The end of the beginning

Washington DC The battle for Iraq is drawing to a close, but the war against terrorism has only just begun. As President George W. Bush has said since the first days after 11 September, this will be a long war, involving many terrorist organisations and many countries that support the terrorists. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was never the most threatening of those countries, even though Baghdad gave support to most of the world’s leading terrorist organisations, and despite Saddam’s programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction. That dubious honour belongs to Iran, three times the size of Iraq, flush with oil revenues, and the creator of modern Islamic terrorism in the form of Hezbollah, arguably the world’s most lethal terrorist organisation. And then there is Syria, which has worked hand-in-glove with Iran to support Hezbollah – both in its terrorist garb (Hezbollah trains in the Bekaa Valley in Syrian-occupied Lebanon) and its political and philanthropic costume, in which Hezbollah members sit in the Lebanese parliament. Today, both Iran and Syria are engaged in a desperate terrorist campaign against coalition forces in Iraq. The only surprise here is that so many diplomats and deep thinkers are surprised, for neither country has been reluctant to announce its intentions. Just over a week ago, for example, the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad incautiously told an interviewer that just because Iraq was conquered did not mean that the coalition had won. He said that the enemies of Britain and the United States would have to be patient, just as they were in Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s, driving the United States and Israel out of the country by means of terrorist attacks. And Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, announced publicly that the presence of US forces in Iraq would be even worse than Saddam Hussein, arguably the man most hated by Iranians.