When reports from US and Canadian intelligence sources surfaced in late June claiming that Hezbollah, a Lebanese political and paramilitary movement which the Canadian government calls a terrorist organization, was scouting Jewish and Israeli locations in Ontario for possible attack, Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, offered his usual blunt take. “They cannot have an operation fail,” said Baer, “and I don’t think they will. They’re the A-team of terrorism,” he told ABC News.
The Lebanese Shia—Hezbollah, in other words—may even be the best car bombers in the world, Baer recently told me. No small praise, it would seem, since he’s also one of those rare terrorism experts with the know-how to build a car bomb himself.
Before retiring from the CIA in 1997, Baer spent what he calls “the best parts of my life in the worst parts of the world.” Think Tajikistan and northern Iraq. He also worked in Syria and Lebanon—Hezbollah’s home turf. In 2002, Baer published a memoir, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism, partly about his hunt for the perpetrators of a massive car bomb that destroyed the US embassy in Beirut in 1983, killing over sixty people. It was also about the mistakes that led to 9/11. Hollywood called and Baer became the model for George Clooney’s skilled, disillusioned field operative in Syriana, a geopolitical thriller about power and corruption in Washington and oil and terrorism in the Middle East, which also drew on Baer’s follow-up effort, Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude.
Now Baer has a new movie. Car Bomb, a documentary history, recently aired on the UK’s Channel 4. The film follows Baer to Northern Ireland, Italy, Israel, and Lebanon. We meet car bomb makers from the IRA, the Mafia, and Hezbollah. Baer also uncovers the modern car bomb’s surprising Midwestern roots. In 1970, a group of American college students blew up a van packed with 800 kg of fuel oil and ammonium nitrate, near a University of Wisconsin physics building where military-funded research was being conducted.
WMDs and Iran’s presumed nuclear program have garnered substantial attention since 9/11, and hence done more to shape our fears, but the car bomb—cheap, simple, made for crowded city streets—may actually be the scarier weapon. Not only can angry locals use car bombs to make things difficult for foreign armies, as we’ve seen in Iraq since the US invasion in 2003, but one car bomb in an American city could permanently change American politics, Baer says. “You could take down the United States with a car bomb. You could change the nature of politics just by, around Christmas time, putting one in a mall parking lot and knocking the mall down from underneath. The American political system would go into a crisis, and maybe never recover from it.”
I spoke to Baer in late July. After touching on his documentary, we talked about car bombs, Iran (the subject of his forthcoming book, The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower), and Baer’s old nemesis: Imad Mughniyah, a shadowy Hezbollah operative, recently met his end by car bomb in Damascus, Syria—prompting party leadership to vow revenge. I also learned that John McCain is not the answer, as this noble twenty-first century proceeds.
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Robert Baer: Well, I’ve been studying this for a long time, and I think there’s a fascinating difference between the Sunni and the Shia car bomb. Shia have tended to go after military targets, and the Sunni are much more indiscriminate about where and who they kill, which has led to all sorts of assumptions and conclusions. The Shia use it much more as a military weapon. The Sunni use it as a weapon against society, against the enemy, and that’s pretty much across the board, especially if you look at Beirut, and you look at Iraq today, where the Sunni use it inside markets.
The Shia just would never do it that indiscriminately. They rarely used it themselves [during the Lebanese Civil War]. It was more Christian vs. Palestinian, which is a different conflict. So you have the marine bombing, which is a military target according to them, and you have the US embassy, which is a military target, and then you had the Tyre bombing on November 11, 1982, the Israeli military headquarters. So that says a lot about the people.
The Irish, the IRA, used it for economic targets. They went out of their way to kill people. They wanted to bring Britain down economically in Belfast. And of course, the Mafia—for the Mafia it was a business tactic.
CW: To go back to the Sunni-Shia divide…. [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah, lately, seems to want to show what he can do in Beirut without actually doing it, and [Iraqi Shia cleric] Muqtada al-Sadr, if I’m not mistaken, told his guys to stand down and stop fighting the Iraqi army. Does this show discipline on the Shia side?
RB: There’s an incredible discipline, though Sadr—and you may want to correct me—wasn’t particularly disciplined. The Iranians have brought him into the fold. You see the deployment of the [Iraqi] army into Basra, and that was done with the help of the Iranians. You don’t see the Shia going after the Sunni. It would be very easy for the Shia to put a car bomb in Fallujah or someplace like that, or a neighbourhood in Baghdad. And what you see is the Sunni, when they were going after targets, were killing as many Shia as they could, indiscriminately... and this has subsided. My theory is that this has subsided because the Iraqis essentially turned against the Sunni car bombers. They didn’t want to fight a civil war because they would have lost...
The Shia have won. Iraq, for the first time since 680 AD, is a Shia country. Why should they be blowing things up? They have the reins of power. It’s their order.
CW: Is Iran trying to create a Shia crescent?
RB: No, they want an empire. If you’re Iran and your enemies in Afghanistan and Iraq have been defeated ... there’s going to be some form of Iranian control over Iraq. Whether it’s limited to keeping out Sunni fundamentalists, or oil cooperation, that’s yet to be played out. But right now Iran is the only serious military power after the West in the Gulf. A country of seventy million, it has the ability to close off the Gulf’s oil. So, treating Iran like a banana republic, they’re saying “Wait a minute: We think your perception of our power, there’s a disparity here. If we have to, we’ll prove it.” That’s when a war’s going to happen. “We think there’s a disparity of power and we’ll prove it on the battlefield.”
CW: This is off the topic of car bombs, or maybe not. I was in Damascus in November…and wound up at a press conference at the Iranian embassy. I asked the ambassador, “Why wouldn’t Iran build nuclear weapons?” I mean, if your power is such that you see yourself as this empire and you live in the neighbourhood that you do, where Pakistan has nuclear weapons, Israel probably has nuclear weapons, and there’s a huge amount of sabre-rattling from the United States....
RB: And what was his reaction?
CW: He said there’s a fatwa against nukes, and he told some other reporters that Iran would be happy to share its nuclear technology, but it’s for the purpose of energy. Perhaps my question wasn’t as well structured as it could have been. But isn’t it basically the case that powers get nuclear weapons for deterrence, rather than to, you know, drive Israel into the sea?
RB: Well, [for them to bomb Israel] you’d have to assume the Iranians are suicidal, which they’re not. They’ve backed away from conflict everywhere. In Iraq, they’re cooperating in the occupation. They’ve backed away from conflict in the Gulf. They’ve backed away from conflict in Lebanon. So, are they suicidal? No. Are they going to fire a nuclear weapon at Israel? No, not with this leadership. And then, of course, the argument becomes reduced to Ahmadenijad and what he says, and that seems to change day to day, but he doesn’t have his finger on the nuclear trigger. It’s sort of irrelevant what he says. Why listen? The Arabs have been talking about destroying Israel forever and they haven’t really fought a war since 1973. You have to look at what they do, more than what they say. They’re not doing anything. They’re not pre-emptively invading other countries, unlike the United States, which did, and for no particularly good reason.
CW: Meanwhile the Iranians have this pretty sophisticated ability to lash out with car bombs, if they want to, right?
RB: Yeah, there’s no reason why they couldn’t put ten of them in Baghdad right now, and use them against the military, and they don’t.
They are happy the way Iraq is going because the United States can never successfully occupy an Arab country, and by successfully, I mean turn it into some beacon of democracy, fighting corruption and the rest of it. Iraq is now more corrupt than it ever was under Saddam.
CW: Have we reached the point where the military might that a conventional superpower builds—because it has a lot of money and it invests in innovation—[is] basically worthless now?
RB: I wouldn’t say they’re worthless…. [But] who wants a tank? A lot of good they did Saddam. You can’t really patrol with them. You never connect with the people. You can disable them with a truck bomb and knock one of these things over. And when you’re fighting a sophisticated power like the United States, they’re gone, immediately—rockets hit them, Hellfire missiles. So the Iranians have taken a look at Lebanon and looked at the 2006 war and said, wait a minute, unconventional warfare is the way to go. We can deter a superpower. You can’t beat it, but you can deter occupation with unconventional weapons. That means anything from those double-effect Russian anti-tank weapons, to car bombs, to small unit tactics, to swarming, and it stopped the Israelis in Lebanon in 2006.
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