Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

by Robin Wright

  “The surprises I promised,” he added, “will begin, from now.”

  And then Hezbollah launched its own punishing counterstrikes with missiles and rockets from the vast arsenal Iran and Syria had supplied over the previous six years. Nasrallah had at least 12,000 missiles at his disposal.

  For the first time, Israeli civilians bore the brunt of an Israeli war. The entire northern quarter of Israel was vulnerable. Haifa came under irregular missile attack. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis were under fire. Many fled; others spent days in shelters. Hezbollah even hit an Israeli warship, deployed off Lebanon’s coast as part of a naval blockade, with a sophisticated radar-guided missile.

  Just as surprising, however, were Hezbollah’s ground forces.

  “We are not a regular army, and we will not fight like a regular army,” Nasrallah said in another of his periodic broadcasts during the war.

  Yet Hezbollah was also no longer a ragtag group of suicide bombers and individual cells based around neighborhoods and extended families. The Shiite force was well trained, well organized and surprisingly well stocked.

  Hezbollah fighters had Russian antitank weapons to pierce Israel’s most advanced tanks. They had body armor, night-vision gear, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades. They had satellite communications to coordinate attacks and command scattered forces. They drove mobile Katyusha rocket-launching platforms from place to place on the back of GMC trucks. They had teams of scouts with walkie-talkies who zipped around on motorbikes. They had “listening rooms” with equipment to eavesdrop on Israeli communications. They even had Israeli uniforms, complete with Hebrew lettering, for decoys.

  Hezbollah troops had trained from purloined American and Israeli military manuals, with particular attention paid to the Vietnam War. They constructed a network of bunkers and tunnels to hide themselves and their missiles. One bunker, near the border town of Maroun al-Ras, was more than twenty-five feet deep. It was connected to a network of tunnels complete with a camera at the entrance, several storage rooms, and many emergency exits.55

  Elusive Hezbollah proved hard to find, much less defeat. To the surprise even of the Lebanese, it had become the most effective guerrilla force in the world.

  “If you’re waiting for a white flag coming out of the Hezbollah bunker, I can assure you it won’t come,” Israeli Brigadier General Ido Nehushtan told reporters during a wartime briefing. “They will go all the way.”

  Israel’s overwhelming air superiority—a full array of warplanes, bombers, helicopter gunships, and unmanned drones—had been key to every earlier victory against the Arabs. In the 1967 war, Israel defeated three conventional armies, which had well over 100,000 troops and sophisticated armor and artillery, in a mere six days. In 1973, air power pushed back the Arabs’ initial gains on the ground. In 1982, Israeli air power gutted Syria’s air force, while Palestinian guerrillas simply abandoned positions under air attack. One of the many tongue-in-cheek T-shirts that appeared in Beirut during that summer war launched by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin read, BEGIN AND THE JETS, APPEARING NIGHTLY, IN SUPER-SONIC SOUND. Protected by air power, Israeli troops blitzed to within ten miles of Beirut in less than two days, surrounding the capital and laying siege for ten weeks, until Arafat finally agreed to put his troops on ships that took them to new places in distant exile.

  In 2006, Israeli air power was again impressive. Over thirty-four days, Israel hit more than 7,000 targets in little Lebanon. Air strikes left Lebanon’s infrastructure tattered. More than 15,000 housing units were destroyed. Dozens of southern villages were scarred, charred, and left without electricity and water. Damage was estimated by the United Nations at up to ten billion dollars.

  The dahiya was particularly ravaged. Satellite photographs of the area before the war showed a dense labyrinth of tall buildings. A week later, whole blocks had been flattened into vacant patches. The Hezbollah headquarters where I had met Nasrallah three months earlier—and the entire security zone around it—were reduced to heaping piles of concrete rubble.

  “We’ve decided to put an end to this saga,” said Israeli cabinet minister Isaac Herzog.

  Yet in 2006, Israeli air power failed to scare Hezbollah or stop its missiles. For thirty-four days, Hezbollah did more than survive. It returned fire, pounding northern Israel with almost 4,000 missiles—an average of more than 100 per day. And the number did not diminish. The last day of the war was the heaviest—almost 250 Hezbollah missiles slammed into the biblical Galilee.

  Israeli ground troops, who outnumbered Hezbollahis by at least ten to one inside Lebanon, had mixed results as well. They were stuck fighting in towns only a few miles inside the border. Rather than advance deeper, units often retreated after blowing up or clearing out suspected military sites. And it was often slow going. CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper went embedded on one mission that was supposed to take three hours, but lasted fourteen. “We moved inch by inch,” he told me.

  It was the longest war Israel ever fought. Israel had to constantly adjust its military strategy—and lower its expectations. And, in the end, Israel’s tank-led assault was unable to gain control over a border buffer zone.

  In the sixth war, Israel was not invincible. Israel’s aura as the Middle East’s lone impregnable power was shattered.

  Rubbing propaganda salt in the military wound was Hezbollah TV. Its headquarters was leveled. Its mountaintop relay towers were felled. Yet the station remained on the air throughout the war, broadcasting Nasrallah’s stream of speeches to his supporters and the outside world over and over again.

  At best, Israel fought to a draw. At worst, it achieved few of its goals. Israel lost almost 120 soldiers in only five weeks—a staggering loss compared with 900 troops killed in the eighteen years of its Lebanon occupation. Hezbollah was weakened, but hardly eliminated or disarmed. It still had at least one half of its missile arsenal.

  “I say this to the Israelis, there is no point of your blockade on the borders, ports, and airport, because our conduct throughout the war was based on our assumption that we are headed for a destructive, tough, and long battle, so what we have used is only a minute percentage of what we had assembled,” Nasrallah said shortly after the war ended.

  “Some people like to categorize this as a psychological war, and I admit that I engage in them,” he said. “But even during psychological wars, I don’t throw out lies.”56

  Israel also did not win immediate release of its two captured soldiers. A year later, they were still in Hezbollah’s hands.

  Politically, Prime Minister Olmert’s new government paid a huge price. The initial overwhelming enthusiasm for the war slipped steadily. In a sharp public rebuke, a survey one week after the war found sixty-three percent of Israelis wanted Olmert to resign.57 A year later, Olmert’s support had plummeted to less than three percent.

  For Hezbollah, the standard of success was much lower. Without an air force, naval fleet, or tank corps, Nasrallah never claimed that Hezbollah could defeat Israel.

  “I don’t want to raise expectations,” he said in the early days of the war. “I never said that the Israelis cannot reach any place in southern Lebanon. Our dogma and strategy is that when the Israelis come, they must pay a high price. This is what we promise, and this is what we will achieve, God willing.”

  To survive, in some ways, was to come out ahead. Wars in the Middle East are often good for extremists.

  Despite public fury over the destruction of a country only recently rebuilt, the vast majority of Lebanese said they supported the Shiite movement. A survey by the Beirut Center for Research & Information during the war found a staggering eighty-seven percent supported Hezbollah’s attacks on northern Israel.58 In a banner front-page headline, An Nahar declared the fighting to be “The War of All Lebanon.” A front-page editorial concluded, “It has united the Lebanese in position and word, instead of dividing them and sowing dissent among them, as some may have hoped.”59

  During the war, Lebanese P
rime Minister Fuad Siniora publicly thanked Hezbollah for its “sacrifices.” He specifically praised Nasrallah. “We are in a strong position, and I thank the sayyid for his effort,” said Siniora, a Sunni.

  After the war, Defense Minister Elias Murr, a Christian, said on national television that the Lebanese Army would not disarm “the resistance,” as Hezbollah prefers to be called. Despite the conflict’s huge costs, another survey found only one half of the Lebanese wanted Hezbollah to disarm.

  Yet for Lebanon, Hezbollah’s daring raid into Israel also produced mass ruin and endangered a fragile internal peace. One million people—one quarter of the entire population—were forced to flee. Some 1,200 died, with thousands injured and maimed. The vast majority were civilians, including many children. Tourists disappeared, and the already troubled economy withered.

  For Hezbollah, its miscalculation carried huge costs. Operation Faithful Promise basically sacrificed the movement’s long-term military strategy. Its secret arsenal and troop capabilities were exposed. The element of tactical surprise was lost. Its deterrent capability was weakened. Most important, it was also a war that Hezbollah could only fight once without losing serious support at home—and this had not been the moment of its choosing. The Party of God lost an important edge it might have had, or needed, down the road.

  The Hezbollah chief also became a permanently wanted man, permanently in hiding. “There is only one solution for Nasrallah,” a senior Israeli military official told The New York Times: “This man must die.”60 The Hezbollah chief dropped out of the national dialogue, he announced, so as not to endanger Lebanon’s other leaders. When United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited Beirut to shore up the cease-fire, Nasrallah was nowhere in sight.

  In the end, Nasrallah had to admit the raid had been a mistake.

  “We did not think, even one percent, that the capture would lead to a war at this time and of this magnitude,” he said two weeks after the war ended. “You ask me, if I had known on July 12…that the operation would lead to such a war, would I do it? I say no, absolutely not.”61

  The 2006 war marked the beginning of a new phase because it forced Hezbollah’s hand. The Shiite movement still had many, maybe even most, of its weapons, but it was compelled to shift focus to the war’s consequences; it had to try to dodge any lingering blame as the dust settled. To retain legitimacy in the postwar period, the movement became even more immersed in the conventional political and economic life of Lebanon. Its ambitions and hubris had to be checked.

  The shift started even before the war ended. Under pressure from his mistake, Nasrallah took four decisions to end the war. In each, he had to defer to the Lebanese state, a marked change after two decades of often arrogant independence as a state within a state.

  First, Hezbollah accepted the government’s seven-point plan—including the principle of dismantling militias—as the basis for long-term peace. The movement still had plenty of pretexts to keep its arms. But it had to publicly embrace the idea of eventual disarmament, a principle to which at some point it could be held accountable.

  Second, Hezbollah agreed to let the Lebanese Army deploy throughout its southern strongholds. Although Hezbollah’s bright yellow flags still flew in many of the old stone villages in the south, Shiite fighters donned civilian clothes and moved their weapons out of sight. The atmospherics changed out of the wartime mode.

  Third, Hezbollah accepted a United Nations resolution deploying 15,000 foreign troops to back up the Lebanese Army. It was the largest new deployment of foreign peacekeepers since American, French, Italian, and British troops were scared off by Hezbollah’s bombings in 1984. And for the first time, the expanded United Nations mission would have the armament to fight any force that threatened it, including Hezbollah.

  And finally, to avoid renewed warfare, Nasrallah held back Hezbollah fighters from attacking Israeli troops who remained in Lebanon. The quiet in Israel’s encampments was a striking contrast to the violence during Israel’s occupation.

  Unannounced, Hezbollah also shut down fourteen positions around Shebaa Farms. Bulldozers moved in to seal entrances to tunnels and bunkers, while fighters removed missiles and artillery. Then they dismantled checkpoints.62

  The turning point was apparent the day the war ended, at eight A.M. on August 14, just as abruptly as it had begun. Just hours after the United Nations cease-fire took hold, Nasrallah appeared on television to give the last and perhaps the most important of his nine wartime speeches. With meticulous precision, he detailed Hezbollah’s plan to reconstruct Lebanon.

  “You will not have to ask for anyone’s help. You will not have to stand in lines or go anywhere,” he promised people stranded in the cutoff south. “Today is the day to keep up our promises. All our brothers will be in your service starting tomorrow.”

  In a telling signal to his movement, Nasrallah added, “Completing the victory can come with reconstruction.”

  Within twenty-four hours, Hezbollah bulldozers were roaring down streets of the dahiya and southern towns, clearing away rubble. Trucks delivered crates of food—peppers and peaches, sardines and cheese, as well as “victory sweets.” Trucks ferried in water.

  Within two days, Hezbollah teams with clipboards were dispersed in southern towns doing house-to-house assessments, cataloging damage, knocking on doors to check on what people needed. In the dahiya, a high school was converted into a reconstruction center. Signs on the wall directed Lebanese who had lost their homes. One line was marked DAMAGED; the other, DESTROYED.

  Within four days, Hezbollah was doling out $12,000—in crisp American bills—per household to pay for one year’s rent and to buy what Nasrallah called “decent and suitable” furniture. With 15,000 destroyed housing units, the total was well over $150 million dollars just for compensation, before rebuilding even began. Lebanese officials rightly grumbled that Iranian largesse had provided the instant funds. Iranians rightly grumbled that they might get more attention to their own problems if they were living in Lebanon.

  By the end of two weeks, Hezbollah had divided the dahiya into eighty-six zones. Each zone had a four-person engineering team assigned to develop plans for rebuilding.

  Hezbollah’s public-relations prowess was on full display. Massive piles of debris from bombed buildings were cordoned off with yellow crime-scene tape. Propped atop the ruins were big signs proclaiming DIVINE VICTORY—NO TRESPASSING and MADE IN THE USA. In a play on Nasrallah’s name, a billboard proclaimed the war A VICTORY FROM GOD.

  Meanwhile, the Lebanese government and the international community were still trying to get organized.

  The imagery of military prowess and postwar political street smarts proved a powerful combination at home. Because of its postwar efficiency, Hezbollah’s profile evolved yet again.

  Even Israel and the United States had to accept, reluctantly, that Hezbollah would remain a political player in Lebanon. The United States backed Israel’s right to defend itself with punishing air strikes, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told me and other reporters traveling with her in the Middle East during the war that Washington acknowledged Hezbollah would remain a legitimate political force in Lebanon.

  “To the extent that it remains a political group, it will be acceptable to Israel,” Israeli ambassador Daniel Ayalon also told me during the war. “A political group means a party that is engaged in the political system in Lebanon, but without terrorism capabilities and fighting capabilities. That will be acceptable to Israel.”

  The impact of Hezbollah’s war may have been even greater outside Lebanon. The party—whose members came from Islam’s often-scorned second sect, and from one of the region’s smallest countries—vaulted into a position unimaginable a few weeks earlier.

  In 2000, after an eighteen-year war against Israeli occupation, Hezbollah had emerged as a legitimate player inside Lebanon. In 2006, after a thirty-four-day war against Israel, Hezbollah became a legitimate player in the wider Middle East. The Lebanon
conflict jolted public thinking about the broader issues of contemporary leaders and political systems.

  Nasrallah emerged as an unlikely regional champion. In newspaper editorials, political commentaries, and blogs, he was compared with almost mystical reverence to Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, the two leaders who had redefined the region’s political direction.

  “Israel has just set Nasrallah on a trajectory to become the hero of the Arab world,” said my friend Jamil Mrowe, the Shiite editor opposed to Hezbollah.

  The Lebanon war came at a critical juncture in the Middle East. It erupted during a summer of discontent—as Iraq crumbled, Syria cracked down, Egypt increasingly inched toward dynastic rule, the Palestinians remained politically deadlocked and under virtual siege, and democracy regionwide seemed to be ever more elusive.

  Posters of Nasrallah, many of them wall-size, went up all over the Middle East. Men and women were photographed kissing them. More than 120 babies in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria were named Nasrallah during the war.63 Young women on blog sites pined about marrying the Shiite cleric’s sons. On the West Bank, pendant necklaces with little Nasrallah pictures became the new fashion chic. And in several countries, Nasrallah T-shirts became the new political chic.

  The Hezbollah chief was the subject of instant odes and ballads. In Egypt, satellite music channels played the new hit tribute by Shaaban Abdul Rahim: “O Hassan! O Nasrallah! We are behind you and will not leave you.” A Palestinian band, once limited largely to the wedding circuit, gained instant fame off its song in praise of Nasrallah, entitled “The Hawk of Lebanon.”

  “The last thing I expected is to fall in love with a turbaned cleric,” Howeida Taha, a Sunni, an Egyptian, and a secular columnist, wrote in the Al-Quds al Arabi newspaper about the leader of Lebanon’s Shiite movement. “I don’t like them, and of course they will never like somebody like me…. [But] I feel I’ve been searching for Nasrallah with my eyes, heart, and mind. I feel Nasrallah lives within me.”64