by Matt Barr

Hezbollah becoming better armed

Hezbollah has a new rocket.

Hezbollah launched a new kind of rocket Friday that made its deepest strike into Israel yet, rattling Israelis as their warplanes and artillery blasted apartment buildings and roads gunning for guerrillas....

Israel said the Khaibar-1 rockets were renamed, Iranian-made Fajr-5s. They have four times the power and range of Katyusha rockets, making them able to hit Tel Aviv's northern outskirts.

I'm no war expert but this strikes me as significant.

Israel is obviously in no position to use all of its weapons against Hezbollah. Hezbollah assured this would be so by blending into civilian populations in Lebanon like a cancer.

But Hezbollah has no immediately apparent similar reason not to use its full force against Israel. Faced with an enemy whose force is likely to be overwhelming, whom you want to either defeat militarily or force to stand down, I don't think your options include saving your more powerful rockets for later.

The fact that now, more than two weeks after this round of hostilities began, Hezbollah rather suddenly has a more powerful missile capable of carrying more explosives farther means one of two things.

One is that its strategy all along was to engage Israel in a protacted war so that, predictably, the UN, EU and other vanguards of world opinion would relentlessly pressure it, costing it what little political capital it has. To effect this strategy Hezbollah started out with its least powerful rockets, then moved on to more powerful ones, and will possibly move on to even more powerful ones later. The effect is a slowly escalating attack that doesn't beat back the Israelis because that's not what you want to do, it makes them anxious, angry and keeps their response conventional.

(We can't assume after all under this scenario that these Fajr-5s are their most powerful weapons. That is, if we buy that Hezbollah is choosing not to use its most powerful weapons at first and at once, they may have something that can wreak extensive damage in, say, Tel Aviv that they're keeping in reserve. But doing so would risk a truly "disproprtionate" response from a nation that's nuclear.)

I doubt this. There are easier and more direct ways to accomplish it. For one thing, Hezbollah has been raining going on 2,000 missiles on the same wide patch of Israel all month. If you want to extend the war and simply goad Israel into a response, I think you conserve your missiles. I could be completely wrong about that, maybe 1,600 missiles in two plus weeks is exactly the number you would use to prod Israel into bombing southern Lebanon.

But fewer missile strikes would still provoke a response, and would feed the perception that Hezbollah is an underdog, the victim of disproprtionate Jewish aggression. You could continue longer. Using half the missiles it has it could keep it up another four weeks before moving on to the Fajr-5s. Finally, as heavily armed and committed as Israel's military is, I don't think you can risk keeping your more powerful weapons in reserve and hoping you're still around in a month to fire them.

Which brings us to the second possibility, that Iran, or somebody, is arming Hezbollah. An urgent request for weapons went out and, because it's government work, two weeks went by but now they have a stable of Fajr-5s to fire on Israel.

The implcations of this hardly need to be spelled out. First, who's arming Hezbollah?

Second, what's their most powerful weapon?

If Hezbollah has come into possession of Fajr-5 rockets might they be supplied with a nuclear warhead and a means of delivering it two weeks from now?

If not, why not?

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