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.