarmed. Compared with Hizballah...
...group permanently. Said Defense Minister Amir Peretz: "The goal is for this to end with Hizballah so badly beaten that not a man in it does not regret having launched this incident." Most Israelis know the offensive has come at a heavy price--to civilians on both sides, to Lebanon's infrastructure and to Israel's reputation abroad. But from the government's point of view, it is necessary and it is working. Israel claims to have hit many stores of Hizballah's rockets, often within houses. What Israel wants is for the Lebanese to disarm Hizballah, but Israeli realists...