Following is an excerpt of an interview with Milt Bearden about the shifting developments in Israel 's battle with Hezbollah. In a career spanning three decades, Milt Bearden headed the CIA's Soviet and Eastern Europe Division, and served as station chief in places like Pakistan and Sudan. He also ran the CIA's covert war in Afghanistan from 1986-1989.
Hezbollah has begun to look a bit like an overmatched boxer who has stood up to 15 rounds of pounding and made it to the closing bell without being knocked out — like the movie character Rocky. "They've got a lot of very smart people. These are not a bunch of wild-eyed fanatics," he says.
"The concept of dismantling or eliminating Hezbollah is fatally flawed from the very start. Hezbollah is an organic part of that 40 percent of the Lebanese population that is Shia."
Hezbollah is the current darling of everybody in the Middle East, and even the Sunni-Shia thing is put aside from that, mainly because of what they've accomplished by not being destroyed.
And if you step back and look at a larger piece of the Middle East [from the Shia Iranian point of view]:
They've got a Shia south of Iraq.
They've got the Shia that could emerge as the dominant force in Lebanon.
They've got the Americans bogged down forever doing the Shias' heavy lifting in the Sunni areas of Iraq. (Kurdistan is independent already in [northern Iraq].)
And we've got ourselves a narco-state war in Afghanistan that goes on without end.
[Excerpt of an interview conducted by Hot Zone Senior Producer Robert Padavick]
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