Opinion: Like it or not, Hezbollah is fact of life in Middle East
Like it or not, Hezbollah is fact of life in Middle East
By Julie Flint (an ABC News correspondent in Lebanon from
1983 to 1990. She has lived in Lebanon since 1981)
Chicago Tribune
July 31, 2006
America’s concept of Hezbollah will always be defined by Oct. 23, 1983, when a suicide bomber killed nearly 245 U.S. servicemen at the Beirut airport in the Marines’ worst one-day loss since the World War II invasion of Okinawa. But it is 23 years later and Hezbollah now lives in the mainstream of Lebanese politics, not in the small Iranian-controlled terror cells that attacked American soldiers and took American hostages in the 1980s.
Today Hezbollah is a strong social and political movement headed by an articulate and charismatic cleric, Hassan Nasrallah, who enjoys considerable popularity among many Lebanese. It has two government ministers, 14 members of parliament and an experienced and efficient guerrilla force far stronger than
the Lebanese army. Most critically, Hezbollah has the devotion–not just the support–of many of Lebanon’s Shiite Muslims, who make up almost half the country’s population.
Hezbollah is not the Palestine Liberation Organization, which could be crushed and sent packing from a country that was not its own. Hezbollah cannot be defeated without exterminating the entire Shiite community. U.S. policy in the area will fail, with disastrous consequences regionwide but especially in Iraq,
as long as Washington accepts Israel’s caricature of Hezbollah as a bunch of fanatics who “want their own people as human shields … [and] civilian casualties on both sides.”
Wishful thinking must not inform U.S. policy. Hundreds of thousands of Shiites fleeing the war in south Lebanon have reached Beirut with no interference from Hezbollah. The interference has come from Israeli planes shelling them as they flee and strengthening their determination to resist, with their lives if need
be. Many families, even non-Hezbollah families, are leaving at least one man behind in the south to fight against Israel. For the moment at least, Hezbollah’s support is growing.
“The military situation for us is perfect,” a Hezbollah official told me last week as Israeli ground forces inched deeper into south Lebanon, taking heavy casualties. “The Israelis are destroying everything. Even children are saying they have nothing to lose now.”
For the last 15 years, Hezbollah’s Lebanese face has been becoming increasingly moderate–first under the leadership of Abbas Musawi, who ended hostage-taking, despite internal opposition, before being killed by an Israeli helicopter gunship in 1992; then under Nasrallah, who took Hezbollah into the government, despite internal opposition. Today Hezbollah does not seek the establishment of an Islamic state in Lebanon and does not endeavour to impose Islamic morals, even in the predominately Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut.
The party is a complex, broad-based amalgam of many tendencies and cannot be wished, or blasted, away. If the Israel Defense Forces succeed in killing Nasrallah, Hezbollah will splinter and its most radical wing, closest to the caricature, will come to the fore. Then we’ll see the petrochemical complexes of
Haifa rocketed; then we may see new attacks on Westerners in Lebanon.
Have the U.S. and Israel forgotten the lesson of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon: that force resolves nothing? Yes, the PLO sailed out in the end. But Hezbollah rode in and is still fighting Israel 20 years later, more determined and more organized than Yasser Arafat’s men ever were. To keep northern Israel safe from Hezbollah’s missiles, Israeli forces would have to police a “buffer zone” 80 miles deep, the range of Hezbollah’s Zelzal 2 rockets. Israeli public opinion will not accept that.
In the end, there will have to be a negotiated political settlement. It would be so much better to seek it now. Instead of standing by as Israel blows up Lebanon to rediscover the futility of force, the U.S. should demand an immediate cease-fire and open direct talks with Iran and Syria, which support and supply
Hezbollah. This is a time for statesmen, not petulant schoolboys.
What we are witnessing in Lebanon today are the first tremors of an earthquake that will create a new Middle East order–although not the one Washington has in mind. Protracted war in Lebanon will only radicalize the Lebanese face of Hezbollah, increase its already heroic stature in the region and entrench it as a proxy through which Iran will try to seek regional ascendancy. The time for diplomacy, for scaling down the rhetoric, is now.
Recent Comments