Hezbollah rally (AP)
"Building up the Lebanese Armed Forces will bolster efforts to build up the institutions of the state within Lebanon at the expense of sectarian militias, Hezbollah included."In the aftermath of last week’s prisoner swap between Israel and Lebanon, it is hard to imagine Hezbollah enjoying a more secure and powerful position both within Lebanon and the greater Middle East. Short-term gains, however, mask deeper underlying trends—trends which do not favor Hezbollah either in Lebanon or the region.
In the long run, Hezbollah is going to face an ever-narrowing set of options that will eventually lead to serious internal pressure—both from Lebanese adversaries as well as its own war-weary constituency—to disarm. Hezbollah will discover, as the Israelis did in the 1990s, the utility of force has its limits, and the price of using its arms to coerce fellow Lebanese is greater than the benefit. Paradoxically, despite severe setbacks to U.S. policy this past year, the United States is now in a position where patience rather than drastic change may be the best course of action. Unlike the threat posed by transnational terror groups, an immediate concern, other U.S. interests in Lebanon, particularly of seeing a united, democratic country would be best served by staying calm and investing in some of the U.S. government’s longer-term projects in the Levant.
Specifically, the United States should continue to do what we have been doing in Lebanon since the end of the civil war in 1990—arming and training Lebanon’s armed forces to serve as a viable instrument of the state. Contrary to recent reports, the United States enjoys a long and stable partnership with the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF). In the aftermath of the fighting in Nahr al-Bared last summer and with further clashes between the army and Islamist groups predicted, it makes sense to invest heavily in not just the equipment of the LAF but also its training. The LAF earned the pride of Lebanon last summer and remains a national institution despite what was, on balance, a poor showing against the gunmen of Fatah al-Islam. A more intense cycle of training and equipment is needed along the lines of what the United States is already doing but focused more on light infantry skills and collective task training. Eventually, looking past battles with Islamist groups, the United States envisions an LAF able to supplant Hezbollah, which has since 2000 styled itself as the protector of Lebanon.
Today, that claim goes largely unchallenged. Hezbollah’s domestic enemies have been routed–at times, literally–since 2006. On the streets of Beirut this past spring, for example, the pathetically-organized gunmen of Saad Hariri’s pro-Western Future Movement were swept off the streets by Hezbollah’s well-oiled military machine. While these actions belied the claim that Hezbollah’s raison d’etre is to fight the Israelis and not other Lebanese, they nevertheless precipitated a series of compromises that have left Lebanon’s pro-Western government emasculated and Hezbollah in its strongest position ever within the cabinet. Since the stalemate between Hezbollah and its allies and the pro-U.S. March 14th movement began in November 2006, Hezbollah always claimed it would not re-join the government unless given an effective veto over all legislation via one third of all cabinet seats. In the aftermath of the one-sided street fighting, Hezbollah achieved that aim. Even before this year’s gun battles, however, it has been far from clear since 2005 that the government commanded more popular support than Hezbollah and its Christian allies, a fact to which Bush administration policy appeared willfully ignorant as it continued to support hardline stands from its allies in Beirut.
Regionally, Hezbollah’s status has been enhanced by Israel’s decision to give in and exchange prisoners with Hezbollah. Hezbollah’s stated motivation behind seizing Israel soldiers in the 2006 war, after all, was to force Israel to do exactly what it did last week—to release Lebanese prisoners in exchange for the bodies of Israelis. If there was any doubt as to whether or not Hezbollah had “won” the 2006 war, it was at last settled when Israel met Hezbollah’s demands. This prisoner swap took place in an environment in which Hassan Nasrallah, based upon a major speech in May, appears to be reaching out beyond Lebanon’s borders and holding up Hezbollah as a model for other anti-Western resistance groups in Iraq and elsewhere. Hezbollah’s most recent success will not have passed unadmired.
Hezbollah’s political and military victories during the past two years have highlighted the impotency of what passes for U.S. power in the Levant. The U.S. response to the street fighting in Beirut, for example, was to deploy a warship–the USS Cole–off the coast of Lebanon. The empty symbolism of the warship’s deployment was not lost on the Lebanese: though the United States might be the world’s most advanced military power, nothing in its high-tech arsenal could prevent Hezbollah from annihilating U.S. allies where it mattered—in Beirut, in street-by-street fighting that quickly turned into a rout.
Conventional wisdom suggests that such a monumental failure of U.S. policy–backing the wrong horse in Middle East, yet again–would necessitate a drastic change of direction. One of the ironies of the current situation in Lebanon, though, is that the wisest U.S. policy option at this point might be to continue doing what we have been doing in terms of the LAF. The real danger here is that U.S. policy might overcorrect in one of two directions: either the United States could enter into direct negotiations with Hezbollah to undetermined ends or the United States could redouble efforts to arm Hezbollah’s internal enemies in the hopes that their domestic position will be weakened. The former option is foolish, while the latter is suicidal.
The United States stands to gain very little from talks with Hezbollah. It is difficult to imagine what, exactly, a U.S. envoy would discuss with Hezbollah–or indeed what Hezbollah could say or guarantee without the approval of its Iranian partners. An ill-considered scheme to arm the militant Sunni groups in Lebanon (which feel humiliated in the aftermath of the street battles against Hezbollah) would quite possibly put arms and support in the hands of those actors–transnational Sunni terror groups– who pose as great a threat to U.S. interests as Hezbollah, which remains an actor more or less rooted in its local constituency.
Instead, the United States must continue the policy of helping to build Lebanon’s army and national institutions. Building up the Lebanese Armed Forces will bolster efforts to build up the institutions of the state within Lebanon at the expense of sectarian militias, Hezbollah included. Since Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah has searched for new and inventive reasons to keep its formidable armaments. The Shebaa Farms border region has been its main rationale, but Israel now looks open to transferring that territory in exchange for security guarantees. What else will Hezbollah seize upon to justify its enormous armament when that goes away?