Dead to rights: the world is better off without Imad Mughniyah.(THE MIDEAST)(Brief biography)

LATE at night on February 12, a car exploded in Kfar Sousse, a quiet residential district of Damascus, and killed the lone man who was about to drive away in it. Some say that a bomb was detonated by remote control; others say that the device had been placed in the driver's headrest. There seem to have been no witnesses, and nobody else was hurt. So Imad Mughniyah died, or as an associate, the Iraqi Shiite militia leader Moqtada al-Sadr, put it, "He was sent to paradise where he became a martyr of world Islamic resistance." Mughniyah may not be a household name in the West, but he deserves to be. A master terrorist of the times, thoroughly professional, he hid away without the element of playboy publicity common to the better-known Osama bin Laden and Carlos the Jackal. To catch him in the shadows of Kfar Sousse as he left a party given by an Iranian official was an exceptional feat. The consequences are quite unpredictable.

Devoted to violence, conspiracy, and secrecy, Mughniyah's life illustrates the failure of the Arab and Muslim political and social order. In the absence of the rule of law and institutions to enforce it, the strong and the rich are free to act as they dare, thriving at the expense of everyone else and maintaining themselves in power by sponsoring individuals of bad character to do their bidding. In the course of lawless careers, ambitious but flawed individuals like Mughniyah acquire the means to challenge for power in their own right. So the cycles of violence are self-perpetuating, time and again degrading society as a whole.

Mughniyah's biographical details are hard to come by. Born in 1962, he was the son of a vegetable seller and grew up as a Shiite Muslim in the village of Tayr Dibba in southern Lebanon. Seemingly in 1976, more boy than man, he joined Force 17, the elite personal bodyguard of Yasser Arafat, and this has given rise to unfounded rumors that he was actually a Palestinian and a Sunni. A sniper in Beirut during the Lebanese civil war, he targeted Christians. When the PLO was forced to evacuate that city in 1982, he stayed behind and switched allegiance to Hezbollah, the Shiite militia that Iran was then recruiting and financing in Lebanon as an essential part of its imperialist expansion.

Hezbollah gave Mughniyah the chance to do his worst, attacking the U.S. embassy in Beirut (63 dead), the barracks of French troops (58 dead), and the barracks of American Marines (241 dead); kidnapping and sometimes killing hostages; bombing the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and a Jewish cultural center there (29 dead and 85 dead respectively); and so on. Effectively the chief of staff of Hezbollah, he was responsible for its intelligence and security apparatus as well as its fighting capacity, as demonstrated in Hezbollah's 2006 campaign against Israel. Here was a central operative in the alliance of Iran and Syria that is determining peace and war in the region.

Solid evidence exists that he was in touch with al-Qaeda in general, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq in particular. American and Israeli intelligence agencies pay tribute to his organizational skills. The FBI had him high on the Most Wanted list of terrorists, with a bounty of $5 million on his head. "The world is a better place without this man in it," said the State Department spokesman, evidently much gratified. Danny Yatom, the Mossad chief in the 1990s and now a member of the Knesset, says: "Mughniyah was one of the most dangerous terrorists ever. He operated in complete secrecy and concealed his every action.

... [He] operated with full cooperation with Iranian intelligence. He was a very clever man." Mughniyah is known to have traveled on unscheduled flights and false papers put at his disposal by Iran, and to have had face-lifts for good measure. Recently living clandestinely in Damascus, he was reported to have been in touch with Khaled Mashaal, the head of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist terror group, to coordinate an attack on Israel on two fronts.

So who killed him? An initial suspicion, of course, was that Mughniyah might have staged his own death. This being the Middle East, there are several possible lines of inquiry. A hallmark of Syrian intelligence is blowing up cars without being detected. Some Palestinian suspects have already been arrested in Damascus. Perhaps Mughniyah knew too much about the crimes of the Syrian elite for his own good. Or perhaps he had crossed or double-crossed his Iranian masters. Various Lebanese factions, Christian and Muslim, have reason to want a Hezbollah leader of his capability out of the way.