Former Hezbollah hostage Tom Sutherland on Wednesday warned of “a vast overreaction on the part of Israel” against emboldened Hezbollah fighters.
Israel’s bombing of Lebanon is causing casualties there – the death toll topped 300 Wednesday – that are out of proportion to Hezbollah’s kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers that set off hostilities, Sutherland said from his home in Fort Collins.
Now an escalating war threatens Lebanon’s hard-won recovery after two decades as a battleground, said Sutherland, a former Colorado State University professor.
Hezbollah captors held Sutherland and other Americans hostage for more than six years in Lebanon, “and we never bombed at that point,” he said.
The United States “has to be a bit careful about what it condones, because our reputation in the world is not the highest,” he said. “We need active diplomacy.”
Israeli forces “with the best American equipment … can just blow the hell out of anything if they want to. They could knock the heck out of Lebanon, flatten it completely.”
Sutherland was working as a dean at American University in Beirut in 1985 when Hezbollah members abducted him. They held him for 2,354 days.
Now he wonders about the thousands of Americans in Lebanon as Israeli warplanes attack. In the 1980s, when bombs rocked Beirut, newcomers would leave for Cyprus, spending heaps of money in hotels, only to hear calm had returned almost as soon as they left. Oldtimers stayed put.
“But right now,” Sutherland said, “Israel seems to be going after Lebanon in a very, very vicious way. I think I would want to get my tail out of there.”
