Hizbullah, not Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida, is the world's No. One

terrorist group. He also said the United States made a "stupendous

blunder" by failing to retaliate militarily to the 1983 suicide attack

on a U.S. Marines Base at Beirut airport.

"I wanted along with the navy secretary at the time to fire a cruise

missile that would have penetrated the window of the Iranian ambassador

in Damascus," Armitage said in a testimony before a U.S. Congressional

Committee investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist operations in New York

and Washington in 2001.

The Iranian ambassador at the time was Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, who

actually founded Hizbullah after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

He was then a leading hardliner in Imam Khomeini's regime, but has now

joined President Khatami's camp of liberal reformists.

"We thought that this operation would have been very useful," Armitage

said, attributing the failure to carry out the cruise assault to

the "regrettable" decision by President Ronald Reagan's administration

to abstain from a military retaliation to the Marines bombing, which

killed 241 American servicemen.

Reagan's stance was dictated by "the huge political differences about

the reasons for our presence" in Lebanon. That presence, Armitage

contended, had developed with the lapse of time into "a factor of a

civil war of others. We have then been eyed as biased … and all of a

sudden we took the blow."

Armitage accused Hizbullah, despite repeated public denials, of

engineering the bombing of the Marines base at Beirut airport. "It is

the A-team of terrorism because it has a global reach and is capable of

dealing blows at will."