SHI-ITE ORGANIZING: Ways, ways back in 1985, I published a book about Lebanon. (It won an award from Choice magazine, actually.) The “new” phenom in Lebanon then– new, I mean, in terms of, gee-whiz, it suddenly gets “discovered” by otherwise uninterested Westerners– was the rising influence of the country’s rapidly modernizing and rapidly organizing Shia community.
I wrote a bit about that along the way. A little monograph called “The Shia Community and the Future of Lebanon” (January 1985). A chapter in a book co-edited by Juan Cole and Nikkie Keddie: “Shi’ism and Social Protest” (Yale, 1986).
More recently, I’ve been going back to look at some of the more recent scholarship being done on the Shi-ites of Lebanon, and in particular on the notable successes won over the years by Hizbullah.
What is clear to me, from my own earlier work, from my close knowledge of developments in Lebanon throughout the past 30 years, and from this more recent work that’s now starting to come out, is that Hizbullah is an incredibly sophisticated, disciplined, and focused organization.
Some Westerners may look askance, or with a strong but unexamined sense of cultural/intellectual superiority, at a political movement run by men in turbans. They do so, I suggest, at the risk of considerably underestimating a religio-political culture that– in the case of Hizbullah, above all– has shown itself to be extremely adept at the core political chore of winning and keeping a strong and multifaceted political base.
And no-one looking at the political dynamics of the Middle East today can fail to see that Hizbullah is renowned throughout the entire region for being the only grouping anywhere that was able to liberate large chunks of Arab land from Israel’s military occupation. Considering that Hizbullah is a non-state actor and has none of the immense advantages that the stature of statehood confers, that’s no mean feat.
Hizbullah is important, currently, I believe, for two main reasons:
(1) because of the power throughout the Muslim world of “the Hizbullah mystique” — that is, the narrative that argues that Hizbullah won (all or nearly all) of its goal of liberating Lebanon from Israeli occupation primarily through the force of arms. One clear contrast that is often posed, in this argumentation, is with hapless old Abu Ammar and Abu Mazen, who have pursued peace negotiations with Israel for so many long years but have gotten nothing but repeated grindings of Israel’s military jackboot in their face for all their pains. And–
(2) because we can fairly confidently expect that much of the same political/organizing smarts that Hizbollah has displayed in Lebanon will be increasingly displayed by the Lebanese Shit’ites’ co-religionists in Iraq.
I’d love to write about both aspects of this topic. Not sure that I have time to, tonight. But here goes.
First, the possibility of Iraqi emulation of Hizbullah. Well yes, it’s evidently going to happen. Has already been underway for quite a time, indeed. While I do not pretend to know all the ins and outs of the relations among the different Iraqi Shi-ite groups, or the details of their relations with different factions in Iran, it’s evident that the Iraqi Shi-ite groups which have had a strong presence in Iran in recent years must have had close links and the opportunity for close consultation with Hizbullah people there.
Plus, the links between all three of these Shi-ite communities go back a long way. Lebanese ulema have received their religious training in Najaf for many centuries, and have socialized and inter-married there with many members of the big Iraqi (and some Iranian) religious lineages. So of course continued cross-border learning has been taking place– on matters of how to liberate a country from foreign military occupation, as well as on interpretations of arcane religious texts.
So what kind of lessons might the Iraqi Shi-ite organizers have been getting from their Lebanese counterparts? One key one, I think, would be the need to adopt a careful, longterm strategy of guerrilla warfare, and to pay attention to the classic guerrilla doctrine that rock-solid socio-political organizing is every bit as important (and sometimes, much more important) than organizing for direct military confrontations.
In Lebanon, in the years after Israel’s large-scale invasion of 1982 (which had been preceded by its smaller-scale invasion of 1978), it was Israel’s continued presence on Lebanese soil and the clumsiness of the interventions it made in Lebanese politics that themselves stimulated the birth and rapid growth of Hizbullah.
Hizbullah won early acclaim for the daring of its front-line fighters and the ingenuity of the tactics they used against the Israeli occupiers. (Israel in Lebanon, like the US in Iraq today, always swore its troops were not there to stay… But the Israelis never showed any signs of voluntarily leaving the country completely to its rightful owners.)
The Israel “Defense” Forces with their state-of-the-art military technology, funded and largely provided by an ever-generous Uncle Sam, always had the ability to “beat” Hizbullah on the battlefield. There was never any question about that. But the darned thing was– the thing that frustrated the heck out of two or three generations of Israeli military leaders– that they could never figure out how to translate a battlefield victory into a lasting political victory. The one big attempt to do so– in 1982, when they occupied about 35% of the whole country right up to and including the capital, Beirut– rapidly proved to have led to an order that was ways too costly, at every level, to sustain.
I’ve written about this before. In 1984, the inflation rate in Israel went up to 373%.
So they re-jiggered their footprint in Lebanon, and tried to keep a smaller force in “just” the south of the country, and to use it to project a “deterrent” threat that would deter the unruly Lebanese from messing with the IDF any further.
Israel’s “deterrent” in Lebanon was meant to work like this: Israel (of course!) would set the ground rules for any encounter. If something happened that Israeli gauleiter Uri Lubrani didn’t like, then the IDF would launch a “punitive” raid to force Hizbullah or other opponents to shape up.
But it didn’t work out like that. Hizbullah was never cowed into submission by those Israeli raids.
So starting in the early 1990s, the Israeli brain-boxes came up with a new idea. Instead of punishing Hizbullah, they would punish the Lebanese population instead, and try to force large parts of the Lebanese body politic to repudiate Hizbullah. (Sort of what they’ve been trying to do in the Palestinian occupied territories for the past 30 months. Also, without much notable success.)
So in 1991, and in 1993, and again in 1996, Israel launched raids of increasing ferocity against Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure. Each time, they unilaterally declared that most of the (majority Shi-ite-peopled) area of South Lebanon was a “free-fire zone”, and that Lebanese civilians stayed there– in their own homes– at their own peril. (And then they accuse others of “terrorizing” civilians??) The idea there was to send waves of Shi-ite refugees flooding northward for their lives; and that once these waves hit Beirut, they would put irresistible pressures on the Lebanese government to repudiate and finally take action against Hizbullah. To step up the pressure, Israel bombed bridges, power-plants, roads… The pressure inflicted on the lives of most Lebanese was terrible indeed.
But the support for Hizbullah didn’t waver. In fact, it got stronger each time. Finally, the 1996 invasion– launched by Shimon Peres and titled “Operation Grapes of Wrath”– resulted in a humiliating debacle for the Israelis, when they were forced to accept significant changes in the rules of engagement inside Lebanon that went in Hizbullah’s favor.
I guess from that time on, the writing was on the wall for the IDF’s strategy of “active, forward-based deterrence” in Lebanon. In 1999, Ehud Barak ran on a platform calling for speedy, unilateral withdrawal. After he won the election, that was one campaign promise that that he managed to keep. (Unlike the one about real and rapid progress in the negotiations with the Palestinians.)
So the interesting question is why did the political part of Israel’s “deterrent” strategy backfire so badly in Lebanon? And the answer to this has to be the political and organizing genius of Hizbullah. Which stands in stark contrast, I might add, to the shoddy and makeshift organizing capabilities of Yasser Arafat and his colleagues, with their tangled lines of command, their total lack of focus and discipline, and their general over-all reluctance to speak honestly and directly to “the people” whenever they can avoid doing so– which they generally do.
In contrast to Arafat’s Fateh, as it has become over the years, Hizbullah’s leaders always tried to keep close to the people. It was always assiduous about offering them the very best levels of social and economic support that it could. For many years–and perhaps until today– Hizbullah organized all the trash collection in Beirut’s southern suburbs; it regularly trucked in drinking water to all the subrubs’ neighborhoods; it provided cheap schoolbooks for hard-pressed parents and students; it sent its young men to refurbish school buildings. In the agricultural areas of the Bekaa, meanwhile, it provided agricultural extension services, marketing expertise, and cheap loans to farmers.
Most of these services were provided irrespective of the religion of the recipient, though their provision was always centered in areas of high Shi-ite population. But at the political level, Hizbullah’s leaders and sheikhs and ulema associated with it were always very careful to reach out across confessional lines and engage in interfaith dialogues with counterparts in other religions. Though everyone knew Hizbullah had good relations with Iran– which helped to fund the many social programs– Hizbullah’s leaders were always at pains to position themselves as a specifically Lebanese party. They played the political game in Lebanon with aplomb, building alliances across all kinds of confessional and political boundaries in order to maximize the number of their winning candidates in parliamentary and local elections.
Israel’s attempts to get the Lebanese body politic to repudiate them failed in the mid-1990s because by then Hizbullah had become an important and generally valued part of the body politic itself. When Israel launched the punishment raid of 1996, even leaders of the Maronite Christians– traditionally Israel’s closest allies inside Lebanon– declared, “we are all Hizbullah now”.
Without the massive attention to grassroots organizing, and the smart but careful political strategy that stemmed from that organizing, Hizbullah could never have attained those results. On a purely military battlefield, it would always have been smashed by Israel. ut lebanon is not just a “battlefield”. It is also a country, with politics, and even more importantly, people.
My current argument with those friends in the Arab and Muslim worlds who seem to have been dangerously swayed by the attraction of the “Hizbullah mystique” is that Hizbullah’s substantial victories never grew mainly out of the barrels of its guns. They came instead overwhelmingly from the strength and intelligence of Hizbullah’s political strategies.
So if the Palestinians, or the Iraqis, or anyone else who wants to free their country from foreign military occupation wants to take a leaf from Hizbullah’s playbook, maybe they should concentrate on Hizbullah’s superb political-organizing skills much more than on its military achievements.
Indeed–and I have argued this a number of times– they could maybe try to replicate what Hizbullah achieved but with even less loss of life, and less pain and suffering, by doing Hizbullah’s style of meticulous and focused political organizing, and its active mass resistance actions– but on the basis of a determined adherence to using nonviolent means??
So far, this seems to be the focus of what the mullahs in “the new Iraq” are doing. So far, I have a lot of respect for them. It is, after all, their country that the US and UK forces are now quite extra-legally parked in…
As far back as April 12, I wrote here that Bombs-Away Don Rumsfeld bore a lot of responsibility for the terrible power vacuum and mayhem that was then starting to emerge inside Iraq. And I wrote there that in the center and south of the country, the Shi-ite mullahs looked like the network best prepared to provide the kind of very basic services that in such circumstances everybody needs. (Oh, things like basic personal security. Bombs-Away Don seemed to have forgotten about that completely.)
And of course, Iran is right over the border. Handy for them. A long and very porous border, too.
So of course it’s not going to all be an exact replay of Lebanon. But there are already scores of similarities. And one of them is definitely the existence of a common, shared body of knowledge about what works in building a popular movement to resist foreign military occupation, and what doesn’t…
But hey, wouldn’t it be nice if everybody’s armies just returned to their own national soil??? Why should that suddenly seem such a revolutionary notion?