America Needs a Decisive Hezbollah Defeat

Israel's war with Hezbollah is a war to secure its northern border, to defeat a terrorist militia bent on Israel's destruction, and to restore Israeli deterrence in the age of the missile. . But even more is at stake. Hezbollah is a wholly owned Iranian subsidiary. Its mission is to extend the Islamic Revolution's influence into Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, destabilize any Arab-Israeli peace, and advance an Islamist Shiite ascendancy, led and controlled by Iran, throughout the Levant.

America wants, America needs, a decisive Hezbollah defeat. Unlike many of the other terrorist groups in the Middle East, Hizballah is a serious enemy of the U.S. In 1983 it massacred 241 American servicemen. Except for al-Qaeda, it has killed more Americans than any other terror organization. More important, Hezbollah is a wholly owned Iranian subsidiary and today the leading edge of an aggressive, nuclear-hungry Iran.

America finds itself at war with radical Islam, a two-churched monster. With al-Qaeda in decline, Iran is on the march, intervening through proxies throughout the Arab world - Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Iraq - to subvert modernizing, Western-oriented Arab governments and bring these territories under Iranian hegemony. Its nuclear ambitions would give it an overwhelming preponderance of power over the Arabs and an absolute deterrent against serious counteractions by the U.S., Israel, or any other rival. The defeat of Hezbollah would be a huge loss for Iran, both psychologically and strategically. Iran would be shown to have vastly overreached in trying to establish itself as the regional superpower.