Over the past two weeks, Israel has achieved something remarkable: It has mortally wounded a terrorist state.
To be more exact, it is a terrorist state within a state: the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia that controls—or used to control—the Shiite Muslim areas of Southern Lebanon. Hezbollah is quite notoriously independent of the nominal government of Lebanon and has used its independent military power to dominate the country’s politics and terrorize or assassinate opponents. Hence its description as a state within a state and as a continuation of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon.
Yet in an astonishingly brief time, Israel has dismantled the organization, primarily by dismantling the top people in it. There are a lot of lessons here for how to successfully fight terrorism.
On September 17, thousands of pagers used by Hezbollah terrorists exploded across Lebanon, killing 13 people and injuring about 4,000.
Why were Hezbollah goons carrying pagers, a technology from the 1980s?
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Tracinski Letter to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.