| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 6:16 am Post subject: BUSH BLOWS IT AGAIN |
| Sent: Monday, April 19, 2004 9:18 AM
Subject: Good ole Charley Reese
From the web site at:
http://reese.king-online.com/Reese_20040419/index.php
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BUSH BLOWS IT AGAIN
by Charley Reese
President George W. Bush continues to mislead the American
people as to the cause of terrorism directed against the United
States.
This week he guaranteed that more Americans will die from
terrorist attacks due to his stabbing the Palestinians in the
back. He has from the beginning acted as if he were a
ventriloquist's dummy and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
were the ventriloquist.
He proved it again by buying into Sharon's scheme to steal great
globs of Palestinian land in the West Bank, and by arrogantly
denying the right of Palestinian refugees to return home or be
compensated. Israel has no legal right to the land occupied by
settlements; the whole world recognizes this and has for
decades. The United States used to recognize it until Bush
decided to kiss the most ample part of Sharon's anatomy.
How dare George Bush tell Palestinian refugees, ethnically
cleansed in 1947-48 and again in 1967, that they have no rights?
What unmitigated gall and arrogance he shows, what contempt for
the Palestinians and indeed for the whole Muslim world. When did
God give George Bush the power to abolish the human rights of
other people?
It's no wonder he has to lie through his teeth to try to explain
terrorism. We are not victims of terrorism because terrorists
hate us or democracy or freedom. We are victims of terrorism
because George Bush's policies inflict grievous harm on
Palestinians, on Afghans and on Iraqis.
One hates to say it, but Osama bin Laden makes more sense than
Bush. If you doubt the role of our support for Israel's
brutalizing Palestine in causing terrorism, listen to what bin
Laden says:
"The greatest rule of safety is justice, and stopping injustice
and aggression. It was said: Oppression kills the oppressors,
and the hotbed of injustice is evil. The situation in occupied
Palestine is an example. What happened on 11 September and 11
March (the Madrid bombings) is your commodity returned to you."
In plainer English, the more the Israelis shed Palestinian blood
with our unadulterated support, the more of our blood bin Laden
hopes to shed. He says quite plainly - addressing himself to the
people instead of politicians - why don't you stop shedding our
blood so we can stop shedding yours?
He scoffs at being called a terrorist and says, "Our acts are
reaction to your own acts, which are represented by the
destruction and killing of our kinfolk in Afghanistan, Iraq and
Palestine."
He goes on to say that rational people would not sacrifice their
security, their money and their children "to please the liar of
the White House. Had he been truthful about his claim for peace,
he would not describe the person who ripped open pregnant women
in Sabra and Shatila (a reference to Sharon) and the destroyer
of the capitulation process (a reference to the peace process)
as a man of peace."
Bin Laden says further: "He also would not have lied to people
and said that we hate freedom and kill for the sake of killing.
Reality proves our truthfulness and his lie. The killing of
Russians was after their invasion of Afghanistan and Chechnya;
the killing of Europeans was after their invasion of Iraq and
Afghanistan; and the killing of Americans on the day of New York
was after their support of the Jews in Palestine and their
invasion of the Arabian Peninsula."
As much as you might hate bin Laden, he is telling the truth
about the cause of the conflict, and Bush is lying.
Bush ought to come clean and tell the American people the truth
about why we are in this war instead of spreading the lie that
we were just innocent bystanders picked on by madmen. Even
terrorists have rational reasons for what they do.
Bush is following the Israeli example. Rather than address the
cause of the problem, he just tries to kill his way out of it.
That policy has failed the Israelis, and it will fail us.
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© 2004 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.
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o__ I'll tell you the truth about the USS LIBERTY, visit
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_____________________(updated frequently)______________________ | |  | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 6:18 am Post subject: ABC News finally said it |
| Forwarded:
Subj: ABC News finally said it
Date: 4/20/04 6:19:17 PM Pacific Daylight Time
ABC News with Peter Jennings finally said it:
"The hatred in the world toward the United States is directly related to the United States' and Israel's Policies".
Devastating report on ABC News tonight. It's the first time a major US news organization has said it publicly, linking the US/Israel without backtracking or attempting to discredit it and fully allowing the rest of the world to compound the sentiment in its report. They acknowledged we are not hated for our "freedom" but because of what we and Israel are doing.
It's a small step, but it is showing the party line is faltering. CBS, NBC and CNN will have to follow suit. FOX never will.
Laura | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 9:29 am Post subject: Seen One Killer, Seen 'em All? |
| http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-shatz15apr15,1,3155260.story
April 15, 2004
COMMENTARY
Seen One Killer, Seen 'em All?
Bush's lumping together of dissimilar militant groups is a dangerous mistake.
COMMENTARY
By Adam Shatz
"The violence we are seeing in Iraq is familiar," President Bush argued, with seductive simplicity, in Tuesday's press conference.
"The terrorist who takes hostages or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad," he continued, "is serving the same ideology of murder that kills innocent people on trains in Madrid and murders children on buses in Jerusalem and blows up a nightclub in Bali and cuts the throat of a young reporter for being a Jew. We've seen the same ideology of murder in the killing of 241 Marines in Beirut, the first attack on the World Trade Center, in the destruction of two embassies in Africa, in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole and in the merciless horror inflicted upon thousands of innocent men and women and children on Sept. 11, 2001."
Bush's argument boiled down to this: A terrorist is a terrorist, whether he is a member of Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas or of an Iraqi resistance organization fighting American troops — and, whatever their differences, they are all inflamed by the "same ideology of murder." Intended as an expression of "moral clarity," it's likely to convince many Americans. But does it hold up? Are such groups all the same, and are they actually driven by an identical ideology?
Let's start by defining terrorism. It's a notoriously slippery concept: As the cliche goes, one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. But the most widely accepted and neutral definition is that it is violence against civilians to achieve political aims.
Do all of Bush's examples pass the test? Certainly the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and in Bali and Madrid, do. But what about the bombing of the Marine barracks in 1983 by Lebanese militants belonging to Islamic Jihad (the precursor to Hezbollah), which Bush also referred to? However appalling, this was directed at a military target in the midst of a civil war. The Marines landed in Beirut as peacekeepers, but they came in the aftermath of Israel's invasion and were perceived by the Shiite community as intervening on the side of Israel and its Christian Falangist allies.
Likewise, however much one deplores the roadside bombings of American soldiers by Iraqi fighters, such acts scarcely qualify as "terrorism." The aim is not to kill American civilians but to target soldiers and thereby drive the American army out of Iraq. Whether you support it or oppose it, it's not terrorism; it's resistance to occupation.
As for the horrifying suicide attacks by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade on buses and in restaurants in Israel, they certainly qualify as terrorism — i.e., violence against civilians to achieve political aims. But it is unfair (and misleading) to say that these attacks are motivated by a diffuse "ideology of murder." In fact, they're motivated by long-simmering nationalist rage against a 37-year-old occupation that shows few signs of abating; despite the similarity in methods, they are distinct from Al Qaeda's attacks on trains and resorts. This does not excuse such attacks, but it does distinguish them.
Unlike Al Qaeda, moreover, Palestinian militants are not at war with the U.S. Hamas' arena of operations is limited, and so are its aims: Its struggle is with Israel, not with the West.
Giandomenico Picco, the former U.N. diplomat who helped secure the release of the Western hostages held by Shiite militants in Lebanon in the late 1980s, believes it is important to draw a careful distinction between "tactical" and "strategic" terrorism. Tactical terror, however murderous, is a means of pursuing concrete territorial goals that — whether we agree with them or not — are at least real goals. Strategic terror, by contrast, is an end in itself.
Many nationalist groups have used tactical terrorism, from Algeria's National Liberation Front to South Africa's African National Congress to the Irish Republican Army to the Irgun and Stern Gang in Palestine during the British mandate period. Once they achieved independence, these groups generally abandoned terrorism, and many former "terrorists" have become statesmen, among them Nelson Mandela (the leader of a group long classified as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department) and Menachem Begin (who, as the leader of the Irgun militia, presided over the July 22, 1946, bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem that killed 91 civilians).
Since the end of Israel's 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon four years ago, Hezbollah has largely followed this pattern. The organization now has nine deputies in the Lebanese parliament, where it has focused its efforts on improving the lives of its Shiite constituents. Although the party continues to exchange fire with Israeli soldiers on the border and to offer rhetorical and logistical support for Palestinian militants, it has not been implicated in an attack on Western civilians in more than a decade. The first Islamic cleric to denounce 9/11 was none other than Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon's senior Shiite cleric who served as Hezbollah's spiritual guide at the time of the 1983 bombings. Like most Shiites, he loathes the Sunni fundamentalists of Al Qaeda, who in turn revile the Shiites.
Al Qaeda, by contrast, has declared war on the United States and the West, and its terrorism is strategic: not simply a means to an end but an end in itself. Its ideology is fanatical, apocalyptic and expansionist, and its goal — the restoration of an Islamic caliphate and the elimination of "Crusaders and Zionists" — is a recipe for endless war.
Far from being an expression of moral clarity, Bush's promiscuous definition of terrorism blinds us to the distinctions among groups with very different and often-clashing agendas and threatens to drag us into further unnecessary wars.
To insist upon these distinctions is not to excuse the murder of civilians, which must be condemned, or to endorse the agenda of nationalist insurgencies that use "tactical terror." Rather, it is to acknowledge that terror comes in different forms, and that in order to combat it successfully, we need to know which kind we're confronting.
Adam Shatz is literary editor of The Nation. | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Apr 21, 2004 9:06 pm Post subject: JINSA/PNAC Zionist Extremists after Hizbollah/Syria for Isra |
| http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17060 (see the links which are embedded in this URL):
'A Clean Break' is an embedded link at the following article and is a must read:
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j100603.html
http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles114.htm
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20020902&s=vest
Notice how JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs)/PNAC (Project for the New American Century) Zionist extremists Richard Perle and Douglas Feith (who co-authored the 'A Clean Break' document for Likudite Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu back in 1996) are ardently in supportive of going after Hizbollah in Lebanon/Syria for Israel (be sure to read the 'War Conceived in Israel' article which is linked under the map of 'greater Israel' after scrolling down to it on the left at www.nowarforisrael.com as more about 'A Clean Break' is also linked after scrolling down to it at www.irmep.org):
Volume 51, Number 7 · April 29, 2004
Email to a friend
Review
In Search of Hezbollah
By Adam Shatz
Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah
(click for larger image)
WORKS DRAWN ON FOR THIS ARTICLE
Hizbollah: Rebel Without a Cause?
by the International Crisis Group
a briefing paper, July 30, 2003
My Life Is a Weapon: A Modern History of Suicide Bombing
by Christoph Reuter, translated from the German by Helena Ragg-Kirkby
Princeton University Press, 200 pp., $24.95
Hizbu'llah: Politics and Religion
by Amal Saad-Ghorayeb
Pluto, 254 pp., $69.95
Should Hezbollah Be Next?
by Daniel Byman
Foreign Affairs, November/December 2003
Hizballah of Lebanon: Extremist Ideals vs. Mundane Politics
a paper by Augustus Richard Norton
Council on Foreign Relations, 1999
Hezbollah: The Changing Face of Terrorism
by Judith Palmer Harik
I.B. Tauris, 241 pp., $24.95
Hizballah: Terrorism, National Liberation, or Menace?
a report by Sami G. Hajjar
Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, August 2002
1.
Beirut used to be known as the Paris of the Middle East, and in the well-to-do Christian and Sunni quarters of the city, the capital of Lebanon still manages to cast a spell. The central business district—a battleground on the dividing line between Christian East Beirut and Muslim West Beirut during the Lebanese civil war—has been rebuilt by a construction firm whose largest shareholder is Lebanon's prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, a billionaire entrepreneur. The cafés are thick with smoke and conversation in Arabic, English, and French, techno music blares from clubs until four in the morning, and everywhere there are women in miniskirts. The old, pre-war Beirut, the sophisticated world where it mattered to people to be seen, seems to have been resurrected.
But "Haririgrad," as downtown Beirut is sometimes called, is hardly representative of the country. If you take a ten-minute drive to the city's southern suburbs, a series of dingy, overcrowded slums, you will see another country, where hejabs are more common than miniskirts, liquor is hard to find, and you're less likely to see posters of Prime Minister Hariri than of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the forty-four-year-old secretary-general of Hezbollah, the Party of God. A prominent Shiite cleric, shrewd militia leader, and political strategist, Nasrallah is admired throughout the Arab world for leading a campaign of resistance to Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in May 2000, and for his successful dealings with the Israeli government. Most recently, after three years of on-and-off negotiations through a German mediator, Nasrallah persuaded Ariel Sharon to hand over 429 prisoners, as well as the bodies of fifty-nine Hezbollah fighters killed in combat, in exchange for freeing an Israeli businessman kidnapped by Hezbollah and returning the remains of three Israeli soldiers killed in Lebanon. The deal sparked a day of national celebration in Lebanon, and has been seen by some as a vindication of Hezbollah's use of violence for political leverage.
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Most of the residents of southern Beirut, where Nasrallah has his headquarters, are Shiites, who account for 40 percent of Lebanon's population, outnumbering both Christians and Sunnis. Until the 1960s, Lebanon's Shiites were a neglected, invisible community, oppressed by feudal landlords and disdained by their fellow Lebanese. Today, they are a rising political force, thanks in large part to the militant political movement Hezbollah. It is now a virtual state-within-a-state, with an army of several thousand men, an extensive social service network, a popular satellite television station called al-Manar ("the Beacon of Light"), and an annual budget in excess of $100 million, much of which comes from Iran, Hezbollah's major patron.
The movement first emerged during Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, in which between twelve and nineteen thousand Lebanese died, most of them civilians and many of them Shiites. Militant followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Hezbollah's original cadres were organized and trained by a 1,500-member contingent of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, who arrived in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley in the summer of 1982, with the permission of the Syrian government. For Iran, whose efforts to spread the Islamic revolution to the Arab world had been stymied by its war with Iraq, Hezbollah provided a means of gaining a foothold in Middle East politics.
Syria's vehemently secular leader Hafez Assad, for his part, had no affection for Hezbollah's religious ideology but keenly grasped its potential as a proxy militia. For Syria, whose principal goal has been to reclaim the Golan Heights, captured by Israel in the 1967 war, Hezbollah is the only "card" it has to pressure its far more powerful neighbor. Unlike the leftist Lebanese forces that, until that point, had led the resistance to the Israelis, Hezbollah guerrillas could not be penetrated by Israeli intelligence. And in their discipline and willingness to die for their cause they had few rivals, as the world was to discover the following year, when members of the clandestine "Islamic Resistance" (a precursor to Hezbollah, which did not yet officially exist) launched a series of terrifying suicide attacks in Lebanon against American, French, and Israeli targets.
Following the bombings, the Western forces made a fast exit from Beirut; in 1985, faced with fierce resistance from Hezbollah fighters, Israel withdrew to a so-called security zone, a strip of territory along Lebanon's southern border that soon became known as its "insecurity zone." Over the next fifteen years, Hezbollah waged an efficient, disciplined, and popular guerrilla war against the Israeli military.
In May 2000, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak decided to bring an end to an occupation that had cost more than one thousand Israeli lives, and ordered a unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon. The withdrawal did not include a formal peace agreement with Lebanon, and the Israeli army continued to occupy the patch of border territory called the Shebaa Farms, which Hezbollah regards as part of Lebanon. But Lebanese Shiites (as well as a number of Barak's Israeli critics) saw the withdrawal as a major Hez- bollah victory—"the first Arab victory in the history of Arab-Israeli conflict," as Hezbollah often proclaims.[1] It is an event that has helped make Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader, one of the most important men in Lebanon.
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Hezbollah now has some 100,000 supporters, about half of whom are party members. When Nasrallah raises his voice, the Lebanese pay close attention to what he says, whether or not they like him. Bashar Assad, Syria's young leader and Hezbollah's other major sponsor, is said to revere him.[2] Although Nasrallah depends on Iranian arms and Syria's support for his military operations, he has achieved a significant degree of autonomy from both parties, which may complicate future efforts to disband it. Hezbollah, which adheres to the principle of wilayat al-faqih, or rule by the Islamic jurist, regards Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as its ultimate leader, and maintains close ties to Iran's leadership, especially to the hard-line clerics who helped organize the party in the early 1980s.[3] It was Khamenei who reportedly influenced Hezbollah's decision to maintain its armed wing rather than devote all its energies to Lebanese politics after Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000. But Hezbollah has long ceased to be an Iranian-controlled militia. (The last remaining Revolutionary Guards left the Bekaa Valley in 1998.) Although Hezbollah is believed to coordinate foreign policy matters with Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the Lebanese and Western experts I've talked to say it reaches most of its everyday decisions without consulting Iran. Moreover, they say, Khamenei has never overruled Nasrallah.
Syria's control of Hezbollah has also declined, and it is widely believed that Bashar Assad—a weak, inexperienced leader who has inherited his father's airs but not his authority—depends more on Nasrallah's "endorsement" than Nasrallah does on his support. For, in the eyes of many Arabs, Hezbollah has succeeded where Syria, which has long prided itself on being a redoubtable opponent of Israeli ambitions, has failed: in defeating Israel on the battlefield. Nasrallah is one of the most resourceful adversaries Israel has ever faced, and his successful guerrilla war against Israel in southern Lebanon has strongly impressed Palestinians and made him a hero in the Occupied Territories, particularly in the refugee camps.
Although Lebanese Shiites have often regarded the Palestinian population in southern Lebanon with suspicion, Hezbollah's ties to Palestinian groups go back more than a decade. In late 1992, Israel expelled to Lebanon 415 leading members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and during the following year, they received training from Hezbollah in both combat strategies and the ideology of martyrdom. In the 1980s, Hezbollah had endorsed suicide attacks as a legitimate and efficient resistance strategy—and some experts argue that the group helped introduce the technique to Israel in 1993, while the exiled Palestinian extremists were in Lebanon.[4]
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More recently, Nasrallah has deepened his party's involvement in the second intifada. Hezbollah has offered logistical support and training in the use of explosives and anti-tank missiles to Palestinian extremists, particularly members of Islamic Jihad, and has attempted to smuggle arms into the Occupied Territories to various groups, from the Palestinian Authority to Hamas.[5] In June 2002, shortly after the Israeli government launched Operation Defensive Shield, which culminated in the invasion of the Jenin refugee camp, Nasrallah gave a speech in which he defended and praised suicide bombings of Israeli targets by members of Palestinian groups for "creating a deterrence and equalizing fear." Although he did not claim that Hezbollah had been directly involved in the attacks, he said, "We [Hezbollah] are trying to find a way for this weapon to become more developed, effective, and capable, leading the resistance movement in Palestine to a new and exceptional phase." He continued, "This weapon is today the most powerful weapon the Palestinian people...could ever have." Israeli officials have also alleged that Hezbollah is recruiting Israeli Arabs and trying to organize Iranian-funded terrorist cells in Palestine known as the Return Brigades, though no attacks have been tied to such a group.
Nasrallah's struggle with Israel did not end with the withdrawal of Israeli troops. On March 22, hours after the Israeli assassination of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the spiritual leader of Hamas, Hezbollah demonstrated its solidarity with the Palestinian group by firing more than sixty-five rockets at six different Israeli military positions in the occupied Shebaa Farms. The Israeli air force responded by sending warplanes into Lebanon and firing at suspected Hezbollah bases, reportedly foiling in one case a second Hezbollah rocket attack. According to Haaretz, the Israeli Defense Force has also placed Nasrallah, along with Yasser Arafat, on a list of targets for future assassinations.
Hezbollah has vigorously responded to other Israeli activity along the border. In January, a month after Israeli commandos killed two Lebanese men who had wandered into Israeli territory, Hezbollah guerrillas fired on an Israeli bulldozer which had crossed several yards into Lebanese territory to dismantle roadside bombs, and killed one Israeli soldier. As the Lebanese scholar Amal Saad-Ghorayeb underscores in her perceptive new book, Hizbu'llah: Politics and Ideology, Hezbollah views the conflict with Israel as "'an existential struggle' as opposed to 'a conflict over land.'" In the words of Sheikh Naim Qasim, Hezbollah's deputy secretary-general, "Even if hundreds of years pass by, Israel's existence will continue to be an illegal existence."
Although Hezbollah has denounced attacks on Western civilians—Nawaf al-Musawi, the party's foreign minister, told me in no uncertain terms that he viewed September 11 as an act of terrorism—it makes an exception in the case of Israel. As Nasrallah puts it, "in occupied Palestine there is no difference between a soldier and a civilian, for they are all invaders, occupiers and usurpers of the land." When Nasrallah was asked whether he was prepared to live with a two-state settlement between Israel and Palestine, he said in interviews with both Seymour Hersh and me that he would not sabotage what is finally a "Palestinian matter."[6] But until such a settlement is reached, he will, he said, continue to encourage Palestinian suicide bombers. Israel has found him to be a credible, although exasperatingly tough, negotiator. (Nasrallah has voiced similar respect for Israeli leaders, praising their determination to get back their soldiers' remains. "These values are our values too," he told his followers after the recent prisoner exchange.) It is clear, on the other hand, that he thrives on ambiguity about his intentions toward Israel, and enjoys the confusion it sows across Lebanon's southern border.
Some secular Palestinians, for their part, make plain their anger at the efforts of Nasrallah and Hezbollah to influence the Palestinian cause. I recently talked to a ranking Palestinian official who strongly disputed the analogy between occupied Palestine and South Lebanon. "There were no Israeli settlers in South Lebanon," the official said, and "Israel would have eventually left, with or without Hezbollah." The Palestinian, who declined to be identified, criticized Hezbollah for encouraging Hamas and Islamic Jihad to make suicide attacks against Israeli civilians. "I do not consider this resistance," the official said.
2.
Like most of Hezbollah's leaders, Nasrallah studied both at religious seminaries in Najaf, with Iraqi clerics close to the pro-Iranian Islamic Dawa party, and in the Iranian holy city of Qom, with Iranian disciples of the late Ayatollah Khomeini. But he is a modern Lebanese politician, and the language he speaks is that of nationalism, albeit one saturated with the elements of Shiite theology that emphasize resistance to persecution and martyrdom. The Shia cult of martyrdom is part of a tradition going back to Hussein ibn Ali, the grandson of the prophet Muhammad, who was slaughtered, along with a small number of his followers, by the army of the hostile caliph Yazid at Karbala in 680 AD. During the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, Hezbollah used the cult of Hussein to glorify self-sacrifice among its fighters and to launch suicide attacks, or "martyrdom operations," against the Israeli army. Since the Israeli withdrawal, Hezbollah's culture of victimhood has given way to celebrations of victory, but the group has used its satellite channel, al-Manar, to promote the same ideology of resistance and martyrdom among Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
Nasrallah, who wears the full beard, dark turban, and robes of a Shia cleric, spoke with me in his office in the southern suburbs of Beirut, the so-called Belt of Misery. The office is in an apartment building in a gated courtyard on Abbas Musawi Street, named for Nasrallah's predecessor, who was assassinated in Lebanon in 1992 in an Israeli helicopter gunship attack that also killed his wife and son. The reception room where we spoke was decorated with portraits of Musawi, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and his successor Ayatollah Khamenei; all the blinds were drawn for security. On the wall just outside hung a portrait of Nasrallah's son, Hadi, who was killed six years ago at age eighteen while fighting Israeli soldiers.
A short, plump man with boyish features his beard does little to conceal, Nasrallah is not impressive-looking but he is a stirring speaker. His speeches —detailed examinations of Arab politics, and of Hezbollah strategy—are analytical rather than flowery. He seldom makes claims he cannot defend —a rarity in the region, where the relationship between words and deeds is sometimes comically tenuous. Nasrallah knows how to address ordinary Lebanese Shiites because he is one of them. Born in 1960 in East Beirut, he is the son of a grocer who was a follower of the Imam Musa Sadr, an Iranian cleric who settled in Lebanon in the late Fifties and awakened the long-quiescent Shiite population.
If Israel's leaders hoped that, by killing Sheikh Abbas Musawi, they would get a more pliable, or less capable, adversary, they badly miscalculated. Not only did Nasrallah prove to be a more effective military leader than Musawi, he has adroitly translated his military successes into political gains for Hezbollah and its Shiite constituents. Immediately upon assuming power in 1992, he decided that Hezbollah should openly take part in Lebanon's "confessional" political system, in which parliamentary seats are allocated according to religious identity. Radicals accused him of betraying his party's revolutionary principles, but Nasrallah argued that Hezbollah was better off working within the political system than protesting from the sidelines. His gamble paid off. Hezbollah became the biggest of Lebanon's many political factions, commanding the largest single bloc in the country's parliament, and its leader emerged stronger than ever.
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Today Hezbollah has nine of the twenty-seven seats reserved for Shiites in the 128-member Lebanese parliament; it also controls three additional seats held by allied parties and occupied, respectively, by a Christian and two Sunnis. Were it not for Syrian backing not only of Hezbollah but of Hezbollah's principal Shiite rival, Amal, Hezbollah would have even more. (The first major Shia organization in Lebanon, Amal was created in 1974 and, along with Hezbollah and other groups, fought against the Israeli occupation in the 1980s. Although it has shared Hezbollah's hostility toward Israel, Amal is far more secular in its politics. It was never as close to Iran, and fought a bloody turf war with Hezbollah over southern Lebanon between 1985 and 1989. Today it has eight delegates in the Lebanese parliament, and maintains a strong following among Shiite professionals, who depend on the extensive patronage network run by Amal's leader, Nabih Berri, the speaker of parliament.)
After Israel's withdrawal, some analysts predicted—and many Lebanese hoped—that Hezbollah would soon wind down its military operations and become a purely political party. But Nasrallah has greater ambitions than to win more seats in Lebanon's parliament, and he has had the firm backing of Iran and Syria. At once a determined radical and an astute pragmatist, he views Hezbollah both as a Lebanese party committed to assuring the welfare of its constituents and as a vanguard in the pan-Islamic struggle to destroy Israel and restore Palestine to its native inhabitants.
Nasrallah is not about to surrender power that he believes he might end up needing in the future. Although Hezbollah is a liability for Syria and Iran in their present efforts to improve relations with the American government, the party's arsenal of long-range Katyusha rockets provides it with a defensive shield against Israel. Instead of choosing between politics and "resistance," Nasrallah is pursuing both tracks at once, with a combination of extreme rhetoric and tactical caution that has made Hezbollah the most enigmatic and successful guerrilla organization in the Middle East. Which aspect of Hezbollah's identity he chooses to emphasize will depend, to a large extent, on what happens in the region.
If anything has convinced Nasrallah that now is not the time to disarm, it is intensified American hostility since September 11. In early September 2002, Richard Armitage, the US deputy secretary of state, characterized Hezbollah as "the A-team of terrorists," while "maybe al-Qaeda is actually the B-team," and promised to "go after them just like a high school wrestler goes after opponents." Before the US invasion of Iraq, Democratic senator Bob Graham, a former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, had told 60 Minutes that Hezbollah represented a graver threat than Saddam Hussein. Dick Cheney's new adviser on Syrian policy, David Wurmser, a pro-Likud ideologue, is an open advocate of preemptive war against Syria and Hezbollah, a position favored by neoconservatives in and close to the Bush admin- istration, such as Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and Richard Perle. Perhaps not coincidentally, there have also been lurid accounts of Hezbollah in the American press. Jeffrey Goldberg, writing in The New Yorker, called Hezbollah an "organization devoted to jihad, not to logic," one that "might attack American interests regardless of American interests in Lebanon."[7]
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Hezbollah's reputation for violence against the West is well deserved. The group was behind some of the worst attacks against Western military and diplomatic targets of the 1980s, including the October 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut (in which 241 servicemen died) and the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight (in which an American serviceman on board was brutally beaten, then killed and dumped on the tarmac). Western intelligence officials also believe that in the mid-1980s the group participated in the kidnapping and assassination of American citizens in Lebanon, such as Terry Anderson and CIA station chief William Buckley, who was tortured before he was killed. A Lebanese terrorist group called Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for many of these attacks, but the group shared many of the same leaders as Hezbollah, and US intelligence officials allege it was merely a cover for Hezbollah's military wing.
In the early 1990s, Hezbollah members were connected to two notorious attacks in Buenos Aires: the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy, which killed twenty-nine people, ostensibly in retaliation for Israel's assassination of Sheikh Musawi; and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center, which killed eighty-five civilians. American and Saudi officials have also implicated Hezbollah in the 1996 truck bombing of Khobar Towers, a US military base in Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen US servicemen, although their evidence has been questioned by some experts.[8] According to Western officials, many of these attacks were organized by Imad Mughnieh, a shadowy pro-Iranian terrorist who is said at the time to have led Hezbollah's "external security apparatus," an extremist wing of the party that has organized Hezbollah cells and raised funds abroad. Reportedly based in Tehran, Mughnieh is one of three Hezbollah members who remain on the State Department's list of "23 Most Wanted Terrorists." He is alleged to run a network of terrorist cells and training camps in Asia, Europe, and along South America's "triple frontier," where the borders of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil intersect, and may have had some contact with al-Qaeda in the early 1990s.[9]
In view of these attacks, the concerns of the American government are understandable. And Hezbollah's ideology—a fiery mixture of revolutionary Khomeinism, Shiite nationalism, celebration of martyrdom, and militant anti-Zionism, occasionally accompanied by crude, neo-fascist anti-Semitism—only exacerbates concern about the organization's potential for violence. Nevertheless, there has been little evidence of violence sponsored by Hezbollah itself against Western targets in recent years and the extent of Mughnieh's current ties with Hezbollah's political leadership remains in doubt. Several experts on Hezbollah I spoke to believe that Mughnieh now works solely on behalf of Iran.
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Hezbollah's announced long-term objectives—the establishment of an Islamic republic in Lebanon, and the elimination of the State of Israel— have not changed. But it interprets its founding principles with considerable suppleness, as when Nasrallah says he will not sabotage an Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement. Today it is not only prominent in Lebanese politics; it is also a major provider of schools, where the principles of Islam according to Ayatollah Khamenei and Hezbollah ideology are folded into a normal curriculum that is approved by the Lebanese government. It also provides an impressive range of social services such as hospitals and job training to the Shiite community.
In a country mired in patronage and back-room dealing, Hezbollah is respected for its lack of corruption. Although the party's yellow-and-green flag—depicting a fist brandishing a Kalashnikov, posed against a globe— still advocates "the Islamic Revolution in Lebanon," Hezbollah has recently said little about an Islamic state, and begun to build alliances across religious lines, particularly at the municipal level and in professional unions. In 1999, for example, Hezbollah members of Lebanon's engineering syndicate formed a coalition with the Phalange Party, a rightist Christian group, and the National Liberal Party, both allies of Israel during the civil war. Another change that is impossible to ignore is the growing prominence of female activists in the party, a development that makes the party progressive by Islamist standards. "One would have to be blind not to notice the changes Hezbollah has undergone," says Joseph Samaha, a secular Christian writer for the daily as-Safir. "Has Hezbollah tried to ban books or impose sharia? Not once. Their electoral program is [an] almost social democratic [one]. So we're confronting a very different kind of Fundamentalist party."
Moreover, as Daniel Byman, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, points out in his article "Should Hezbollah Be Next?" in Foreign Affairs, over the last decade Hezbollah's military wing has concentrated most of its efforts on strengthening its defensive capacity; according to Byman, Hezbollah has not been linked to a "single attack on a US target" since the 1996 bombing of Khobar Towers. In its guerrilla war with Israel in southern Lebanon, it targeted soldiers, not civilians, although it is said to provide both financing and training for Hamas.
While Iran continues to supply Hezbollah with money and arms, including Katyushas that arrive through Syrian ports, it has shown increasing restraint since the mid-1990s, when it used Hezbollah agents to strike at American and Jewish targets outside Israel. Iran's foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi, has urged Nasrallah to avoid giving Israel a pretext for attacking Lebanon. Although American officials have called attention to the presence of about a hundred Hezbollah members in Iraq, few believe that they are organizing violent resistance.[10] Every Hezbollah official I spoke to vehemently denied such reports, some indicating that they would welcome diplomatic relations with the United States.
Observing these changes, a growing number of American scholars, notably Augustus Richard Norton of Boston University, Judith Harik of the American University in Beirut, and Sami Hajjar of the US Army War College, argue that the party has undergone a genuine transformation, that it cannot be regarded as a terrorist group comparable to al-Qaeda, and that it would be pragmatic to engage in talks with Hezbollah and test its intentions. Their views are shared both by European diplomats such as Giandome-nico Picco, former assistant secretary-general for political affairs at the United Nations, and by retired American diplomats, such as Richard Murphy at the Council on Foreign Relations, and by some officials in the State Department. Dennis Ross, the Middle East envoy under the first Bush and Clinton administrations, has stated that Hezbollah's resistance to the Israeli occupation, unlike its past activities aimed at Western targets, is not terrorism.[11] While the United States, Israel, and Canada classify Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, European allies of the US, including Britain, say a distinction should be made between Hezbollah's political wing and the terrorist "external security apparatus." In their view Nasrallah and his Lebanese political organization are giving support to Palestinian extremists but are not directly involved in international terrorism.
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The difference between American and Arab perceptions of Hezbollah is even wider. Michel Samaha, Lebanon's minister of information, insists that Hezbollah has been an important ally in the war against terrorist groups like al-Qaeda. According to Samaha, who is close to the Syrian government and often meets with Nasrallah, Hezbollah has been providing the Lebanese government with intelligence on Sunni extremists operating in refugee camps in southern Lebanon. "What astonishes us is the American attempt to link Hez- bollah to al-Qaeda," Samaha said in his Beirut office. While al-Qaeda is known throughout the Arab world as a terrorist outfit, Hezbollah is just as widely seen as a legitimate resistance organization that has defended its land against the Israeli occupying force, and consistently stood up to the Israeli army.
Which is not to say that Hezbollah is universally well-liked in Lebanon. Although support runs high among Shiites, patience with the party is wearing thin among many Christians and some Sunnis. While they may have cheered Hezbollah's guerrilla war against Israeli troops in southern Lebanon, they are decidedly less enthusiastic about Nasrallah's decision to continue "the resistance" after the Israeli withdrawal. Lebanon has been at peace since the signing of the Taif Accords in 1991, but at the price of losing its sovereignty to Syria, which maintains thousands of troops in the Bekaa Valley and exerts veto power over Lebanese foreign policy. By Syrian design, Hezbollah's is the only militia that was not dismantled after the Lebanese civil war ended, and its refusal to disarm after Israel's withdrawal is a cause of growing irritation among some Lebanese. "We want to go back to normal life," Samir Qassir, a journalist for the daily paper an-Nahar, told me. "Hezbollah is using the struggle with Israel as leverage to gain power in Lebanon."
Last August, a teenager in northern Israel was killed by a Hezbollah anti-aircraft missile, fired after Ali Hussein Saleh, a liaison between Hezbollah and radical Palestinian groups, died in a car bomb explosion in the southern suburbs of Beirut, an apparent "message" from Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence service. Saleh, who was a Hezbollah security official and a driver for the Iranian embassy in Beirut, was suspected of channeling funds to Pal-estinian militants, possibly with Iranian assistance, although his actual role remains unclear. Within days, Israeli planes flew over Beirut and created a deafening "sonic boom." Many people in Beirut fled the city, terrified of an invasion. It was a false alarm, but the Lebanese fear that events such as this could easily spiral out of control.
If Hezbollah is, to many Lebanese, a painful reminder of their truncated sovereignty, it also raises more visceral fears of Iran's influence over young Shiites—some of whom march in Hezbollah demonstrations in full military dress, with red bandannas and rifles. "These people are an Iranian import," said Gebran Tuení, the conservative, Orthodox Christian editor of an-Nahar. "They have nothing to do with Arab civilization." Like many Christians, particularly Maronites who have seen their numbers and power decline in recent years, Tuení believes that Hezbollah's evolution is cosmetic, concealing a sinister long-term strategy to Islamicize Lebanon and lead it into a ruinous war with Israel. "Ask Mr. Nasrallah whether there would be a place for Christians in the Islamic Republic of Lebanon," he said, "You might remind him that we are not an external force. We've been here longer than the Muslims—we are not Afrikaners!"
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Tuení's fears are understandable, but they may be exaggerated. Although Hezbollah has repeatedly shown its readiness to engage in hostile action on the Israeli border, it has until now avoided large-scale attacks that might result in a broader conflict. Hezbollah's parliamentary representatives and mayors have avoided appeals to religion; they have worked instead to raise the standard of living in poor Shiite communities. After Israel's withdrawal, Nasrallah took steps to ensure that there were no revenge killings against Christians in the south, and that Christians who had fled to Israel during the war could return home safely, although some were sentenced to short terms in prison by the Lebanese government. When I asked Nasrallah about his views on an Islamic state, he said,
We believe the requirement for an Islamic state is to have an overwhelming popular desire, and we're not talking about fifty percent plus one, but a large majority. And this is not available in Lebanon and probably never will be.
While Nasrallah's pan-Islamic message of fighting the Israelis until the "liberation of Jerusalem" appeals to Hezbollah's soldiers, the roots of Hezbollah's popularity among Shiites lie elsewhere. Judith Harik's surveys of Shiite opinion have shown that "deep religiosity and strong support of Islamic goals were not significant as a determinant of popular support for Hezbollah." What is significant, in addition to the party's success in ending a hated occupation, are its social services, especially in the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Bekaa Valley, and in the south, a region of some 250 small villages recovering from two decades of war. By emphasizing public works over piety, Hezbollah has succeeded in embedding itself deeply into Lebanese society, a fact that anyone seeking to confront its military wing will have to face. Hezbollah's growing popularity in Lebanon will be the subject of a second article.
—March 31, 2004
Notes
[1] See, for example, "Hezbollah 2, Israel 0," by Israel's former defense minister Moshe Arens, Haaretz, February 16, 2004. "It is Hezbollah's second vic- tory over Israel," Arens wrote of the recent prisoner exchange. "Its first victory over Israel was when Ehud Barak decided to pull the IDF out of southern Lebanon."
[2] By contrast, Bashar's father, the late dictator Hafez Assad, held Hezbollah officials at arm's length, punishing them harshly when they defied his wishes. In 1987, when Hezbollah refused to hand over its bases in West Beirut to Syria, Syrian troops killed twenty-three Hezbollah fighters.
[3] According to the International Crisis Group, in its briefing paper "Hizbollah: Rebel Without a Cause?," the Lebanese cleric Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah was considered Hezbollah's spiritual leader through the early 1990s but has distanced himself from the party's leadership in recent years. Fadlallah, who was the first cleric in the Islamic world to condemn publicly the attacks of September 11, is believed to agree with Hezbollah on most political issues but diverges on religious doctrine. According to some reports, he has emerged as a rival to Hezbollah for influence in the Lebanese Shiite community, although some experts believe he remains a mentor to members of Hezbollah.
[4] According to Christoph Reuter in My Life Is a Weapon, the first suicide attack in Israel took place in April 1993. Jessica Stern also suggests Hezbollah taught suicide bombing to the Palestinians in Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill (Ecco, 2003), p. 47.
[5] In 2002, Israel intercepted a ship carrying arms that had embarked from Iran with a Hezbollah-trained crew, the so-called Karine A shipment; Hezbollah agents have also tried to smuggle wea-pons into the West Bank via Jordan.
[6] Seymour Hersh, "The Syrian Bet," The New Yorker, July 28, 2003.
[7] Jeffrey Goldberg, "In the Party of God," The New Yorker, July 14 and 21, 2002.
[8] Of all the charges made against Hezbollah, the connection to the Khobar bombing is the least persuasive. In his recent book Against All Enemies (Free Press, 2004), Richard A. Clarke cites a Saudi who claimed to the FBI that the Khobar attack was partly directed by a leader of "Saudi Hezbollah" —an Iranian-sponsored Saudi Shiite group; although Clarke suggests that some members of Saudi Hezbollah may have received training in the Bekaa Valley, he does not accuse the Lebanese party of planning the Khobar attack. When I spoke to Robert Baer, a former CIA analyst stationed in Beirut and an expert on terrorism, he expressed strong doubts that Lebanese Hezbollah participated in Khobar, which he believes to have been the work of Saudi Hezbollah, backed by Iran and possibly al-Qaeda as well.
[9] According to court testimony by Alie Abdelseoud Mohammed, an al-Qaeda member and former US Army sergeant who was arrested in September 1998, Mughnieh met with Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s.
[10] "Hezbollah, in Iraq, Refrains from Attacks on Americans," The New York Times, November 24, 2003.
[11] Ross stated in the daily as-Safir that the US included Hezbollah on its list of terrorist groups for Hezbollah's past activities, not for its ongoing resistance to Israel. See Sami Hajjar, "Hizballah: Terrorism, National Liberation, or Menace?," p. 48. | | | | Alpha | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
