BEIRUT — Why, oh, why do peo­ple with access to really big bombs con­tinue to think they can change people’s loy­al­ties by drop­ping those big bombs on their homes and fam­i­lies?
Israel’s strat­egy in Lebanon is pretty clear now: Make the pain of “sup­port­ing” or “har­bor­ing” Hezbol­lah so great that the Lebanese will deal with the group. That was also the idea behind the attack on Gaza and Hamas as well as the so-called Bush Doc­trine — the U.S. will make no dis­tinc­tion between the ter­ror­ists and those who har­bor them. It’s also the hot air for the trial bal­loon often floated in D.C. regard­ing regime change in Iran: Bomb the mul­lahs and watch the pro-American youth embrace the _Pax Americana_!
Except… it almost never works. I mean, George Bush was con­sid­ered barely qual­i­fied to make cof­fee at the White House in August 2001. (Remem­ber that?) And then, boom, 9/11 hit and he’s sud­denly the best wartime leader since Churchill. Was there a rethink­ing of Amer­i­can pol­icy on the part of the masses and a call for chang­ing those poli­cies? Or even, dare I say it, remov­ing the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion from office because the con­se­quences of hav­ing a nin­com­poop in office had grown too painful? Hell, no! Amer­i­cans ral­lied around the flag and the leader. In fact, the only inci­dent that I can think of that involved bombs lead­ing to the vic­tims blam­ing their lead­ers and pun­ish­ing them was … Madrid.
So why do Wash­ing­ton and Tel Aviv think Arabs would react any dif­fer­ent? (Maybe a bit of cul­tural chau­vin­ism?) Did the Iraqis turn on Sad­dam Hus­sein through 13 years of sanc­tions? No. Did the Pales­tini­ans turn on Fatah after the start of the 2001 _intifada_? That’s a neg­a­tive. The Gazans this year? Nope. Will the Lebanese turn on Hezbol­lah? Not likely, and cer­tainly not in the short term.
Another rea­son the “bomb ‘em and they’ll love us” strat­egy won’t work here is that Hezbol­lah is not the PLO. An his­tor­i­cal digres­sion, if you’ll allow me: Israel invaded Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 in two attempts to dis­lodge the PLO from Lebanon, where it was using the coun­try launch attacks on the Jew­ish state. The Pales­tini­ans had devel­oped a state-within-a-state in the south, which was often called “Fatah-land.” (Sound famil­iar?) In 1983, Israel finally pushed the PLO out and Yasser Arafat and his fol­low­ers fled to Tunisia. Still, the Lebanese war dragged on for another seven years as var­i­ous mili­tias — some sup­ported by Israel, oth­ers by Syria and Iran — before finally end­ing in 1990 from exhaus­tion. Lebanon was shat­tered and Israel ended up occu­py­ing parts of the coun­try for 22 years, spawn­ing Hezbol­lah.
This is impor­tant. Hezbol­lah was not _started_ by the Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guard. It was _organized_ by them out of the dis­parate Shi’ite groups that popped up to resist the Israeli occu­pa­tion. Iran helped merge them together, but they’re a Lebanese cre­ation.
This means Hezbol­lah is an indige­nous group, not a for­eign body like the PLO was. Say­ing that Lebanon “har­bored” Hezbol­lah is like say­ing the United States “har­bors” white suprema­cists or anti-government mili­tias. You prob­a­bly hate them and despise their goals, but you can’t they’re alien par­a­sites on Amer­i­can soci­ety. Like Hezbol­lah in Lebanon, they’re an inte­gral if extreme part of the polit­i­cal and social fab­ric. End­ing of expelling Hezbol­lah is akin to ampu­ta­tion rather than lanc­ing a boil.
I’ve been in love with Lebanon since 2004 when I took a flat here and began immers­ing myself in the place when­ever I could take a break from Iraq. In March, I set­tled here for the fore­see­able future. I have a wide vari­ety of friends, not just upper-crust Chris­tians, and while I’m not a polling com­pany, I think I have a decent grasp of the zeit­geist here.
Before this damn war, Hezbol­lah was los­ing sup­port. It wasn’t drain­ing, but it was ebbing. The polit­i­cal process was stut­ter­ing along, but it was mov­ing. Many peo­ple here hated Hezbol­lah… Many peo­ple also loved it. The soci­ety was split but there was a con­sen­sus the prob­lem had to be set­tled judi­ciously and polit­i­cally because no one wanted another civil war.
When the first Israeli bombs fell, some Shi’ites even blamed Hezbol­lah. I met a guy in the south­ern sub­urbs last Sat­ur­day, just four days after things started. He’s a Shi’ite from Nabatiyeh in the south and hated Hezbol­lah. He thought they’d screwed up big-time. These days, when I talk to him, he says he hopes Hezbol­lah rips the Israelis apart. Another friend of mine, one of those upper-crust Chris­tians, told me last night that as much as he hates Hezbol­lah, he hates the Israelis even more now.
The Lebanese are clos­ing ranks in the face of an exter­nal threat, just like peo­ple all over the world do — with the excep­tion of Spain, I guess. They’re no dif­fer­ent from any­one else, and the same thing hap­pened in the ini­tial days of Iraq. The same pat­tern would play out in Iran, too, if this war gets that far east. The West has no monop­oly on unity, patri­o­tism and nation­al­ism.
That said, unity rarely lasts. In the case of Amer­ica, it led to a polar­ized pub­lic where the pub­lic debate seems to involve scream­ing “trai­tor!” when some­one votes for a Demo­c­rat for the school board.
In the Mid­dle East, things rarely stay at that level. Once that unity breaks, we’re left with civil war. (See, Lebanon, 1975 – 1990 and Iraq, 2003-present.) And in civil wars, lots of peo­ple die and the sit­u­a­tion that needed to be fixed is usu­ally worse. (Does any­one think Iraq is a more sta­bi­liz­ing force than it was?)
Which is why it’s impor­tant to end these things before they start.