24
August 2006
The dilemmas of being
an Iranian bullet
Hizbullah's
efficient ward heelers are handing out cash, reportedly much of it Iranian,
to persuade the party's
Shiite supporters that the
destruction of their homes and
livelihood was worth it. However, a more
pressing question is: At what point will Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah,
Hizbullah's secretary general,
be forced into making an impossible choice where he
must either reimburse his expanding debt
to Iran or, by doing so, risk losing the
backing of his own community? In other words, when
will Hizbullah have to truly decide whether
it is Iranian
or Lebanese?
The question is ever
more relevant in light of the ongoing
tension between the
international community and
Iran over the latter's nuclear program. Iran had wagered on Hizbullah's missiles being
a deterrent in the event of a conflict with the United
States and Israel. That effect has been mostly lost thanks
to the month-long Lebanon war. Hizbullah
still has many rockets, and its infrastructure in the South is
probably intact. But what it no longer has is a blank check from the Shiite population to pursue a
new war of "honor"
that will surely put most of them back in the streets again.
Amid the sanguine assertions of a Hizbullah victory, a colder assessment is needed to gauge
just what the party achieved,
or, rather, lost after July 12 - specifically what it lost
Iran. Aside from
Hizbullah's spent deterrence
capability (only revivable at a high price) is
the element of surprise when it comes
to the party's training, tactics, and defenses.
In the next war, the Israelis
will come better prepared. The Lebanese Army
is in the South, and a broader
international force will probably
soon deploy in the border area. That hardly makes a new war impossible, but were Hizbullah to take its weapons out of their containers to resume the fight, it
would have to first confront the Lebanese
state and the international
community, meaning bearing a heavy responsibility for the aftermath.
Then there is the matter of Iranian
calculations. If you were a Revolutionary Guards chief in Tehran, how would you view the
latest conflict with Israel? You
would doubtless marvel at Hizbullah's training (Iranian of course), but the
ovation would end there. If it's true that hundreds of millions of
dollars have been spent on arming
and preparing the party, and
that hundreds of millions,
if not billions, more will be
needed to rehabilitate
Lebanon's Shiite community, then
the Iranians got little for their outlays. The Lebanon war
was useless to them, only making
their nuclear program more vulnerable. That's
one reason why Tehran organized military exercises before its formal
answer on Tuesday to an international offer on ending uranium enrichment. The Iranians would have preferred to use Lebanon as a cushion to keep the conflict away
from their borders; but Hizbullah torpedoed that by miscalculating the Israeli and American
response to the July 12
abductions of two Israeli soldiers.
So now Nasrallah has a
mounting debt owed the Iranians
and little room to tell them that he
cannot implement a request to heat Israel's northern border if the nuclear issue demands it. Worse, the Hizbullah leader knows that even
a devotee like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will have to explain to his own poor
electors why billions of
dollars are being spent on
building Shiite homes in Lebanon, while
Iranians continue to face grinding
poverty - poverty that might get
worse if the UN Security Council manages to
impose sanctions. How much can
the Iranian regime bear financially
when it comes
to buoying up Nasrallah's base? Even
Shiite businessmen, whether in the
Gulf or Lebanon, may hesitate to offer substantial funding if they sense a new war is looming.
What can Nasrallah do if
Iran asks Hizbullah to resume military operations against Israel while Shiites are slowly rebuilding their lives? By refusing, Nasrallah could lose his
sponsor and financier; by agreeing,
he could lose his supporters. If one had to guess, the
Hizbullah leader would obey Iran and hope
for the best when it comes to the
Shiites. Yet the risks of such a strategy are immense, because Nasrallah's allegiances would be there for all to see, particularly his coreligionists. And that's not mentioning how negatively
Hizbullah's actions would be
received by the other Lebanese communities, who would again see
their country devastated in
a proxy war. Hizbullah has lost what little it
once retained of the
consensus behind the "resistance" (prompting Nasrallah to threaten his critics on Al-Jazeera last month), but a renewal of conflict, fed by Iran, could lead toward a more violent domestic standoff.
The irony is that Nasrallah has spent the better
part of 15 years deftly avoiding hard choices. His strategy has been to hop from one side of Hizbullah's personality to the other, depending on the circumstances. When, in July, he was attacked by Walid Jumblatt for claiming that the war
with Israel was that of the
umma, he changed tack in a subsequent speech and mentioned he was
doing it all for Lebanon. When, in the national dialogue, he came under pressure to advocate a drawing of the Syrian-Lebanese border in the Shebaa Farms, Nasrallah
obliged, only to later backtrack when the Syrians
showed they were not amused. And last week when,
in a televised speech, the secretary general criticized the slowness of the Lebanese state in financing
reconstruction (implicitly advocating
Iranian suitcases of cash
as a panacea to that problem), he also
insisted Hizbullah was part of the state. In each case one was left wondering: Is Nasrallah all expedient maneuvering?
Another war with Israel, fought on behalf of Iran, would not allow such gymnastics.
Hizbullah has largely used up its Shiite card, but has valiantly tried to save it
by selling the notion that what happened
in the past month was a military
victory. Fair enough, since no emperor can long go without clothes. But if Hizbullah is merely
Iran's bullet, at some stage Nasrallah will have to decide whether he wants
to be more than that.
Michael Young is opinion editor of THE DAILY
STAR.
Copyright (c) 2006 The
Daily Star