Richard Dannatt

Britain needs to wake up to the threat from Hezbollah

Tomorrow, the House of Commons will debate the proscription of Hezbollah in its entirety. Abandoning the false distinction between the organisation’s ‘political’ and ‘terrorist’ wings would go a long way toward assuring our national interest and help avert a major new conflagration in the Middle East. Hezbollah’s own long-standing insistence that its organisational setup is indivisible is self-evident; nobody seriously believes that anyone other than Hassan Nasrallah has the final word in its chain of command, be it on politics or terrorism. This diplomatic fiction may have been partly believable when the Lebanese state was still conceivably comprised of Western-oriented elements versus Iran-aligned Hezbollah, but today that is sadly a fiction.  Hezbollah has now completed the process of state capture, a goal it has pursued relentlessly since the 2006 ceasefire that ended the Second Lebanon War with Israel. A few months ago, I completed a study of Hezbollah’s military capabilities with a number of senior colleagues drawn from across Western militaries. 

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