OVER THE PAST few months, the dance of war between the US and Iraq has shifted tempo. At times this past summer, it was a pogo dance veering into slam dancing and stage diving. The hawks in President George W. Bush’s administration were eschewing a renewal of United Nations weapons inspections (and, at times, any attempt to work with the UN) in favor of a notion of unilateral "regime change" effected by US troops. A steady hosanna stream of neocon op-eds greeted and amplified the hawks’ pronouncements.

Yet, as Bob Woodward’s recent book Bush at War (Simon & Schuster) details in its epilogue, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice managed to shift the war-dance tempo from slam to jitterbug, and then slowed it to a minuet of UN Security Council resolutions and a new round of inspections. The numerous Beltway conferences on what a post-Saddam Iraq might look like — and who should be next on the list in America’s open-ended war on terror — seemed less immediately relevant.

Now, as weapons inspectors hit the ground, reservists are called up, and Saddam Hussein unleashes a voluminous volley of paper against those who would bring him down, the US war dance has speeded up again — perhaps to a nimble but relentless waltz. This shift in tempo has Iraqi dissidents once again boldly plotting in the open. It also has reopened debate on which person, group, or nation will be the next target of the war on terror.

Recently, Saudi Arabia has drawn lots of attention in this regard. That nation’s links to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have been analyzed, as has its financial ties to terror networks. The question of whether the Saudis are trusted allies also has been aired in op-ed pages and on cable-news gabfests. Yet, aside from a controversial presentation openly labeling Saudi Arabia as a threat that was given to the Defense Policy Board, a Pentagon advisory board, by RAND analyst Laurent Murawiec — whose remarks were quickly disavowed by Pentagon officials — no one anywhere near the government has indicated that Saudi Arabia could be the next stop in the war on terrorism. As recently as last week, State Department spokesperson Philip Reeker praised the kingdom, saying, "We are pleased with the continued cooperation that we have received and continue to receive from the government of Saudi Arabia in the global war on terrorism."

North Korea — a charter member of the Bush administration’s "axis of evil" — is also pushing itself into the terror news cycle, whether the White House is ready to take on that nation’s threat or not. As if Pyongyang’s shocking admission to US diplomats that it has restarted its nuclear-weapons program were not enough, last week’s seizure and subsequent release of a shipment of Scud missiles from North Korea to Yemen proved to be an acute embarrassment to the Bush administration’s anti-terror efforts.

Still, despite all this, the Bush administration has yet to say that North Korea is the next target after Iraq. Rather, the White House’s emphasis in public statements about North Korea has been on diplomacy and containment. When reporters asked White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer about the administration’s differing approaches to Iraq and North Korea, Fleischer observed that "the region has a peaceful interest in working together so North Korea comes into compliance with international norms. The isolationist path that North Korea has put itself on only hurts the people of North Korea, and it has risks for the rest of the world.

If you believe Woodward’s account of the Bush White House’s inner workings, the lack of public saber-rattling toward Saudi Arabia and North Korea is no accident, and indicates that those nations are not favored subjects for action. Bush-administration hawks aren’t shy about pushing for targets. One of the scariest narrative threads of Bush at War describes how the idea of attacking Iraq dominated the Bush administration from the day after the 9/11 attacks. According to Woodward, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was in Bush’s ear from the get-go, asking for a war aimed at "terrorism more broadly." Woodward tracks Rumsfeld and his hawkish deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, beating the drum for an Iraq attack, despite the continuing absence of evidence linking Saddam to September 11.

So if you are looking to put some chips down in the casino of US terrorist pre-emption, where do you lay your bet? Try South Lebanon. Already, clear signals have come that the Lebanon-based military and political organization Hezbollah — which is on the US State Department’s "Terror Watch List" — is under serious consideration as the Bush administration’s next target.

No less a personage than Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage — Secretary of State Colin Powell’s number two at Foggy Bottom — has openly stated just that. In response to a question posed to him about Hezbollah at a United States Institute of Peace luncheon (see "Iraq Attack," News and Features, September 13), Armitage replied: "Hezbollah may be the A team of terrorists, and maybe Al Qaeda is actually the B team. They’re on the list, and their time will come. There is no question about it. They have a blood debt to us, which you spoke to; and we’re not going to forget it, and it’s all in good time. We’re going to go after these problems just like a high-school wrestler goes after a match: we’re going to take them down one at a time."

The prospect of taking on Hezbollah after Iraq — if not sooner — already has bipartisan support. On Fox News in early December, Senator Bob Graham (D-Florida) — the outgoing chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee — called on the United States to attack "the headquarters and the training camps of those international terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah, which are the most likely ones to form an alliance with Saddam Hussein."

Linking Hezbollah to Saddam Hussein is not the only pretext for such an attack. In fact, proponents of opening a new front against Hezbollah even have a stock supporting phrase that both recalls old scores and links the group to 9/11: "Until September 11 of last year, Hezbollah had murdered more Americans than any other terrorist group."

There is no doubt that Hezbollah’s past success in inflicting casualties on the United States via suicide bombings (the "blood debt" to which Armitage referred) is at the forefront of suggestions that the US tackle Hezbollah next. In a four-year period in the mid 1980s, Hezbollah’s attacks on a US embassy annex in Beirut (63 dead), a US Marine barracks (241 dead), and another US embassy bombing (14 dead) proved lethal and effective. The group also struck at individuals, kidnapping and torturing CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley in 1984.

Worse yet, Hezbollah’s strikes against Americans added the sting of humiliation to the horrific carnage. The bombing of the US Marine barracks led directly to the withdrawal of US troops from Lebanon. The kidnapping of Buckley — and attempts to free him despite firm US policy not to cut deals with terrorists — was a key trigger in the "arms for hostages" prong of the Iran-contra affair.

In the Bush administration, which busily recycles figures from the Reagan era and even earlier, such memories linger. According to the State Department’s annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report for 2001, it’s been a decade since Hezbollah has targeted the US with such violence. "Hizballah has not attacked US interests in Lebanon since 1991," states the report, "but it continued to maintain the capability to target US personnel and facilities there and abroad. During 2001, Hizballah provided training to Hamas and the Palestine Islamic Jihad at training facilities in the Beka’a Valley. In addition, Hizballah reportedly increased the export of weaponry into the West Bank and Gaza Strip for use by these groups against Israeli targets."

Hezbollah’s patrons are also integral parts of the case against it. The group is directly funded by one member of the Bush administration’s "axis of evil" — Iran — and remains closely linked to neighboring Syria. As the State Department report mentions, Hezbollah is no friend of the Mideast peace process, either, supplying both moral support and weaponry to the Palestinian Intifada and occasionally skirmishing with Israel over a slice of the Golan Heights.

Yet a scan of news headlines from major newspapers in 2002 indicates very little actual conflict between Hezbollah and anyone — even on the border between Israel and South Lebanon (which has been controlled by Hezbollah since the Israeli Defense Forces withdrew from the region in 2000). The biggest flash point this year, in fact, was not over terror or oppression, but over Lebanon’s plan to pump water from a spring that serves both that nation and Israel. A deal was eventually brokered — with US help — to stem that conflict quietly.

Despite such diplomatic efforts, Hezbollah has a way of continually popping up on the radar screen. At a recent preview of the upcoming Israeli elections, former US ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk summed up much of the current thinking about Hezbollah in the US and Israel. Asked about the water skirmish and the possible role that Hezbollah might play in the election, Indyk laid out the patient diplomacy and the appeal to Lebanon, Hezbollah, and Syria’s self-interest that quelled the crisis. Then, he continued:

"The question that is on the minds of many Israelis in the political and security establishment these days, however, relates to what happens to Hezbollah after Iraq. That is the question of phase three of the war on terror. You’ll see it today in the Israeli press, and I think there will be a steady drumbeat on this. That the next phase, phase three, needs to focus on Hezbollah as being the threat, as Senator Graham has been pointing out repeatedly over the last few weeks. Hezbollah is the premier terrorist organization, backed by Iran, with a global network, and the Israelis see Hezbollah increasing its activity in the West Bank and Gaza. Smuggling of arms, financing, not just [to] the Islamic Jihad but Hamas and now even the Al-Aqsa brigades of Fatah, money coming via Hezbollah and through the Iranian Revolution Guards, from Iran to all of the organizations that are now conducting terrorist attacks in the West Bank and Gaza. So the Israelis are very keen to see something done about Hezbollah, and they are arguing that this should be the next phase in the war on terror."