Bush, Hizbullah, and disarmament

My recent long article on Hizbullah has continued to evoke a broad– and fairly predictable– range of reactions in various places. I’ll be giving a public presentation on the subject in DC on June 1, in case any of you is able to get there. (More details later.) The date is a little delayed, I know. But I really do need to focus on finishing my violence-in-Africa book. Then in late May, I’ll be teaching a summer course over at Eastern Mennonite University….
Anyway. Bottom line here. I’m a member of an on-line discussion group on (mainly) Gulf affairs, and recently started reading some postings there on the topic of Bush and Hizbullah. So yesterday I dashed off the following comment:

It is extremely “rich” that the same Bush administration that has handed over a lot of the security work in Iraq to the Pesh Merga (and some to foreign mercenaries) should be the one saying that party militias can absolutely not be allowed in Lebanon! However, the general principles that the state should have a monopoly on the means of force and that security forces should come under the governance of the civilian political leadership (preferably, a democratically constituted one) are very valuable ones indeed.
In Lebanon, the state, being itself weak, has until recently in essence subcontracted many of the security reponsibilities in South Lebanon to Hizbullah, which had “won” that right by being the force that liberated the area from foreign military occupation. (How many other people remember the Israeli-forced “high noon at Kawkaba” back in March 1978?) Hizbullah’s command of this private militia is certainly not a desirable situation over the long or even shorter term. But it is overwhelmingly the business of the Lebanese themselves to deal with it. It was interesting to see the very low degree of support the recent Zogby poll found, in many segments of Lebanese society including Maronites, for the idea of a forced disarming of Hizbullah. The Lebanese seem clearly to prefer negotiations to regularize the situation of the people who currently staff the Hizbullah-affiliated territorial defense and deterring-Israel formations in the South. Perhaps this could be done along the lines recently suggested by Sheikh Naim Qasem. This would broadly parallel the efforts Abu Mazen has been pursuing to fold the combatants from Hamas and other militant groups into the centralized PA security structure.
Let’s all continue hoping and working for a comprehensive peace in the area– Israel-Syria, Israel-Lebanon, intra-Lebanese, Israeli-Palestinian, etc. In that context, the amounts of national revenue that all these parties keep tied up until now in military preparedness could be radically reduced. Until then, some form of citizen-based, territorially organized defense probably makes a lot of sense for the people of south Lebanon.
I’d like to be able to argue that a completely nonviolent civilian mass movement might “hold off” the Israelis better than such a force. But the comparative records of the Palestinians’ (largely nonviolent) first intifada, which won them nothing lasting from Israel, and Hizbullah’s exactly contemporaneous pursuit of armed struggle, which in combination with expert civilian organization did succeed in liberating national territory, would make that argument a very hard sell indeed…
Helena Cobban

Oh heck– just because the argument would be a hard sell, I shouldn’t make it? What on earth kind of un-Quakerly thinking is that??
So I’ll make it:

The people of south Lebanon could do really well to study the nonviolent means by which Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha movement not ony resisted the entire weight of the British Army in India but was also able to persuade the British to pull their forces out of India completely.
Go for it!
Using these means successfully requires a strategic and very deeply philosophical commitment to the principles of nonviolence. But since Hizbullah has already shown its high level of experience and expertise in civilian mass organizing it already has much of the groundwork in place for such a campaign.
And no: nonviolence is by no means anathema to Muslim teachings. One of Gandhi’s key lieutenants in his principled and successful movement against British occupation was the Pathan leader Badshah Khan, the “Gandhi of the Northwest frontier.”

Ach. That stuff is so important, I’ll have to come back to it again sometime soon.
But for now, I just want to add into this post some points that were made in that same on-line discussion forum by the Beirut-based writer Nicholas Blanford, who gave me permission to reproduce them here.
Nick, who’s been following Hizbullah a lot more closely than I have and has done so for a number of years, wrote the following:

A few points perhaps worth noting.
1. The debate has yet to begin in earnest on the future status of Hizbullah’s military wing, the Islamic Resistance, and it probably won’t begin until at least after the parliamentary elections scheduled to be held at the end of May. What Hizbullah has been doing through its various declarations is staking out its initial bargaining position. Essentially, their position is as follows: They want the Islamic Resistance to remain intact and under Hizbullah’s chain of command while accepting increased coordination with the Lebanese Army (i.e., the government). They will not initiate military confrontations with the Israelis along the Blue Line (the UN name for Lebanon’s southern border with Israel and the Golan Heights/Shebaa Farms) with the exception of the Shebaa Farms theater in the south east corner. They will, however, reserve the right to respond to Israeli acts of aggression (overflights, ground breaches of the Blue Line etc). Since 2000, Hizbullah has cultivated a public image of defender of Lebanese sovereignty from Israeli aggression, and its initial bargaining position deviates little from its current modus operandi along the Blue Line.
2. The Islamic Resistance is the beating heart of Hizbullah and the party will do what it can to retain it. They will play for time in the hope that domestic and/or regional developments will intervene to rescue them. In the meantime, the party is even willing to subordinate potential political gains for the sake of the Resistance. That means co-opting and appeasing other Shiite/Sunni political groups to retain them as allies and defenders of the Resistance, rather than alienate them by competing aginst them politically and turning them into opponents.
3. The big question is how far Hizbullah will go to keep the Resistance intact. Will they risk destabilizing Lebanon for the sake of the Resistance or will they yield if the majority of Lebanese clearly support disarmament?

[Nick Blanford, contd.]
I suspect that they could attempt to trigger an upsurge of violence along the Blue Line which they can blame on Israel and thus justify a continuation of the Resistance. Hizbullah is engaged in a finely calibrated war of nerves with the Israelis along the Blue Line which has its own tacit set of rules recognised and observed by both sides and rarely noticed, appreciated or understood by the general public on either side of the border. I wrote a detailed piece on this in the March edition of Jane’s Intelligence Review [snip]. Although Hizbullah will probably push it to the limit to save the Resistance, I don’t think it will go so far that it seriously jeopardizes its standing in Lebanon. There is an earnest debate within the party about where to go from here, a repeat of the intense debate in autumn 1999 when a looming resumption of Israeli-Syrian peace talks and the possibility of a peace deal threatened the future of the Resistance.
4. Hizbullah’s initial negotiating stance notwithstanding, there is [ample] scope for compromise, acknowledged by some Hizbullah officials in private. One possible option is to fold the Islamic Resistance into the Lebanese Army, possibly as a separate southern border protection force. By no means easy and at the moment opposed by Hizbullah on the somewhat disengenuous grounds that the Lebanese army would be subject to direct retaliation by the Israelis for Islamic Resistance ops in the Shebaa Farms and that the Resistance’ guerrilla nature and Islamic ideology do not sit comfortably within the framework of a conventional army. One Hizbullah official told me the other day that valued as the Resistance is, there are non-violent means of resisting Israel and the military wing is not the be all and end all of Hizbullah. [Emphasis by HC there.] Another official told me that if non-Shiite Lebanese are concerned about the notion of an autonomous Shiite military force operating in Lebanon, then the Resistance could be opened up to all Lebanese confessions, apparently similar to the multi-faith Lebanese Resistance Brigades which Hizbullah set up in the late 1990s. Clearly, that will not appease Hizbullah’s critics in Lebanon, but it does show that the party is thinking laterally. Hizbullah is deeply suspicious about the Lebanese trait of looking for outside assistance. They regard Resolution 1559 as a US-Israeli plot to defang Israel’s most resolute opponent and in that context see no reason why they should comply. The Lebanese opposition for the most part appears willing to strike a deal with Hizbullah rather than confront the party over the Resistance. For the sake of Lebanon, which is passing through a sensitive period, the issue has to be handled with nuance, tact and compromise, regardless of what one thinks of Hizbullah and the Islamic Resistance. One would hope that the Bush administration will cease making pronouncements about Hizbullah – favourable or otherwise – and let the Lebanese resolve this issue.
A few extra points…
One element that is overlooked in the debate, particularly among Lebanese not from the south, is the fears of southern Shiites about future Israeli aggressions. The southerners have lived with violence for almost 40 years and many see the Islamic Resistance, rightly or wrongly, as their only guarantee of protection.
Linked to the above, Hizbullah fears that dismantling the Islamic Resistance will leave the leadership and its cadres vulnerable to Israeli assassination attempts or possible extradition demands by the US. What guarantees, they ask, can a future Lebanese government offer for their safety if it no longer possesses the Islamic Resistance as a deterrent?
Nasrallah lost some brownie points with many Lebanese for his defiantly public show of support for Syria at the Riad al-Solh rally on March 8. One should bear in mind, however, that Hizbullah kept a very low non-committal profile for the first 2-3 weeks after Rafik Hariri’s assassination. The Riad al-Solh rally came after the Syrians placed a great deal of pressure on Nasrallah to start demonstrating some loyalty to Damascus. My understanding is that Nasrallah was deeply embarrassed by the rally. He is no fool and understood the consequences of what he was doing. But at the time, when the fate of Syrian hegemony over Lebanon could have swung either way, he felt he had no choice but to comply.
On [the] point [raised by someone else] about the inadvisability of dismissing militiamen from their jobs, one should bear in mind that we are not talking about a vast number of people. There have been several reports cropping up in the international media recently citing the Islamic Resistance’ strength at between 20,000-25,000. Where that figure came from I don’t know, but the actual number is in the hundreds. These are well-trained veteran fighters who patrol stretches of the border, man observation posts and stake out the Shebaa Farms area. Hizbullah is not concerned about keeping the Resistance intact for the sake of employing their guys. They admit that if the Resistance was to disband (and not be wrapped into the Lebanese Army), the fighters would find alternative employment within the party framework.
Re. the 1989 Taif Accord’s clause on dismantling militias. Hizbullah originally opposed Taif for that very reason. But a Syrian-Iranian deal allowed the “national resistance” (ie Hizbullah) to retain its weapons to battle the Israeli occupation in the south. Hizbullah says today that it is a “resistance” force, not a “militia” as referred to by Taif, thus is exempt from Taif’s provisions.
Nicholas Blanford
Beirut

Well, to me that looks like a really nuanced and fairly closely informed assessment. I figured that Nick’s bottom-line judgment on “what Hizbullah plans to do about its military wing” shifted a little somewhere between his points 3 and 4. That’s no bad judgment on him. In fact, it shows he’s capable of hearing and recording evidence that seems to point both ways on this.
In the end, as in any case where the evidence seems contradictory, it seems to me that the best thing to do is for outsiders concerned about the situation but also concerned about the wellbeing of all the people of south Lebanon, as well as all their neighbors to probe the thinking of the party leadership even more. Through engagement in a friendly and open-ended dialogue.
Which is what I was urging at the end of my Boston Review piece. Let’s just hope that this happens– and sooner, rather than later.