Party of God

Hezbollah must have been startled by the outburst of anti-Syrian sentiment in Beirut over the last three weeks. The collapse of the status quo is unnerving. I have problems with changes to the little routines of life, getting querulous in my old age. What is happening in Lebanon is the equivalent announcement by the Arlington County Police that they are withdrawing from the neighborhood around Big Pink.

You know the Hezballah. They have been around since Lebanon began its skid into chaos, around the time of great change everywhere. Vietnam and Selma, Alabama, were in the news columns of the day.

Odd to think that it was forty years ago today that Alabama state troopers and volunteer officers of the Dallas County Sheriff’s Office attacked demonstrators with tear gas, nightsticks and whips in Selma

Selma is peaceful today, and Lebanon is aquiver with the possibility of change after so much misery.

Hezballah is one of the architects of the long skid, and are famous for shooting or blowing up their many enemies. They started in Lebanon, in the civil war days, but they are here in America, too. They are engaged in smuggling cigarettes from North Carolina to Michigan, among other places. Their name means ”The Party of God.”

They have a long history with America, the ”main enemy,” with the regional power of Israel being the local manifestation of evil.

They are Shia, by confession, and were supported by Saddam Hussein, when he was in a position to do that, and now largely by Iran.

Hezbollah is lead by an astute military-politico named Sheik Hassan Nasrallah. He has read the cards as he sees them and has called for rallies in Beirut to counter the protests calling for the Syrians to leave.  Specifically, he wants the Syrian troops to leave ”with honor,” and he opposes UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which calls for ” the strict respect of Lebanon’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, unity, and political independence under the sole and exclusive authority of the Government of Lebanon throughout the country.”

In response to the pressure, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria announced an eventual pullout from Lebanon on Sunday. It will be conducted in two parts, the first being to the Beka’s where the terror camps were located, and then eventually to security areas on the border. It is not dissimilar to the model used by the Israelis after their invasion.

Hassan Nasrallah is understandably concerned, and he is a force to be reckoned with. He has 25,000 men under arms. With 15,000 Syrians moving up the narrow passes to the Beka’a Valley his people are going to be exposed, and he does not want to disarm. The opponents of Syrian occupation have to move carefully and placate Hezballah, sooth them with kind words and concessions.

Nasrallah is a charismatic character. In a 2003 speech before 150,000 people at his stronghold in southern Beirut, he said the U.S. will be made to suffer greatly as a result of its presence in Iraq. He was quoted by the LA Times as saying “In the past, when the Marines were in Beirut, we screamed, ”Death to America!” Today, when the region is being filled with hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, ”Death to America!” was, is and will stay our slogan.”

I don’t think he was kidding, but who knows. That was two years ago. Hezballah is what makes the situation in Lebanon different than the one in Ukraine. In that show-down, the forces of the State blinked at the Orange power in the street, and officials of the intelligence ministries actively conspired with the opposition. In Lebanon, Hezballah is a force unto itself, a total package of social and military services.

The Islamic Resistance, or Al Moqawama al Islamia is the armed component of Hezballah. It has a presence on at least three continents, and recent reporting indicates ther are as many as twelve cells in the US alone.

The way it works in practice is much like the Irish Republican Army, which has an overt political component- Shin Fein- which is ostensibly law-abiding and acts to cover the activities of the violent Republican formations.

Hezballah has a similar model, and it is not surprising, since the Republicans trained with the Resistance in camps in the Beka’a Valley.

The political wing of Hezballah operates a number of community services, including hospitals, orphanages, Islamic schools, supermarkets and gas stations. They have radio and television outlets to convey the Party message.

Part of the message is the implacable resistance to the foreign presence in Lebanon. The bombing of the barracks of the US Marines and French headquarters in 1983 killed 300 soldiers of the Multinational Force. Hezballah is proud that the murders caused the US to lose its nerve and pull out. It is proud of the subsequent murder of seventy-five Israeli soldiers at Tyre in 1975, which it claims forced the IDF to pull back to the security zone north of the Israeli border.

Hexballah success in Lebanon may have contributed to the successful Shia revolution against the Shah in Iran, and there are links through the faith to the Islamic revival that began near the Tomb of Ali in an-Najif in Iraq.

So, round it goes and round. There are links across the swath of majority Shia areas in the Middle East, and the outbreak of democracy may not presage what it has elsewhere. A lot of it will depend on what Hezballah, and Hassan Nasrallah think and do over the next few weeks.

I wonder what that might be?

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

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