As the Bush administration sought last week to play down Hezbollah's success in boosting its power and legitimacy in Lebanon, the militant group's rising influence around the world has led some intelligence and counterterrorism officials to ask whether the Iranian-financed organization has grown more dangerous to the United States than al-Qaida.
Though few believe Hezbollah would launch an attack in the West, continued hostility between the United States and Iran could significantly raise the threat level here, several former counterterrorism officials and analysts said - especially if the tensions evolve into full-blown conflict.
Compared with al-Qaida, Hezbollah has a far more pronounced posture inside the United States and around the world, analysts and Bush administration officials have said. And while it has not organized an attack against the United States in 25 years, the group had more American blood on its hands before the Sept. 11 attacks than any other terrorist operation - the deadliest example being the 1983 suicide bombing that killed more than 200 Marines in Beirut.
"They are the granddaddy of them all," said Kenneth Bell, a former federal prosecutor who disrupted a Hezbollah cell in North Carolina in 2002, leading to a more than 100-year jail sentence for the group's ringleader. "Hezbollah has the greater infrastructure, expertise and arms to be much more lethal as an organization than al-Qaida."
Some hard-liners have described the Islamist group's activities in Lebanon during the past month as an effective coup, after militants boldly seized much of West Beirut when the government tried to shut down its communications networks.
Nearly 70 people were killed in the ensuing violence before a power-sharing arrangement brokered by Arab nations gave Hezbollah what amounts to veto power over the new government, which selected army chief Michel Suleiman as the country's new president yesterday.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that the group hurt its own cause among the Lebanese when its members "turned their arms on its own people," but some analysts and former intelligence officers say that Hezbollah's continued defiance of the West has made it more powerful than ever and a looming threat to the United States.
Last year's highly controversial National Intelligence Estimate predicted as much, noting that the group had concentrated its attacks outside the United States but might consider such an operation if "it perceives the United States as posing a direct threat to the group or Iran."
