Hezbollah has won battles but has lost its social anchor

Michael Young

Mention the name Hezbollah and many observers will slip on a meaningful face to remark what a great success the armed group has been. It defeated Israel during the Lebanon war of 2006, just as last year it thrashed the March 14 coalition in Lebanon that opposes Syria. More than being a mere paramilitary organization, Hezbollah is a political leviathan representing the legitimate aspirations of Lebanon’s hitherto marginalized Shiites – a Robin Hood of sorts.

However, two events in recent days help to illustrate what the party is up against. Last Saturday, hundreds of thousands of Lebanese descended on Martyrs Square in Beirut to commemorate the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, the former prime minister. Though the occasion drew large crowds in earlier years, none were as large as this year. The reason was that last May, Hezbollah and its Amal allies overran western Beirut, humiliated the Sunni community and its leader Saad Hariri, and imposed by force of arms a political arrangement handing the Lebanese opposition veto power in the government.

The large Sunni participation this year was a protest against that assault. And for the first time in years, the participation of the urban Christian middle class was conspicuous. These were the same people who, in the weeks following Hariri’s murder, kept alive the month-long anti-Syrian demonstrations that became known, rather ambitiously, as the Cedar Revolution. Many of these Christians are back, angry with Hezbollah and angry with its main Christian ally, Michel Aoun, for whom this week’s high turnout must have been a warning of what the future holds for him as Lebanon moves towards elections in June.

On Monday, Hezbollah held a rally of its own to mark the one-year anniversary of the killing of a former official, Imad Mughniyeh, in Damascus, as well as to honor the memory of two other slain party figures. The secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, made a speech of Brezhnevian length in which he again affirmed Hezbollah’s refusal to surrender its weapons to the Lebanese state, as it pursued “resistance” against Israel. Nasrallah hinted that Hezbollah might also have anti-aircraft weapons allowing for it to overcome Israeli air superiority.

While the Hezbollah gathering was supposed to affirm the party’s militant prowess, more striking was the extent to which Nasrallah played down the implicit message in the rally on Saturday. He did point out, candidly, that Lebanon could be run only through a consensus between its different political forces, but otherwise his speech was an effort to splendidly ignore what those gathering in memory of Hariri want to see happen: Hezbollah handing over its weapons to a sovereign Lebanese state, into which the party would then integrate. The reality is that perpetual resistance is shorthand for perpetual war, and many Lebanese have no stomach for perpetual war.

But then neither do most Shiites. Hezbollah has been able to convince many people that it won the confrontation with Israel in 2006. However, its victory was a victory only when defined in the most self-centered of ways: that Hezbollah was still standing at the end and firing rockets into Israel. However, the party wasn’t fighting in a vacuum. Lebanon paid a heavy humanitarian and economic price for the month-long blockade imposed by Israel, while Shiites in particular suffered terribly: Some one million people were thrown into the streets, and over 1,200 others, mostly Shiite civilians, were killed. To this day, swathes of south Lebanon are blanketed with unexploded cluster munitions.

The Shiite population is not soon willing to repeat such a fanciful triumph, and Hezbollah must consider this before it enters into a new conflict with Israel. The party’s conquest of western Beirut was, similarly, a pyrrhic victory. Hezbollah got what it wanted, but the price may have been onerous. All the masks fell once the party showed its enthusiasm for turning its weapons on its countrymen. As Hezbollah contemplates the wars ahead – for example if it is obliged to retaliate against an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities – it has to wonder how secure its rear will be as the combat escalates, and whether its Lebanese adversaries will assist a party that so intimidated them.

The reality is that Hezbollah today relies on two things to maintain its power in Lebanon: its overwhelming military superiority and its ability to play on Shiite fears that if the party loses ground, so will the community. However, if Lebanon can only be run through a consensus, as Nasrallah conceded, then his weapons are really of limited value. As for Shiite fears, Hezbollah’s playing on those fears is just a step removed from aggravating them. The paradox today is that the party has given its coreligionists a sense of new affirmation, yet by pushing them into polarizing conflicts with the other Lebanese communities to enhance its own authority, it also imperils Shiite gains.

The Hariri memorial gathering showed, not for the first time, that there is a substantial portion of Lebanese, certainly a clear majority that would like to see the implementation of a viable project of statehood. In contrast, what Hezbollah offers, and has offered in past years, is an anti-state, a project that defines itself almost entirely through what it has denied the state: a monopoly over the use of violence; sovereignty over all its citizens and territory; and an ability to consolidate Lebanese independence after the debilitating 29-year Syrian military presence.

Since the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon in April 2005, Hezbollah has seen its anchors in the society gradually erode, so that it stands virtually alone today in defending its austere vision of a garrison state. The party has the weapons to do so, but not the flexibility to reinvent itself in a way that might reassure its Lebanese partners. Therein lie the roots of Hezbollah’s decline, no matter how long that takes.

*Published in UAE’s THE NATIONAL on Feb. 19.