Beware of Small States

Who, in fact, did win? There was no question that, in terms of anticipated outcomes, the laurels of the 2006 war went to Hizbullah.¹ Still, this unusual, ‘asymmetrical’ conflict which, in any immediate, physical sense, changed very little on the ground, lent itself to opposing claims about what its outcome really meant. On 22 September, in his first post-war public appearance, Nasrallah staked his. The victory they were celebrating, he told the immense, euphoric throng, had been ‘great, strategic, historic and divine’ - so much so, indeed, that it was simply ‘too great to be comprehended by us’. However, about one thing he was sure, and this was that it had transformed Lebanon from a ‘small’ state of the Middle East into a ‘great’ one.² It was an audacious proposition, yet not a wildly extravagant one. Lebanon certainly remained, in Bakunin’s sense, the battleground of greater states than itself. Indeed, amid very serious fears that it might now disintegrate altogether, it was if anything more that battlefield than ever, more than ever a potential flashpoint in the course of the ‘Great Arab Unravelling’,³ the decline and possible break-up of the whole existing Middle Eastern order. Yet, in spite of that, though in a very real sense because of it as well, it had become more, much more, than just the hapless object of others’ actions; it was an agent, a prime mover, in its own right too. Lebanon, or perhaps one should say a very important segment of it, was now exerting at least as powerful an influence on the region as the region had always exerted on it. In their ‘legendary resistance’, proclaimed Nasrallah, ‘the people of Lebanon’ were offering a ‘model’ and a ‘strong proof that it is not only Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem which Arab armies and peoples are capable of liberating, but - with one small decision and a bit of determination - [the whole of] Palestine too, from the river to the sea’.⁴

What Hizbullah had wrought did indeed have a great resonance around the Arab and Muslim worlds. Not for nothing had it been quickly baptized the Sixth Arab-Israeli War, the most important, many said, since the first, which had produced al-Nakba — the Calamity - and whose consequences the whole Arab ‘nation’ had at the time pledged itself to reverse. The effect, at this stage, was essentially psychological. But that did not prevent Arab commentators from speaking of ‘earth-shaking regional consequences‘, of a ‘contagion’ that would inexorably spread, of ‘a model of dignity, steadfastness and defiance’ that would ‘revive a frustrated Arab spirit burdened with the accumulations of pain and defeat‘, ‘renew noble hopes and aspirations’ that had been ‘buried beneath the ruins of submission, injustice, repression, and humiliation’.⁵

Ever since Israel came into being, it had put its trust in the doctrine of the Iron Wall, the notion that force - and yet more force - was the only way to preserve and strengthen itself against Palestinians and Arabs who viscerally rejected its presence in their midst. It certainly had not won their acceptance by such means; what it had done was so to cow and intimidate them that they - or rather their regimes - no longer even considered the use, or threat, of force in response, and generally speaking comported themselves with a demeaning complaisance, not to say servility, towards both it and, above all, the American superpower which stood behind it. But here, at last, had come these ‘combatants of Islam’ to change all that. The Arab media had no doubt about their achievement: they had demonstrated, for the first time, that force could be met with successful counter-force. They had ‘smashed the myth of Israel’s invincibility‘, ‘broken the barrier of fear‘, imparted great impetus to the rising popular demand for ‘resistance’ in place of acquiescence, appeasement and surrender. The plain fact was that Israel, even if not the ‘spider’s web’ Nasrallah always said it was, could be defeated. That was his electrifying message. The Arabs had the resources: all they needed was the will and skills to use them.

That they were not being used was a fault Nasrallah laid at the door of the Arab ‘kings and presidents’. Whenever, he lamented, they found themselves ‘torn between two choices - between Jerusalem, their people and the dignity of their homeland on the one hand and their thrones on the other - they always chose their thrones’.⁶ Thus was Hizbullah’s struggle with Israel inextricably bound up with another one, between itself - and other non-state actors like it - and the whole official Arab order. Whatever their virtues or vices, these non-state actors, a prime manifestation of the Great Unravelling, had broadly speaking arisen in those places where the official order was most eroded, or most glaringly deficient in its ability to promote and defend the basic interests and expectations of its people - in Lebanon with Hizbullah, in Palestine with Hamas, in Iraq with that maelstrom of ethnic and sectarian militias that foreign invasion had unleashed. Hizbullah was much the most advanced of them, and, at the hub of the world’s most implacable conflict, the most significant, most destiny-shaping, for the whole region. The more successfully it confronted Israel, the greater the threat it presented to the Arab regimes, to the so-called ‘Arab system’ in which they were collectively represented, and to the strategy which that system had adopted for dealing with the historic Arab foe.

It was an accident, no doubt, but a richly symbolic one that, even as the non-state actor was confounding Israel on the battlefield, the ‘system’ was all but formally confessing to its own bankruptcy. ‘Peace with Israel’ - via the American-sponsored ‘peace process’ - had for decades been its strategic choice, a few mavericks excepted. But at a meeting of the Arab League a few days into the war, its secretary-general, Amr Moussa, formally pronounced the whole process ‘dead’: Arab governments, he said, could do no more. This was such a shocking admission of failure that Arab journalists, in an extraordinary violation of decorum, did not merely report on it, they barracked it. Hizbullah’s achievement was therefore a double one, a military one against the Israelis, a moral, political and psychological one against virtually all the Arab regimes, but especially against the ‘moderates‘, led by Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. These it were who dominated the ‘system’, yet despite the abject failure of the ‘peace option’ and their possession of large conventional armies of their own, they persisted in rejecting the military alternative, and when Hizbullah adopted it in their stead, they desperately sought to thwart it, virtually siding with the enemy to do so. With the success of his new, Islamist way of war, Nasrallah became more than just a role model, he became - for one commentator - nothing less than a ‘de facto caliph, a spiritual and political leader of the Arabs and Muslims’.⁷

In the event, he did not, as some even thought possible at the time, ‘light the prairie fire’ of wider Arab revolution and bring the whole, despised and decadent order down - but his ‘victory’ clearly changed the balance of power within it. It strengthened the Islamo-nationalist camp at the expense of the ‘moderate’ one. Of its non-state members, Hizbullah’s Palestinian counterpart, Hamas, was a notable beneficiary. So was Syria, its only state member. It is true that when government-encouraged demonstrators paraded through Damascus shouting ‘Oh Nasrallah, hit Tel Aviv too‘, many of their compatriots cannot but have wondered why the ruling Baathists, in charge of their self-styled ‘citadel of Arabism‘, had failed yet again to lift a finger on sister-Lebanon’s behalf, perhaps by striking into the occupied Golan. Indeed, no less a personage than the Grand Mufti himself vainly suggested such a course. But in a fiery speech he safely made after the ceasefire, President Asad had no compunction about virtually appropriating Hizbullah’s victory as Syria’s own. For this had, he said, vindicated his conviction that ‘resistance and liberation go hand in hand‘, and ‘unmasked’ those other Arab leaders who, mere ‘half-men’ that they were, had only brought defeat and humiliation to their peoples. ‘Resistance’ - not ‘subjugation’ to America - would now be ‘the core of “the new Middle East”’. Syria would ‘liberate the Golan with [its] own hands, will and determination’. And it would do so, apparently, not merely by following the non-state actor’s example, but even adopting some of its Islamist, ‘asymmetrical’ way of war as well.

For the US and Israel, the mullahs were the great and growing enemy of all their purposes in the Middle East, and their defeat or downfall - and termination of their nuclear programme - was to have been the ultimate objective of a campaign in which the violent suppression of Hizbullah would have been only the start. But instead, they had only strengthened them. As the mullahs saw it, the US had posed a grave, even existential, military threat to themselves with its invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. But now, with their counter-offensive in Lebanon, they were turning the tables on it, demonstrating their ability, by proxy, to retaliate against its Israeli partner and protégé⁸ — and that was only an earnest of what they could do with all the other assets, no less formidable than Hizbullah itself, which they disposed of across the region, should any situation require it. No wonder that, amid the rejoicing, President Ahmadinejad, Holocaust-doubter and champion of a nuclear Iran, was moved to proclaim that if, as a result of the Sixth Arab-Israeli War, there was going to be a ‘new Middle East’, it would not be Condoleezza Rice’s; it would be that of ‘the Iranian people’, and ‘a Middle East without America and the usurper Zionist regime’.

To be sure, the balance sheet was not wholly in Hizbullah’s favour. The Israelis did have one achievement to their credit. This was the deployment of the much expanded, robuster, European-led, 13,300-man UNIFIL, as well as 15,000 soldiers of the Lebanese army, throughout the territory between the Litani river and the southern border, where Hizbullah had enjoyed a virtually unimpeded presence before the war. And this did cause it a problem. It was very like the one which it had faced after its first great triumph of arms, the enforced Israeli withdrawal of 2000, but it was more serious. After 2000, it will be recalled, Hizbullah had been hard put to it, having successfully liberated virtually the whole of Lebanese territory, to find a means of justifying and perpetuating its basic raison d‘être, its jihad and ‘Islamic resistance’ against the Zionist enemy. It had managed it, however, by going into its ‘gradualist-pragmatic’ mode of occasional ‘reminder’ operations-until the last of them, going too far, provoked the full-scale war it never wanted. But the loss of this southern sanctuary, and the network of ‘nature reserves’ and fortified positions it had patiently built up there, constituted a serious weakening of its whole modus operandi. It might not have completely eliminated its ability to renew such cross-border attacks, but it certainly rendered them more difficult. And after the war they completely ceased.

Moreover, the reasons for this were not merely technical and military, more importantly, they were political too: Hizbullah simply could not afford the risk of provoking more hostilities in any foreseeable future. Less than ever would its own Shiite constituency, let alone the Lebanese people at large, now stand for that. And the clear fact was that, as a result of the war, Lebanon’s internal politics had become a more critical arena for Hizbullah’s future than before. For ironically, the glory which it had garnered through the length and breadth of the Arab and Muslim worlds was never going to be matched in the place - its very own, diminutive, Lebanese backyard - where it needed it most. For there, political and sectarian animosities always ensured that what might become an object of passionate adulation for some was all too apt to become the object of fear and loathing for others. The great national schism, with Hizbullah’s arms at its heart, not merely manifested itself again, it did so more dangerously than before. The government and its supporters accused Hizbullah of having brought catastrophe on the country. Hizbullah retorted that, on the contrary, it alone had done what any government, any self-respecting state, should have done itself - defend the nation against its enemies - and that its accusers were mere ‘traitors’ and ‘backstabbers’ in time of war. In such a climate, not surprisingly, sectarian tensions took a sharp turn for the worse, mainly between Shiites and Sunnis. And Hizbullah’s feat of arms, a source of widespread, trans-sectarian pride during the war, became a source of great apprehension after it. If it could so humble the mightiest army in the Middle East, what might it do against its fellow Lebanese if, as many now feared, the internal conflict degenerated into violence, or even, heaven forbid, into renewed civil war?

Gains of a sort, actual or potential, these doubtless were, but they did very little to sustain the ‘victory’ claims of Israeli leaders. Indeed, hardly had the guns fallen silent than ‘the war between the Jews’ began, the ‘all-out war’ of recrimination about all that had gone wrong in the real one.¹⁰ Within hours of their exit from Lebanon, reservists - outraged at the gap between their own experience there and the version of it propagated by the high command - took the lead with public protests against the military and political leadership, and with a petition demanding - and soon getting - a commission of inquiry into the whole conduct of the war. Within a few months Chief of Staff Halutz and key commanders had resigned in disgust or disgrace; the reputation of the Israeli army, most sacrosanct of institutions, fell to an unprecedented low. Prime Minister Olmert clung mulishly to office in spite of an approval rating which, at a mere 2 per cent, fell far below even that of his war-making accomplice, President Bush. Eventually the Winograd commission delivered its damning verdict on ‘the worst kind of mistakes’ the political and military leadership had made in ‘initiating’ the war, and the ‘failure of the ground forces - and thus the whole Israeli Defence Forces - to carry out the missions assigned to them’.

Soldiers, strategists and politicians were saying things about the future of the Jewish state which had much in common, albeit from a diametrically opposing standpoint, with what their nemesis, Nasrallah himself, was saying. Israel had gone to war for one supreme goal: less to smash Hizbullah as such than to re-establish its ‘deterrent power’ throughout the region. But it had only succeeded in further undermining it. And this, said one, was not ‘a mere military defeat’; it was a ‘strategic failure ... eroding our national security’s most important asset - the belligerent image of this country led by a vast, strong and advanced army capable of dealing our enemies a decisive blow if they even try so much as to bother us’.¹¹

It would not be the first time that Israel had sought to redress the adverse consequences of one war with the waging of another, but this time the generals all but leapt to proclaim the necessity and inevitability of the ‘second round’, and even to predict when it would happen. One of them was Moshe Kaplinsky, the former Deputy Chief of Staff who had told his reservist son that Israel had actually won the last war. He now assured a Washington think tank that, by sending in its ground forces from the very outset, it really would win the next one.¹²

Under such a state, he went on, the problem of Hizbullah’s arms would ‘not even require a negotiating table’ for its resolution. It would wither away of its own accord:

[But] under this state, this authority, this regime ... any talk of surrendering the resistance weapons means keeping Lebanon exposed to an Israel that can bomb, kill and kidnap as it wants, and plunder our land and waters ... We don’t want to keep the weapons forever. They will never be used inside Lebanon. They are not Shiite weapons, but weapons for all the Lebanese.¹⁴

For many in the government, and the non-Shiite communities from which it drew its main support, Nasrallah’s ‘just state’ would have been the end of Lebanon - model of inter-communal co-existence, meeting place of East and West, bastion of a freedom, democracy and tolerance unique to the Arab world - as they deemed it, ideally, to be. It would have ushered in a totalitarian, theocratic regime, and the dominion of one ideology, one sect, over all the others. It would have institutionalized the ascendancy of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Lebanon’s internal affairs, and it would have done this not only at the expense of the West, but of all those Arab states with which Iran, and its Syrian ally, did not agree. It would, so to speak, have rendered de jure what Lebanon already was de facto: the only place where the Arabs could fight the good fight against the historic Zionist foe - fight it, that is to say, to the last Lebanese. And it was a kind of blackmail. ‘The essence of his speech‘, said Marwan Hamade, the minister of telecommunications, ‘was: “Give me the state, and [to it] I shall surrender my weapons.”’¹⁵

Whether Nasrallah, who had always said that turning multi-confessional Lebanon into an ‘Islamic state’ was impossible, really entertained such maximalist ambitions was very much open to question. Of one thing, however, there could be no doubt: he was not prepared to live with the actively hostile state which, in the hands of Prime Minister Fuad Siniora’s government, he considered it to be. ‘What has happened since the end of the war‘, Nasrallah said, ‘is an extension of Israel’s war against Lebanon. And just as we fought in July and August, so we will fight today, but with other weapons and other rules.‘¹⁶ And by that he meant that Hizbullah would now seek a real share in the running of the country. In his opinion, in fact, Hizbullah and the ‘8 March’ opposition of which it was the backbone should already have been doing that in any case, because it was they, not the current government, who represented the true majority of the people. Meanwhile, however, he would be satisfied with the formation of a national unity government in which Hizbullah was strongly enough represented, either directly or via its allies, to enjoy ‘veto power’ over any decisions he did not like, especially those threatening Hizbullah’s weapons, its right to ‘resistance’, and its determination to thwart any kind of American or Israeli tutelage over Lebanon.

So it was that Hizbullah launched a bold and escalating campaign to secure such a government. It began with the resignation of six ministers, five of them Shiites. This supposedly rendered the Siniora government ‘illegitimate’, on the grounds that, lacking any representation for one of the country’s major sects, it violated the principle of inter-communal consensus. But the government did not see it that way. Nasrallah therefore resorted to direct action in the streets. First he ordered an indefinite sit-in in the heart of Beirut; his followers camped out day and night beneath the Grand Serail, the seat of government, from where the besieged prime minister denounced this action as tantamount to an attempted coup d‘etut. Then, in January 2007, with the government still standing firm, he ordered a one-day general strike. But this degenerated into ugly sectarian clashes, mainly between Shiites and Sunnis, leaving seven dead and 250 injured. Fearful that matters could get out of hand in a way that would be as ruinous for Hizbullah as everyone else, he took the exceptional step of issuing a fatwa urging the withdrawal from the streets of all Shiites - not just his party members - who, in sectarian solidarity, had spontaneously joined the fray. In the opposing camp, Saad Hariri and the Future Movement, the mainstream Sunni organization he had inherited from his father, appeared to have no more scruples than Nasrallah about exploiting sectarian solidarity for political ends, even cultivating support among the most extreme of anti-Shiite fundamentalist groups, especially in the northern city of Tripoli and the Beqa’a Valley.

Hizbullah’s campaign coincided - though many did not believe it was a coincidence at all - with renewed assassinations of anti-Syrian personalities, including two MPs and a minister. These were widely presumed to be the handiwork of a Syria resolved to destroy a government that was no less resolved to get it tried, by international tribunal, for the murder of Rafiq Hariri. Hizbullah’s open hostility to such a course, seen as blind adherence to Damascus, further alienated a great many Lebanese, especially Sunnis, who might have applauded it during the war. The purpose of the assassinations was apparently not merely to terrorize, but to deprive the government of the ministerial quorum it constitutionally required to stay in office, or of the majority in parliament it required to elect a president of its choice. For the term of the widely despised Emile Lahoud was now coming to an end, and who was to succeed him was becoming the fiercely contested question on which Lebanon’s destiny increasingly seemed to hinge. Institutional collapse; the emergence of two governments; chaos, partition, a new civil war; a failed state, an Iraq or Somalia, in the making. These were the kind of worst-case scenarios now conjured up by people, pundits and politicians alike should parliament elect a divisive president, or, more likely, fail to elect one at all.

Petty and parochial in its strictly Lebanese dimension, the presidential crisis inevitably, like anything else in the ‘small state’ of the Middle East, had its regional and international dimension too. Foreign powers were engaged in such a multitude of ‘mediations, initiatives, interventions and interferences‘, said Issa Ghorayeb of Beirut’s L’Orient Le Jour, that it seemed to have become their veritable cause célèbre.¹⁷ Indeed, those flimsy ribbons of barbed wire that separated the Grand Serail from the protesters permanently encamped outside it were actually the new front-line in the continuing battle of wills between the Islamo-nationalist camp on the one hand, America and the Arab ‘moderates’ on the other. Iran and Syria’s determination to secure a president to their liking was only matched, if not outdone, by the Americans’ to secure one to theirs. At one point, President Bush, more royalist than the king, was publicly urging his ‘allies’ in the ‘14 March’ coalition to use what they deemed to be their constitutional right to elect a president of their choice by a simple majority vote. But that would have been a step too far for the Siniora government, all too well aware that, for the ‘8 March’ opposition which insisted that only a two-thirds majority vote was constitutionally valid, it would have amounted to a ‘declaration of war’. At another critical moment, Bush dispatched two warships to Lebanese coastal waters in a show of strength at which, again taking fright, Siniora himself had to protest.

Whatever the pressures their respective backers exerted on them, neither side wanted to push matters to another civil war, and, eventually, they got so far as to agree on the need for a neutral candidate, in the person of army commander General Michel Suleiman. But still the loyalist camp, deeming itself to have already made the main concessions, simply would not bend to the further conditions on which the opposition also insisted, and in particular a guarantee of their veto power in a ‘national unity government’ to come. Election day, 24 November 2007, came and went without a new president. Even then, however, the final break was averted: the ‘14 March’ government ceded what it considered to be its right to elect a candidate by simple majority, and in return, as the outgoing Lahoud stepped down, the opposition did not challenge the automatic transfer of his powers to the Siniora cabinet, illegitimate though it considered it to be. But, against an ominous background of more inter-communal violence, car-bombs and assassinations, the deadlock persisted. A full seventeen times the speaker of parliament, Nabih Berri, set a new date for the crucial election, a full seventeen times he postponed it - until finally, in April 2008, he refused to set another. The stage was set for a Hizbullah coup.

But Hizbullah’s arming had less to do with the prospect of fitna — the internecine feuding of the Lebanese - than with the higher cause of anti-Zionist jihad. It was less small arms that it was after - though it was far from uninterested in those too - than the heavy stuff, missiles especially, with which it had humbled Israel in the 33-day war.¹⁹ This could only come from Syria or Iran, smuggled across the rugged, mountainous march lands that separate Lebanon from its only Arab neighbour. But that was precisely what Security Council Resolution 1701 was supposed to put an end to, with its call on ‘all states’ to supply no ‘arms and related materiel’ to any other ‘entity or individual’ than the Lebanese government.

Although President Asad had officially welcomed 1701, personally assuring UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan that he would deploy additional troops to police the notoriously porous frontier, it quickly proved that he actually had no more intention of stopping the supply of weaponry than Hizbullah had of forgoing it. And no one could do anything about that either, as Syria issued dire warnings about ‘the enmity’ it would arouse between itself and Lebanon should anyone so much as try.²⁰ Theoretically, the enlarged, post-war UNIFIL could or should have done so. But, in practice, it had no such desire; no desire to expand its mandate - territorially - beyond the southern buffer zone where, thanks mainly to Hizbullah’s consent, it was quite comfortably installed, or - functionally - to engage in coercive military action against which its contributing nations, alarmed by the inevitable casualties, would have soon rebelled.

Besides — decreed 1701 — UNIFIL could only have undertaken this task ‘at the request’ of a Lebanese government to which the international powers-that-be had left the ultimate responsibility for securing its frontiers just as they had the disarming of Hizbullah. But the government was never actually going to make such a request; for that would automatically have drawn it into a collision with both Hizbullah and Syria which, politically, it could not have withstood. It did make a show of sealing its border - at one time it had 8,000 troops stationed along it - and a couple of times, probably more by accident than design, it did intercept weapons destined for Hizbullah. But when it did so, Hizbullah, far from disowning them, unashamedly laid claim to them. It deemed it had the right to do so - and, in a sense, it actually did. For the fact of the matter was that the schizoid Lebanese state had contracted two obligations, one - international - to 1701, and the other - domestic - to the ‘resistance’ as ‘the natural, honest expression of the Lebanese people’s national right to liberate their land’. Inevitably, the domestic obligation won hands down, so much so that the regular ‘progress’ reports which the UN Secretary-General commissioned from his special envoys to the region became little more than international testimonials to the failure of 1701 — and the fiasco to which the Israeli-American ‘victory’ was being steadily reduced.

As the months passed precise Israeli estimates - broadly corroborated by the UN and Nasrallah himself - of the number of missiles in Hizbullah’s possession steadily rose, from 20,000 to 30,000, and finally, in early 2008, to 42,000, making it the tenth largest ‘missile power’ in the world. They included a much higher proportion of the longer-range ones, like the Iranian-built Zelzal-2 which it had apparently refrained from using in the war, as well as three times its former stock of C-802s, those Chinese-made shore-to-ship rockets, one of which, it will be recalled, had nearly sunk the Israeli flagship Hanit. They could reach almost anywhere in Israel, from Tel Aviv to the Dimona nuclear plant in the far south.²¹ Perhaps the Israelis’ greatest worry was that the mysterious ‘big surprise’ which Nasrallah kept promising them would turn out to be precisely what they feared it was: the latest and most sophisticated of Russian anti-aircraft systems. For nearly thirty years, Israeli fighter-bombers had had Lebanese air space entirely to themselves; and with reconnaissance flights they were still violating it virtually every day. Such a system in Hizbullah’s hands, the Israelis said, could fundamentally alter the aerial balance of power over Lebanon and western Syria.²² All in all, the Jerusalem Post estimated, Hizbullah was now four times stronger than it was before the 33-day war.²³

This did not mean that it retained no military capability in the buffer zone, only that it had to be a relatively modest and discreet one. After all, when things were quiet, most of its fighters in the region were just civilian residents of it like anyone else. There was an informal, but well-observed, understanding between them and the Lebanese army, and by extension with UNIFIL, that neither of these two would take any action against what, without actively looking for it, they could not actually ‘see’. And it appears that, on this congenial basis, Hizbullah was able to do quite a lot - by way of infiltrating, stockpiling, and readying for immediate use large numbers of those short-range Katyushas, as well as anti-tank weapons, which had exacted such a toll in the war.²⁴

But it did mean that Hizbullah’s second, albeit main line of defence now lay further to the rear, north of the Litani, around the town of Nabatiyah and up into the lower Beqa‘a Valley. There Hizbullah more or less replicated what it had formerly done right up to the Israeli border. It assembled a vast military infrastructure, complete with ‘nature reserves’ and all manner of other installations designed, with the rugged terrain aiding, to give an invading Israeli army as hard a time as it could possibly imagine. To this end, as before, it declared large tracts of territory ‘off-limits’ to everyone, representatives of the Lebanese state included, built new access roads to them, bought up swathes of mainly non-Shiite land and property in the vicinity, and peopled them where possible with poor, resistance-friendly members of its own community; it also enrolled new recruits in very great numbers, thousands of whom went to Iran for training.²⁵

The decisions looked like the opening shot in an all-out campaign by the state to bring to heel the state-within-a-state and its militia, which had been relentlessly chipping away at its authority. For Nasrallah, it was tantamount to treason, a ‘declaration of war against the resistance on behalf of America and Israel’. The telephone network, an integral part of Hizbullah’s military infrastructure, had been of critical importance in the 33-day war. Having always vowed to ‘cut off the hands’ of anyone who sought to harm the resistance, Nasrallah was now, as it was said, going to ‘use his weapons to defend his weapons’. His men took to the streets under cover of a general strike, besieging and blocking access to the international airport.

Then, even as he warned, in a television address from his bunker somewhere in the Dahiya, that if the decisions were not reversed greater conflict would ensue, fighters of Hizbullah and its allies Amal and the Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, invaded the predominantly Sunni Muslim heart of West Beirut. With the army, which the government had been counting on to intervene, basically standing aside for fear that this last functioning national institution, a composite of all sects, would fall apart under the pressure of conflicting loyalties, Hizbullah routed the Future Movement’s ill-trained, inexperienced militia. Within a day, its men had surrendered or fled. The marauders also briefly seized government buildings, and sacked Future Movement premises and media outlets. The two main ‘14 March’ leaders, Hariri and Jumblat, were reduced to prisoners in their own homes. It was profoundly humiliating, especially for the Sunnis. But the fighting was not all one way; those doughty warriors, the Druzes, of whom a pro-Hizbullah faction went over to the loyalist mainstream, did inflict a very serious reverse on the Hizbullahis, at least eleven of whom were killed as columns of their heavily armed, mechanized infantry sought to carve a strategic pathway through the Druzes’ ancestral mountain homeland. In all at least eighty people died in nearly a week of fighting that dragged on even after Jumblat, said to have been main architect of those ill-fated decisions, formally admitted defeat.²⁸

Atrocities were committed on both sides. The demons of sectarianism stirred anew, most menacingly among the outraged, defeated Sunnis. Their community was already witnessing an upsurge of Islamist fundamentalists, extremists cast in the same Saudi Wahhabite mould from which al-Qaeda had sprung, and these, though generally supporters of the mainstream Sunni leadership, now deplored the ‘moderation’ and weakness it had shown; in the northern city of Tripoli, where they were strongest, one Khalid al-Daher, a former deputy, launched a ‘national Islamic Resistance’ to confront Hizbullah, that ‘Persian army in Lebanon’.²⁹ Uncontested victor though Hizbullah was in this miniature civil war, morally and politically it had done further damage, not just in Lebanon but the whole Arab world, to the glorious image it had earned itself in the 33-day war.

But whatever Hizbullah’s long-term profit-or-loss might be, in the short term there was no question about the shift in Lebanon’s internal balance of power which its coup had wrought. The loyalists’ political capitulation followed hard on the heels of its military one. The government unconditionally rescinded its decisions. Then the Arab League invited all the country’s political leaders to Doha, Qatar, for make-or-break talks on a general settlement. Except for a Nasrallah under constant threat of Israeli assassination, most attended. As they left, banners raised along the airport road reflected the Lebanese people’s disgust with the whole race of politicians: ‘Reach an agreement’, one read, ‘or don’t come back.’ After five days of negotiations, reach one they finally, all but miraculously, did. Basically, Hizbullah and the opposition had got just about everything they wanted: a consensual president; a national unity government in which, with eleven seats out of thirty, they would enjoy ‘veto power’ to block decisions, though not to press an agenda of their own; a new and - in their judgement - much fairer electoral law through which, in forthcoming general elections, they hoped to prove that they, not the government, represented the true majority of the people. The critical question of Hizbullah’s weapons - to be dealt with in a future ‘national dialogue’ under the auspices of the new president - was effectively relegated to the never-never.

Among the regional and international losers, the chief of them, the Bush Administration, sought to put a brave face on this defeat in the one arena where, with the Cedar Revolution and the expulsion of the Syrians, it had actually chalked up an achievement of sorts amid all its otherwise disastrous Middle Eastern misadventures. It continued to offer its ‘unwavering support’ for the Siniora government and the army even as Beirut was falling into Hizbullah’s lap. But an exasperated Siniora did not return the admiration which Bush bestowed on him, telling him that if he had really wanted to help Lebanon he should have reined in Israel, ended its occupation of the ‘Sheba‘a Farms’, and found a solution for the ‘Palestine problem’, which was the root cause of all his country’s woes.³⁰

Siniora was right. In the end, everything did come down to the ‘Palestine problem’, crux of the region’s politics, pan-Arab, pan-Islamic cause par excellence, abiding grievance against America and the West. Historian Albert Hourani had said it half a century ago.³² James Baker, George Bush père’s secretary of state, and a group of distinguished colleagues said it in a policy paper in late 2006: ‘all key issues in the Middle East are inextricably linked’, and none could be ‘addressed effectively in isolation from other major regional issues, interests and unresolved conflicts’.³³ Although they said this in connection with Iraq, and America’s deepening predicament there, what applied to so large, rich, and once so powerful and self-reliant an Arab country clearly applied even more forcefully to one, the ‘small state’ of Lebanon, that was so preternaturally prey to the influence of external forces. On nowhere else, other than Palestine itself, had the unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict impinged so deeply and disruptively.

But the Israelis, and the ‘friends of Israel’ in America, strenuously rejected this whole idea of intrinsic Middle Eastern ‘linkages.’, of the ‘Palestine problem’ as the key to all the others. On the contrary, they insisted, it was actually peripheral to them. All told‘, said Amir Taheri in Commentary, the influential neoconservative mouthpiece, ‘in the past six decades, this region has witnessed no fewer than 22 full-scale wars over territory and resources, not one of them having anything to do with Israel and the Palestinians.‘³⁴ Whether they actually believed this argument or not was beside the point. For the real source of their alarm lay elsewhere, in their belief — a correct one - that Baker’s ‘linkages’ were merely portents of the concessions Israel would be expected to make for the sake of an Arab-Israeli peace now held to be so important for the region and the world.

So the Israelis were, in effect, notifying any would-be international peace-makers that no concessions would be wrung from them which, in their opinion, ran counter to their own interests, be it on ideological or security grounds. If that meant no Middle East settlement, so be it. They would continue to secure their future in the same way - with their strong right arm - they always had. And, so far as Lebanon was concerned, that meant readying themselves for the ‘next war’ they deemed to be all but inevitable. This time they were going to win it, however cruel and costly that might be, and they spelled out two ways in which they would ensure that.

In 2006, they had made at least a theoretical distinction between Hizbullah and the rest of Lebanon; in principle, they only hit Lebanon - army, infrastructure, people - by mistake, or, to the extent that they did so on purpose, as part of their time-honoured, but ever-failing strategy of turning it against Hizbullah. This time they would go after both equally. And they would have all the more justification for doing so because Lebanon in all its component parts - not just its Shiites, but its Sunnis, Druzes and even its Maronites too - had made itself contemptible in their sight. As a postscript to the war which, by now, most Israelis recognized that they had lost, there was one last humiliation they had had to endure. They had had to hand over the five remaining Lebanese prisoners in their hands in exchange for the remains of sergeants Goldwasser and Regev, the two soldiers whose cross-border seizure had triggered the war in the first place. By Israeli accounts, the longest-serving and most important of them, Samir Quntar, was a terrorist of an exceptionally barbarous kind. When, soon after the Hizbullah coup, the deal was struck that enabled him and his comrades to return, free men, to their native land, it was not Hizbullah alone that staged the triumphal homecoming; the newly elected President Suleiman, the prime minister, speaker of parliament and entire cabinet, as well as several of the country’s most representative political leaders, Christian or Muslim, loyalist or opposition, turned out to greet and praise them. Whatever atrocity Quntar might have perpetrated - and it turned out that, in all probability, the standard Israeli version was actually wrong³⁵ — the Lebanese were collectively in no mood, after all they had endured at Israel’s hand, to pay it the heed which, in other circumstances, they might have. Symbolism was all; and the prisoners’ return was bound to have been a source of national pride for them, just as the return of their dead had been one of grief for Israel. Obviously, however, the Israelis couldn’t see it that way. ‘Woe betide the people’, said Prime Minister Olmert, ‘who celebrate the release of a beastly man who bludgeoned the skull of a four-year-old toddler.’ For the Jerusalem Post, this was the ‘new Lebanon’. No longer, it said, could there be a ‘good Lebanon’ that Israel spared or a ‘bad Hizbullah’ it hit. Such ‘artificial distinctions’ had been ‘swept away by this nauseating display of perverted unity: Lebanon and Hizbullah are one.’ In the event of another war, ‘the Israeli Defence Forces must wage it with ferocity - not on Hizbullah’s terms, but across the Lebanese battlefield’.³⁶

The second way they would make sure of winning the next war would be to eliminate another distinction which, in principle at least, they had also observed in the last: between civilian and military targets. Already under discussion in military circles, it was, appropriately enough, the commander of the northern front who, in October 2008, openly and authoritatively announced it. General Gadi Eisenkot called it the ‘Dahiya Doctrine’ — after the name of the populous Beirut suburb where Hizbullah had its headquarters, and large swathes of which the air force had reduced to rubble in 2006.

What had happened there, he said, would ‘happen in every village from which shots are fired in the direction of Israel. We will wield disproportionate power against [them] and cause immense damage and destruction. From our perspective, these are military bases. This isn’t a suggestion. This is a plan that has already been authorized ... Harming the population is the only means for restraining Nasrallah.’ ‘It was’, said Michael Sfard, an expert in international law, ‘as if Eisenkot ... was standing on a hilltop, declaring his intention to commit war crimes. Straight and to the point, without the usual lip service about “the Israeli Defence Forces expressing condolences”, or “in every war civilians get harmed.” Now, in two short sentences, one of the IDF’s senior commanders stated ... his intention to violate the two central tenets of the international laws of war’: that attacks may be directed only at enemy combatants not enemy civilians, and that even in attacks against enemy combatants disproportionate force is forbidden.³⁷

For its part, Hizbullah, in scrupulously ‘gradualist-pragmatic’ mode, did very little that might have provoked a new war. Most remarkably, it did not reply in kind to the great provocation which Israel itself, the undoubted culprit, offered with the assassination in February 2008 of Imad Mughniyah, most venerated of Hizbullah ‘martyrs’. Everyone, Arabs and Israelis alike, had expected Hizbullah to wreak spectacular revenge for that. Surely, on past form, it was a point of honour for it to have done so? And, in his funeral oration, had not Nasrallah himself told the Israelis that if they wanted this kind of ‘open war’ then they should have it - and it would be the beginning of their end? For ‘the blood of Haj Imad, in its purity, [would] wash away this cancerous usurping entity planted in the heart of the Arab and Islamic nation’. But, despite the great significance he attached to the killing and the consequences it would bring in its wake, nothing actually happened.

‘A VICTORY TOO GREAT TO BE COMPREHENDED’

‘DE FACTO CALIPH OF THE ARABS AND THE MUSLIMS’

NO, OUR SIDE WON

SELLING FISH IN THE SEA

‘GIVE ME THE STATE AND TO THE STATE I SHALL SURRENDER MY WEAPONS’

THE TENTH GREATEST ‘MISSILE POWER’ IN THE WORLD

THE HIZBULLAH STATE OF LEBANON

‘THE DAHIYA DOCTRINE’