War: Lebanon / Hizbullah : Fouad Ajami analyzes Nasrallah's Folly, for Wall Street Journal
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A most important geostrategic analysis has been published by Fouad Ajami, "Hostage to Hezbollah," Wall Street Journal(Jul21,2k6) and republished by Regime Change Iran - to whom a Hat Tip:
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.
Iranian Theocrats
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.
IAF drops anti-Nasrallah fliers over Beirut
by Jerusalem Post staff (Jul29,2k6 17:17)
The IAF dropped fliers over Beirut on Saturday, which contained a message to the Lebanese people that Hizbullah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah was continuing to wreck their country.
The fliers described Nasrallah as a child who was playing with matches, only to discover that the IDF's firepower was much stronger, Israel Radio reported.
Back to Fouad Adami's WSJ article ...
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"The hotels are full in Damascus," read a dispatch in Beirut, as though to underline the swindle of this crisis, its bitter harvest for the Lebanese. History repeats here, endlessly it seems. There was something to Nasrallah's conduct that recalled the performance of Gamal Abdel Nasser in the Six Day War of 1967. That leader, it should be recalled, closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, asked for the evacuation of UN forces from the Sinai Peninsula -- clear acts of war -- but never expected the onset of war. He had only wanted the gains of war.Rookmaker Club geostrategic analysis:
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. 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. 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.
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." 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.---------------
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?"
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. 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. 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.
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.
Nasrallah said to be hiding in Iranian embassy, says Bill Geertz, Washington Times (Jul28,2k6): "Intelligence reports indicate the leader of Hezbollah is hiding in a foreign mission in Beirut, possibly the Iranian Embassy, according to U.S. and Israeli officials. ¶ Israeli military and intelligence forces are continuing to hunt for Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's secretary-general, who fled his headquarters in Beirut shortly before Israeli jets bombed the building last week. ¶ "We think he is in an embassy," said one U.S. official with access to the intelligence reports, while Israeli intelligence speculates Sheik Nasrallah is hiding in the Iranian Embassy. ¶ If confirmed, the reports could lead to an Israeli air strike on the embassy, possibly leading to a widening of the conflict, said officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Foreign embassies are sovereign territory and an attack on an embassy could be considered an act of war. ¶ But other reports from the region indicate Sheik Nasrallah may be in Damascus. A Kuwaiti newspaper, Al-Seyassah, reported from the Syrian capital yesterday that Sheik Nasrallah was seen moving through the city with Syrian guards in an intelligence agency car, Associated Press reported. He was dressed in civilian clothes, not his normal clerical robe. ¶ The newspaper quoted Syrian government sources as saying Iranian national security council official Ali Larijani was in Damascus and was to meet with Syrian President Bashar Assad and Sheik Nasrallah. ¶ Hezbollah officials in Beirut said they did not know whether Sheik Nasrallah had gone to Damascus."
Back to Fouad Adami's WSJ article ...
------------Don't miss the remainng 4/5ths of this powerfully ins+tful analysis by a leading scholar of MidEast Studies. The original article is also accessible by going to the RegimeChangeIran blog (click the title headline) and then navigate to Wall Street Journal where you login can or register; it's a pay-for setup but you can download a printable version of the full article if you want.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. 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.
-- Politicarp
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