'Why does Hezbullah care' redux
I know that some of you are still wondering why Hezbullah cares about the results of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon. Here's Lebanon expert Jonathan Spyer trying to explain. With all the current maneuvering, two points need to be borne in mind.The weekend's events in Tunisia could only have increased Hezbullah's discomfort.
First of all, this process is about Hizbullah’s legitimacy, not its physical power. What is at stake is the movement’s attempt to present itself as a patriotic, Arab movement engaged centrally in fighting Israel.
Should it be tainted with the murder of Hariri, the movement will instead come to be seen by millions across the Arab world as an alien, Shia force supported by non-Arab powers and engaging in activities that place it far outside the Arab political consensus.
Hizbullah dreads this outcome, and the possibility of it underlies its present obvious discomfort.
At the same time, what is not at stake is Hizbullah’s real-life dominance of Lebanon.
Whatever the outcome of the present crisis, the undeniable reality that the Iranian-sponsored Shia Islamist movement is the strongest force in the country will remain.
Hizbullah thus finds itself in the unfamiliar position of being without peer in terms of its physical strength, and yet unable to translate this reality at the present time into a situation to its liking politically.
The result is that the irresistible force of Saad Hariri’s (current) refusal to abandon the Tribunal tasked with finding his father’s killers is currently set against the immovable object of Hizbullah’s physical domination of the means of force in Lebanon.
What will be the outcome? As speaker of the Lebanese Parliament Nabih Berri put it in an interview with Asharq al-Awsat, Lebanon is currently entering “a tunnel whose beginning we know but whose end we don’t see.”
Labels: Hezbullah, Rafik al-Hariri, Saad Hariri, Special Tribunal for Lebanon
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:34 PM
2 Comments:
Hmmm. From a distance, Hezbullah looks like nothing more than a bunch of gangbangers, providing dysfunctional and abusive "family life" to neglected and unsupervised children. Where I live, the gangbangers swamp the emergency rooms and hospitals with gunshot and knife wounds. So if Hezbullah is somehow disappointed in their political situation whatever, they need to look in the mirror - thugs with rockets.
Maybe we can make a map like this one linked below for the Middle East called "Hezbullah murders" where every dot represents a town where a Hezbullah-caused death has occurred. That's why the newspapers give glimpses of Hezbullah appearing in the Western Hemisphere... they fit right in with the gangbangers. Head choppers galore.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/jan/14/mexico-drug-war-murders-map
Scroll down a little for the amazing map. Really, giving formal explanations with such intelligent analysis gives Hezbullah way too much credit.
The real problem is Hezbollah is an Iranian import into Lebanon and is controlled from Tehran. It is NOT first and foremost a Lebanese nationalist movement. It is an Islamist terrorist movement. That difference should never be forgotten.
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