A senior Israel Defense Force officer declared Wednesday night that the American air strike against Libya Monday was the opening round in a war against a state which openly supports international terrorism and that the U.S., “once having begun a fight against terrorism, must continue” it “until it achieves results.”
Maj. Gen. Dan Shomron, Deputy Chief of Staff of the IDF who commanded the Entebbe hostage rescue operation on July 4, 1976, also stressed in a television interview that the raid proved the effectiveness of modern U.S. air weaponry and the ineffectiveness of Soviet-ground-to-air missiles with which the Libyans are armed.
Shomron lavished praise on the U.S. for undertaking the strike against Libya. It was the first time a major power has taken action against international terrorism, he said.
“The harm (to Libya) doesn’t lie in the damage to houses or in the numbers killed. The harm lies in the damage to a ruling center. This is the first time that, in the context of terrorism, an administration has been hit, and the head of that administration himself, namely (Muammar) Qaddafi, the ruler of Libya,” Shomron said.
FAR-REACHING SIGNIFICANCE
“The significance is far-reaching. But it must be borne in mind that Libya is a unique phenomenon … a state whose ruler supports a revolutionary ideology. In fact he is involved everywhere in the world where there is unrest and revolt,” the IDF general said. “In fact, Libya is a terrorist state, unlike other countries that work by proxy in a limited sector,” he maintained.
Shomron named Syria as an example of the latter but did not think the Libya raid would necessarily have to be followed up by similar operations against Damascus. He said that while Syria aids terrorism it did so “by proxy and within tactical-local range, even against us (Israel). It will never admit to being a terrorist state as an ideology. At the political level this is a tolerable state of affairs and it is very different from Libya, where the leader openly stated “I am leading the terrorism in the world’,” Shomron said.
In addition, he said, “We must bear in mind that in the background is the Soviet Union, a superpower, which perceives Syria as its primary foothold in the Middle East with Libya being of a lower order even though it is also a client state.”
Shomron suggested that Syria would learn from the U.S. strike against Libya that “the U.S. plane overcomes the Eastern missile … that it is impossible to rely to a large extent on this equipment against the Israel Air Force. In my view the fact that the (Soviet SA-5 missile), 20 which is a strategic missile and from the (Syrian) point of view was supposed to be a deterrent element vis-a-vis Israel, was exposed in its weakness.”
He said the lesson for the U.S. was, “Once having begun a fight against terrorism” it “must continue” because “if they stop in the middle, they will accumulate all the damage; because terrorism will go on, all the political and other damage accruing from this kind of operation will accumulate against them. Therefore, I believe that once having taken this very serious decision, they (the U.S.) took into account that this move will have continuity until it achieves results.”
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