A Suggested Topic Of Conversation With Syria (Updated)

Everyone knows a major terrorist is dead:

A Hezbollah official said on Wednesday that one of the group's top commanders, Imad Mugniyah, had been killed in Syria and blamed the Zionist regime for the murder.

And of course, everyone knows Hezbollah's history of murdering Americans:

Hezbollah’s founding quickly resulted in a spate of kidnappings, torture, and bombing. (See this useful timeline from CAMERA.) In April 1983, for example, a Hezbollah car bomb killed 63 people, including eight CIA officials, at the U.S. embassy in Beirut. More infamously, the organization six months later truck-bombed a military barracks in Beirut, murdering 241 United States Marines (and killing 58 French soldiers in a separate attack). These operations, like many other Hezbollah atrocities, were orchestrated by Imad Mugniyah, long the organization’s most ruthless operative.

On December 12, 1983, the U.S. embassy in Kuwait was bombed, killing six and wounding scores of others. The bombers were tied to al-Dawa, a terror organization backed by Iran and leading the Shiite resistance against Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime (with which Iran was at war). The leader of Dawa’s “jihad office” in Syria at the time was none other than Nouri al-Maliki — now the prime Minister of Iraq (and who, having opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq, currently squabbles with American authorities, draws his country ever closer to Iran and Syria, and professes his support for Hezbollah). Among the “Dawa 17” convicted and sentenced to death for the bombing was Imad Mugniyah’s cousin and brother in law, Youssef Badreddin. (Badreddin escaped in the chaos of Saddam’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.)

Meanwhile, in 1984, Hezbollah bombed both the U.S. embassy annex in Beirut, killing two, and a restaurant near the U.S. Air Force base in Torrejon, Spain, killing 18 American servicemen. On March 16 of that year, Hezbollah operatives kidnapped William Francis Buckley, the CIA’s station chief in Beirut. He was whisked to Damascus and onto Tehran, where he became one of the hostages whose detention led to the Iran/Contra affair. Under Mugniyah’s direction, Buckley was tortured for 15 months, dying of a heart attack under that duress.

Hezbollah hijackers seized a Kuwait Airlines plane in December 1984, murdering four of the passengers, including two Americans. Six months later, Hezbollah operatives hijacked TWA Flight 847 after it left Greece. The jihadists discovered that one of their hostages was a U.S. Navy diver named Robert Stethem. They beat him severely and then shot him to death before dumping his body onto the tarmac of Beirut airport. In early 1988, Hezbollah kidnapped and ultimately murdered Colonel William Higgins, a U.S. Marine serving in Lebanon.

So it is interesting to note, along with Michael Rubin, just where Mugniyah was killed:

Imad Mughniyeh was killed in Damascus.

I'm wondering whether Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) or Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.) still believe that their private consultations with Syrian President Bashar al-Asad were successful, especially given that the Syrian president had, apparently, continued to give one of the world's most notorious terrorists free passage and haven inside Syria.

Never mind Specter and Pelosi--how about Obama adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski?

A foreign policy adviser to Senator Obama is scheduled to arrive in Syria today as the leader of a RAND Corp. delegation.

Zbigniew Brzezinski will travel to Damascus for meetings as part of a trip Syria's official Cham News agency described as an "important sign that the end of official dialogue between Washington and Damascus has not prevented dialogue with important American intellectuals and politicians."

...On August 24, Mr. Brzezinski, a one-time national security adviser to President Carter, announced in an interview on Bloomberg's satellite news channel that he was endorsing Mr. Obama, and he has been an adviser to the campaign since.

Will Brzezinski ask what Mugniyah was doing in Syria--you know, in the interests of dialogue?

UPDATE: From Noah Pollak at Contentions:

Two Great Quotes on Mughniyah

The first from David Schenker:

The fact that Mughniyah was killed in Damascus highlights the Asad regime’s increasing difficulties in protecting the terrorists they provide with “safe haven.” In 2004, another guest of the regime, Hamas leader Izzeddin Subhi Sheikh Khalil, was killed by a car bomb in Damascus. The Israelis bombed an Islamic Jihad training camp in 2003, buzzed Asad’s Latakia palace in 2006, and destroyed a presumed North Korean-supplied nuclear facility in 2007. As Mughniyah’s aunt told AFP earlier today, “We were shocked to learn that he was killed in Syria. We thought he was safe there.”

And the second, from Tony Badran, rounding out Schenker:

Zbig Brzezinski was in Damascus today. And, according to SANA, Zbig told journalists that the US and Syria have a shared interest in stability in the region. Now, we all knew that Zbig was a buffoon, but to say this on the day that Imad Mughniyeh was assassinated in Damascus is really a proud moment for the man on whose watch Mughniyeh’s bosses took over Iran.

A shared interest in stability in the region, by giving safe haven to an all-star team of global terrorists? Buffoon might be too weak a word to describe Barack Obama’s foreign policy adviser.

Technorati Tag: Mugniyah.