As one UN functionary put it: ‘The average Hizbollah volunteer will drink tea on his verandah and, given the word, will go down to his basement, assemble a tube and base-plate and then lob off a clutch of mortar bombs or rockets at a given target. He’ll then strip his weapon, return it to its hiding place and go back to his tea. That’s how the war is waged in these parts.’

The Mullahs with their long frocks, beards and Khomeini turbans – white or black – might seem to be a visible manifestation of Muslim regression to the Middle Ages. Their long term programme is not.

Hizbollah’s stated aim – as is Iran’s, its mentor and its main source of succour – is to wipe the State of Israel off the map. This is not idle talk. It is a threat that is daily uttered by Al Manaar, the official Hizbollah broadcasting station with its headquarters in Beirut as well as by the Iranian Majlis or Parliament.

In a comparatively short time, Hizbollah has become a government within a government with powers of arrest, its own secret police and death squads. Apart from its military wing, there is a well-established and entrenched political structure within the movement that has accumulated a number of seats in the Beirut Parliament, all legally and properly contested within the democratic process. However, when things start to go wrong, Hizbollah tends to resort to threats or intimidation and, more often than not, violence, which some observers fear might ultimately lead to another civil war.

In the old days Hizbollah cadres might only have hinted at action: these days they use force to implement their demands. If warnings are not heeded, the Party of God does what it believes it needs to and if violence is involved, then so be it. During 2007, for instance, nobody could decide on a new President who, according to the constitution had to be a Christian. Hizbollah’s Deputy Secretary General, Sheikh Naim Qasim, gave the country’s politicians an ultimatum. His words were strident and belligerent, very much in line with the ‘new face’ of the Party of God.

‘After the other side resorts to manipulating the presidency and chooses a person who is not suitable for [that post] we will find ourselves forced to fill the vacuum to prevent the emergence of a constitutional vacuum’, said the Sheikh. In other words, the perception in the streets of Beirut suggested that the next President of Lebanon would be from Hizbollah. And if not the next one, then certainly the one thereafter…

He went on to say that Hizbollah had been ‘patient for a very long time about the repeated violations that the government’s group perpetrated’. He suggested that Hizbollah should step in and resolve the matter. In the view of the majority, that was war talk. Coupled as it was to a number of assassinations of prominent Lebanese politicians in recent years, these developments were – and continue to be – profoundly unsettling.

Robert Fisk captured the gist of it in a brilliant article titled ‘Dinner in Beirut, and a Lesson in Courage’ published in Britain’s Independent on 29 September 2007. He disclosed that the fear of assassination among Lebanese politicians had become so severe that 46 of the country’s MPs were hiding in the Phoenicia Hotel, ‘three to a suite…’

Apart from Hizbollah’s political infrastructure, the movement has a variety of military and paramilitary organizations on which to call. This is a kind of ‘Second Lebanese Defence Force-in-Waiting’, as one diplomat uniquely referred to it. Essentially Shi’ite, all these groups are regarded by Lebanese opposition groups as a surrogate force with a first loyalty to Iran. They maintain that the Hizbollah commander-in-chief, Nasrallah, is not averse to taking his instructions from either Tehran or Damascus and it says much that Hizbollah has always worked closely with the leaders of both countries. In fact, as has been demonstrated often enough, Hizbollah as a Shi’ite revolutionary group is an Iranian creation.

More pertinently, there are direct links between Hizbollah and Iran’s Islamic Republican Guard Corps (IRGC). This is the same paramilitary group that is responsible for all Iran’s clandestine external operations, as well as the country’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programmes. Significantly perhaps, it was the Guards Corps that was originally responsible for physically creating the Party of God.

Paula A. deSutter, George W. Bush’s former Assistant Secretary for Verification and Compliance, made a study of the matter while still at Washington’s National Defense University and it is worth reading. She might just as easily have been talking about Hizbollah when she wrote that ‘The Iranian government is not easy to understand. There is a gap between its rhetoric and its actions, between its sense of grievance and inflammatory behaviour and between its ideological and its national interests. Nor are its actions consistent.’ ²