December 25, 2002	Wednesday	Shawwal 20, 1423

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NEW YORK, Dec 24: The Hezbollah has become a more potent anti-American force than the Al Qaeda and its immediate threat is bigger than Iraq, said the New York Times, quoting American officials.

Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who was chairman of the US Senate’s intelligence committee, suggested in a report that Hezbollah be dealt with before Baghdad because, according to him, it was the most dangerous terrorist group on earth, the paper said.

Senior American officials have singled out Hezbollah as the “A team” of terrorism, more menacing than Al Qaeda, the paper said.

“Its stance prompts some senior American officials to deem Hezbollah a more immediate threat than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.”

However, the paper noted that Hezbollah had “scant inclination to save Iraqi President (Saddam) Hussein”.

“We face a plan by the United States and the Zionists to control the region, to redraw the political map of the region,” Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the party’s secretary general, was quoted as saying by the NYT.

“We should realize the extent of the dangerous and satanic goals these people have.”

Sheik Nasrallah is adamant that his group “concentrates solely on the Arab-Israeli dispute”, the paper said.

“Outside this fight we have done nothing,” he said in an interview with the paper. “Everybody knows where Hezbollah’s arena is, where Hezbollah’s battle is.”

He accuses Israel of exaggerating Hezbollah’s threat to lay the groundwork for hitting the organization while the world is distracted by Iraq.

Indeed, Hezbollah’s incessant threats about destroying Israel reflects seems more of psychological warfare than anything else, the analyst observed.

He added that Hezbollah, whose reputation soared with the Israeli withdrawal, launches small Katyusha rockets every few months against the disputed Shabaa Farms area in what analysts call a means of maintaining its resistance credentials.

“The attacks on Shabaa have been symbolic,” Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a political science professor at the Lebanese American University, told the paper. “They are random, scattered and low-key.”