The World’s ‘Best’ Car Bombers?

CW: Would you say the Lebanese were the “best” car bombers in the world, if we can describe them that way?

RB: Oh yeah, they’re the most practiced, and a lot of foreign technology showed up in Lebanon before [the 1975-90 civil war].

CW: What technology showed up that enabled whoever was doing this in Lebanon to become so good at it?

RB: Well, you double-prime charges, you use partially filled acetylene tanks, you use ammonium nitrate if you want to lift up buildings, and if you want to just slaughter, you use military explosives, which travel faster with higher brisance. And you don’t want your bomb to not go off. You’re not really striking fear if only one of five bombs work.

CW: Who was the best that you talked to? I don’t even know how you’d define that or quantify it.

RB: I go back to the Shia. No one knows who did that Tyre military headquarters bombing [on November 11, 1982] when seventy-five Israeli soldiers were killed. In a lot of ways you can consider that the beginning of the end of the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, although it took another eighteen years before they left. The fact that they could get a truck inside the building, kill seventy-five soldiers and until this day no one knows the group who did this.

CW: Who do you think it was?

RB: I think it was Hezbollah, again because it was a Shia boy who drove it in, and they’re very close to Iran. The fact that they haven’t announced the kid who drove the marine vehicle in....

CW: I watched Cult of the Suicide Bomber. There’s been no attempt to claim that attack?

RB: There was a claim in the name of a group, the Islamic Jihad, but the fact is that no one in the family or the group has come forward and said we did it, or wrote a memoir or whatever people do after all these years. It’s been twenty-six years.

CW: And so the Shia just quietly celebrate these things?

RB: No, they don’t celebrate them at all. They just do it. And that’s why I consider them the best. We have a Christian guy in the film that talks about how he found God, and he talks about sending car bombers into West Beirut. You just don’t see that among the Shia. They sat down and they systematically—Hezbollah did, in particular—went against what they consider foreign occupation.

CW: I don’t know if you’re tired of talking about Imad Mughniyah, if I’m pronouncing that correctly. What was the nature of his talent? I don’t want to focus on words like “talent” and “the best”, but this was a guy who was suspected of pulling of some pretty major attacks and yet he remained at large for so many years. How do we account for that?

RB: Largely because there’s no Lebanese state. The fact is, the state in Lebanon is Hezbollah. A judge or a prosecutor is not going to grab Imad Mughniyah driving through Chtaura or someplace like that and say, well, the Americans are going to extradite him, because the judge would be killed. It just wouldn’t happen. The Syrians would kill him, or Hezbollah. In this part of the world it all goes back to Israel. Because he was fighting the Israelis, he was protected by the Syrians, the Iranians and the Lebanese.

CW: Who killed him?

RB: I’d suggest the Israelis, I don’t know. He was training Hamas and it is very easy to infiltrate Hamas, and from there it’s an easy operation..... either the Jordanians or the Israelis, one of the two.

CW: So, it’s not difficult to get in to Damascus or somewhere in Syria and find someone there and get this done?

RB: No, it’s very difficult. They would have had to get into the Hamas leadership and paid somebody or some way blackmailed them. It’s not easy in Syria. In Lebanon, you could have killed him fairly easy. I would have thought he’d be killed in Lebanon. There was a political message there, that they had him killed in Syria. It was a message to the Syrians, because the Syrians all along were, “We’ve never heard of this guy,” which, of course, is just bullshit.

CW: Was Mughniyah’s assassination interesting to you at all in terms of craft, if you will?

RB: No, I don’t think so. They probably remotely detonated it. They put it in the headrest of his car. I suppose that guy always knew he was going to meet his end that way, and he probably didn’t much care. The Middle East is such a complicated place—I mean, the fact that no revenge has been taken. Hezbollah has told me that they will take their revenge at their own time. But they don’t want to be provoked into giving up their gains in Lebanon. They don’t want a civil war. It’s the last thing Hezbollah wants, because they can’t win it, and then their whole persona of a successful guerrilla movement disappears.

CW: What I don’t understand about his assassination is how they even got to his car.

RB: It was parked in a secure compound, I think. Who knows, you know? It was somebody with access to the car, probably a Palestinian, or the keys. They could have co-opted a Syrian, which would really scare the Syrians, if you can co-opt a Syrian intelligence officer. I think you can get to most people in any part of the world. You could kill somebody in Tehran, too, if you were really determined and had a lot of money.

CW: How about in Iraq—where are the resources for so many thousands of car bombs coming from?

RB: I think they come from the [Persian] Gulf. The way the Gulfies look at it, Baghdad was a Sunni city forever, and along comes the United States very clumsily and changes its regime. They looked at Iraq as this very thin membrane that was protecting them from Shia Iran and the Shia in general, and we come along and get rid of it, without any plan. The first reaction is, we can’t invade Iran, so what we’re going to do is scare the shit out of the Shia and make them go back to living in the marshes.

CW: So what we see in Iraq now is America vs. Iran?