Lesson for Nasrallah: "The violence done to Lebanon shall overwhelm you."
BY FOUAD AJAMI
 Pity Lebanon: In a world of states, it has not had a state of its own. A garden without fences, was the way Beirut, its capital city, was once described. A cleric by the name of Hassan Nasrallah, at the helm of the Hezbollah movement, handed Lebanon a calamity right as the summer tourist season had begun. Beirut had dug its way out of the rubble of a long war: Nasrallah plunged it into a new season of loss and ruin. He presented the country with a fait accompli: the "gift" of two Israeli soldiers kidnapped across an international frontier. Nasrallah never let the Lebanese government in on his venture. He was giddy with triumphalism and defiance when this crisis began. And men and women cooped up in the destitution of the Shiite districts of Beirut were sent out into the streets to celebrate Hezbollah's latest deed.
| Siniora claimed he was mistranslated or misquoted the other day when he referred to Hezbollah as a "state within a state," but whether or not he was, the statement was accurate. Hezbollah's an externally imposed creation in Leb, an instrument of Iran's grab at being a great power. Lebanon's an oligarchy dressed up as a democracy, and Hezbollah's outside the structure of the oligarchy. Its aims aren't those of the Lebanese, but those of the caliphate. |
It did not seem to matter to Nasrallah that the ground that would burn in Lebanon would in the main be Shiite land in the south. Nor was it of great concern to he who lives on the subsidies of the Iranian theocrats that the ordinary Lebanese would pay for his adventure. The cruel and cynical hope was that Nasrallah's rivals would be bullied into submission and false solidarity, and that the man himself would emerge as the master of the game of Lebanon's politics.
| The aim of the Islamist enterprise, whether it be Sunni or Shiite, doesn't include the wellbeing of the common man. The commons are mere fodder. They make no secret of their dislike of liberty, despite the benefits it brings. They consider the benefits to be outweighed by the costs — starting with the loss of prestige of the holy men... |
...Nasrallah's brazen deed was, in the man's calculus, an invitation to an exchange of prisoners. Now, the man who triggered this crisis stands exposed as an Iranian proxy, doing the bidding of Tehran and Damascus.
| Leb's a land of subtle politix and shifting alliances, but I don't think anybody's ever regarded Hezbollah as anything other than an Iranian proxy. Their problem is that they realized it was too powerful for them to take on without another civil war. Its presence being a given, something they couldn't do anything about, they regarded it as just another factor, a resource to be used if convenient, as they tried to coopt it into the existing— fairly stable— structure... |
He had confidently asserted that "sources" in Israel had confided to Hezbollah that Israel's government would not strike into Lebanon because Hezbollah held northern Israel hostage to its rockets, and that the demand within Israel for an exchange of prisoners would force Ehud Olmert's hand. The time of the "warrior class" in Israel had passed, Nasrallah believed, and this new Israeli government, without decorated soldiers and former generals, was likely to capitulate.
| There's a difference between Olmert and Sharon. Had Nasrallah tried the game as played this time when Sharon was PM he's have known what to expect. The game would have been different, and much more subtle. Sharon, after all, did once trade hundreds of prisoners for three corpses. He might not have tried anything at all if Moshe Dayan or the divine Golda had been around. He discounted the fact that the Israeli left is loud and it's obnoxious, but that Kadima's got to measure itself against Sharon. Sharon carried the baggage of his prior life in Lebanon, which gave him stature to maneuver within Israelis politix and scared the crap out of the Arabs. Olmert's got to perform as well to be a "Sharonist." The current crisis hasn't shown him particularly well; he hasn't been decisive when he should have been, and he's fallen into the trap of "sending signals," moving tanks around Gaza seemingly without rhyme or reason. He's backed down when he didn't have to — the demand for Hezbollah to be disbanded seems to have been dropped, most notably. But his choices have been constrained by the enemy and if he doesn't act decisively someone else will. |
Now this knowingness has been exposed for the delusion it was. There was steel in Israel and determination to be done with Hezbollah's presence on the border. States can't—and don't—share borders with militias. That abnormality on the Lebanese-Israeli border is sure not to survive this crisis. One way or other, the Lebanese army will have to take up its duty on the Lebanon-Israel border. By the time the dust settles, this terrible summer storm will have done what the Lebanese government had been unable to do on its own.
| I'm guessing it'll be at a severe cost to Lebanon, though. The civil war is the elephant in the Beirut dining room, just like Syria's the guest who wouldn't leave. |
In his cocoon, Nasrallah did not accurately judge the temper of his own country to begin with. No less a figure than the hereditary leader of the Druze community, Walid Jumblatt, was quick to break with Hezbollah, and to read this crisis as it really is. "We had been trying for months," he said, "to spring our country out of the Syrian-Iranian trap, and here we are forcibly pushed into that trap again."
| I think Wally realizes that the push didn't come from anything in the Leb political process, but from outside that process. Hezbollah acted as a tool of Iran, in response to international pressure on Teheran. Beirut's paying the consequences and Damascus is trying to reap the benefits. |
In this two-front war—Hamas's in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah's in Lebanon—Mr. Jumblatt saw the fine hand of the Syrian regime attempting to retrieve its dominion in Lebanon, and to forestall the international investigations of its reign of terror in that country.
| Syria's presence in Leb was actually welcomed by most, as it imposed peace among the factions. In the mid-80s the continuing carnage in Beirut seemed like it would never end. |
In the same vein, a broad coalition of anti-Syrian Lebanese political parties and associations that had come together in the aftermath of the assassination last year of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, called into question the very rationale of this operation, and its timing: "Is it Lebanon's fate to endure the killing of its citizens and the destruction of its economy and its tourist season in order to serve the interests of empty nationalist slogans?"
| There's the weak spot in the oligarchy. Notice they said nothing about Teheran? The anti-Syrian bloc's been caught up in its own internal negotiations and machinations. And the pro-Syrian bloc — Nahbih Berri, Suleiman Franjieh, and the "security" apparatus — still retains a lot of strength. If they didn't, President Lahoud would have been bounced last March. |
In retrospect, Ehud Barak's withdrawal from Israel's "security zone" in southern Lebanon in the summer of 2000 had robbed Hezbollah of its raison d'être. It was said that the "resistance movement" would need a "soft landing" and a transition to a normal political world. But the imperative of disarming Hezbollah and pulling it back from the international border with Israel was never put into effect.
| Left to their own devices, the oligarchy would have argued and compromised and blathered about Resolution 1559 for the next ten years. My guess is that even if or when Israel thoroughly thumps Hezbollah, there will still be elements that resist full implementation. They'd rather allow another Hezbollah to grow. |
Hezbollah found its way into Parliament, was given two cabinet posts in the most recent government, and branched out into real estate ventures; but the heavy military infrastructure survived and, indeed, was to be augmented in the years that followed Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon. Syria gave Hezbollah cover, for that movement did much of Syria's bidding in Lebanon.
| My guess is that someday we'll "discover" they were the agents for the "unsolved" car booms in the time since Hariri's assassination. |
A pretext was found to justify the odd spectacle of an armed militia in a time of peace: Hezbollah now claimed that the battle had not ended, and that a barren piece of ground, the Shebaa Farms, was still in Israel's possession. By a twist of fate, that land had been in Syrian hands when they fell to Israel in the Six Day War. No great emotions stirred in Lebanon about the Shebaa Farms. It was easy to see through the pretense of Hezbollah. The state within a state was an end in itself.
| Bingo. Spot on. Had the Syrians handed the deed to Shebaa Farms to the Leb government there would have been other reasons for the Resistance™ to maintain its armaments, just as there are reasons for the Paleos to maintain theirs. |
For Hezbollah, the moment of truth would come when Syria made a sudden, unexpected retreat out of Lebanon in the spring of 2005. An edifice that had the look of permanence was undone with stunning speed as the Syrians raced to the border, convinced that the Pax Americana might topple the regime in Damascus, as it had Saddam Hussein's tyranny. For Hezbollah's leaders, this would be a time of great uncertainty. The "Cedar Revolution" that had helped bring an end to Syrian occupation appeared to be a genuine middle-class phenomenon, hip and stylish, made up in the main of Sunni Muslims, Druze and Christians. Great numbers of propertied and worldly Shiites found their way to that Cedar Revolution, but Hezbollah's ranks were filled with the excluded, newly urbanized people from villages in the south and the Bekaa Valley.
| Hillbillies. Rustics. Syrians. |
Hassan Nasrallah had found a measure of respectability in the Lebanese political system; he was a good orator and, in the way of Levantine politics, a skilled tactician. A seam was stitched between the jihadist origins of Hezbollah and the pursuit of political power in a country as subtle and complex and pluralistic as Lebanon. There would be no Islamic republic in Lebanon, and the theory of Hezbollah appeared to bend to Lebanon's realities. But Nasrallah was in the end just the Lebanese face of Hezbollah. Those who know the workings of the movement with intimacy believe that operational control is in the hands of Iranian agents, that Hezbollah is fully subservient to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.
| No! Reaaaaaaaally? But they're so subtle about it! |
The hope that Hezbollah would "go Lebanese," and "go local," was thus set aside. At any rate, Nasrallah and his lieutenants did not trust the new Lebanon to make the ample room that a country at war—and within the orbit of Syria—had hitherto made for them in the time of disorder. Though the Shiites had risen in Lebanon, there remains in them a great deal of brittleness, a sense of social inadequacy relative to the more privileged communities in the country.
| The cliche Lebanese is sophisticated and cosmopolitan, Phoenecian rather than Arab. Leb's wealth comes from trade, not from olives grown on Shebaa Farms. The Islamists are alien to the culture that's been there for 4000 years. |
That raid into Israel, the capture of the two Israeli soldiers, was a deliberate attack against the new Lebanon. That the crisis would play out when the mighty of the G-8 were assembled in Russia was a good indication of Iran's role in this turn of events. Hassan Nasrallah had waded beyond his depth: The moment of his glory would mark what is destined to be a setback of consequence for him and for his foot soldiers. Iran's needs had trumped Hezbollah's more strictly Lebanese agenda.
| There's more at the link... |
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