Al-Husseini’s fuel ran low, so he pulled into a station to fill up the tank. I stepped out as the attendant inserted the pump. A group of children ran up to the driver’s side door and excitedly yelled “Sayyed! Sayyed!” as though al-Husseini were some kind of black-robed Santa Claus figure. The attendant grinned as though he felt lucky to be in the presence of such a great man. If anyone who recognized al-Husseini resented him for condemning Hezbollah, they didn’t show it.
He drove me to the place that used to be Hezbollah’s media relations department before it was pulverized, where Hussein Naboulsi worked before leaving the party. Nothing remained but a pit the size of a city block. I could not help but wonder: What does a person do for a living after quitting a terrorist organization? Work at the local CD store? Host a show on Al Jazeera? Perhaps the Syrians would have something for him, though the pay was probably lower.
I swallowed hard as I photographed the devastation, partly because I had been to some of those places while they were intact, but also because the contrast with central Beirut was even more staggering than it used to be.
The Shia experience in Lebanon was diverging from that of the Sunnis, Christians, and Druze more than it had for decades. The dahiyeh, like much of the south, was a disaster area. Shattered glass, chunks of concrete, garbage, and twisted rebar were everywhere. It looked as though the place had been hit by a megathrust quake.
Meanwhile, downtown Beirut looked glitzier than I had ever seen it. The city center was in better shape overall than it had been at any time since the early 1970s, despite the war and Hezbollah’s encampment. Lebanon’s capital was in the midst of a boom, while Hezbollah’s “capital” looked as though World War II had just blown through it. The two Lebanons were moving, at great velocity, in opposite directions physically and economically, as well as culturally and politically.
The Shia had always been the most politically and economically marginal of Lebanon’s sects, and Nasrallah set them back decades with the ruin and violent catastrophe he called down on their heads. As Lebanese scholar Tony Badran noted, Nasrallah reversed every single gain they had made since the cleric Musa Sadr awakened them from their political slumber during the run-up to the civil war. They needed and deserved better than this, as all human beings do, and could hardly have been saddled with a less deserving zaim if one had been imposed on them by their enemies.
Al-Husseini had different ideas, ideas that might have resonated with even conservative Shias if Hezbollah hadn’t aggressively marginalized him.
His credentials could hardly be better. Not only was he a sayyed, but he earned a doctorate in religion from the holy city of Qom in Iran. Unlike Hezbollah, though, he used the Koran and the Islamic religion as his foundation for a vision of peace, independence, and democracy for the people of Lebanon.
“I am against the wars and the violence because of my faith,” he told me. “Any violence, any terrorism.” He handed me the English translation of a book he wrote called Questions and Answers About Violence and Nonviolence. “I published this to explain the difference between the religion and those who are pretending to follow the religion. The proof of my words is that Mr. Bush said we must differentiate between the kinds of Muslims. I have faith in peace. That is why I am sitting with you. That I am Muslim and you are Christian doesn’t matter because I believe in peace.”
His book is short, to the point, and exactly what people in his community needed to hear from someone they trusted.
“I hope that the State Department would invite me and some of my friends to discuss the situation here in Lebanon,” he said. “They think the Shia people here are all on Nasrallah’s side. That is not right.”
It was true, of course, that not every Shia supported Hassan Nasrallah. Even many who did had reservations. His allies in the Amal movement weren’t interested in Khomeini’s Islamic revolution, nor were they keen on starting wars with the Zionist Entity. Even some Hezbollah supporters were only in it for the social services benefits. They were grateful for support from Tehran as long as Lebanon didn’t import its authoritarian ways, and, like most sane human beings, they’d prefer not be “martyred” by Israeli air strikes.
“Because my movement is peaceful,” al-Husseini said, “we don’t have anybody from outside supporting us. Hopefully you can help. We need support. What did Hezbollah do to become popular up until now? They had four hospitals in the dahiyeh. They had thirty madrassas, or schools. They had thirty foundations for supporting work for the people. Also they bring engineers, doctors, and they have plenty of money. They have a TV channel, radio, newspapers, soldiers. They are a country inside a country, a government inside a government. They have all the money. They have the force to do this. Also, in the south it’s the same situation. They built hospitals there, and also in Baalbek. Hezbollah pays for the people to build and repair their houses. So the two reasons are money and services. They use those to gather the people around them.”
How could the likes of Sayyed al-Husseini compete with Hezbollah’s power and wealth? Most Lebanese Shias were unaware that al-Husseini’s path was even an option.
Local journalists couldn’t interview him. Dissent from the likes of a person like him was intolerable and had to be smashed. Hezbollah issued its threats, and after a two-year car-bombing spree against journalists, threats from a Syrian ally like Nasrallah packed weight.
“If we want to change, we need an alternative,” he said. “Here in Lebanon, the Iranian money, for example, is paying for portable water tanks with Iranian flags on them. If you want to take Iran out of Lebanon, you must bring another one with a Lebanese flag on it.”
The state had always neglected the Shia regions in Lebanon, and that gave Hezbollah an opening. Once Nasrallah’s people muscled their way in, they couldn’t let the state provide services without making themselves largely redundant, especially after the Israeli soldiers withdrew in 2000.
Iran’s Islamic Republic regime spent hundreds of millions in Lebanon for the same reason. Many Hezbollah dependents thought of themselves as part of a transnational sectarian community with Tehran as its capital rather than a multisectarian nation-state with Beirut as its capital.
“I am Lebanese,” al-Husseini said. “I am with Lebanon. My loyalty is to Lebanon. The Shia sect must serve Lebanon. We were born in this country, we live here, we grow here. We must serve and defend its independence and territories. I love Lebanon, and I am ready to serve my country. A man who does not help his country is not good for anything.”
Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes1 once said that “radical Islam is the problem, and moderate Islam is the solution.” In 2007, though, the odds that liberal and moderate Shias in Lebanon might defeat Hezbollah in the near term were effectively zero. Sayyed al-Husseini was no match for Hezbollah. He had neither the money nor the profile to compete. Worse, his views got little traction even with those who did hear his message. The only way to beat Nasrallah, or so he came to believe, was through co-option.
He later told Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya news network2 that he formed his own 3,000-man-strong militia—the Arab Islamic Resistance—that he would use to fight Israel. Everything he said on TV that day was a lie. He didn’t have a “resistance” army, nor would he have been able to field one if he tried. This was a desperate Hail Mary publicity stunt. It even worked for a few days, though not the way he intended. He got some attention all right, but practically everyone dismissed him as a liar and a buffoon. He had no credibility as a militia leader since he did not have a militia, and he could never lead a credible peace movement.
Lokman Slim, a liberal Shia activist who worked against long odds for democracy from inside the dahiyeh, rolled his eyes when I asked him about this. “Al-Husseini is just an opportunist,” he said. “Don’t pay any attention to him.” Slim and his small band of fellow activists in the community were more honest and reliable, but they were no less marginalized and had no better shot at toppling Hassan Nasrallah than al-Husseini did.
> After the war in July and August, and with Hezbollah’s ongoing siege of downtown, any effective resistance against the resistance would have to be mounted by Sunnis, Christians, and Druze.
I booked an appointment with Eli Khoury, one of the most dedicated leaders of the March 14 movement whom I met during the Beirut Spring. He still put in overtime hours while many of his old comrades stayed home and hugged their flags while waiting for the darkening Hezbollah storm to blow over.
He was one of the sharpest political analysts in the country and an informal adviser to a number of political figures, including Druze leader Walid Jumblatt and Prime Minister Fouad Siniora. I went to see him in his postmodern office in the Quantum tower, the nerve center of his various democracy and civil society projects.
“What are you working on these days?” I asked him.
He looked as though he belonged in California with his ponytail and unbuttoned shirt, and he had actually lived in Los Angeles for a while before returning home to Beirut.
“Have you seen our I Love Life billboards?” he said and smiled.
I had. They were ubiquitous in the Christian, Sunni, and Druze parts of the country, and their message could not have been simpler. Clean white letters spelled out I Love Life in English, French, and Arabic on a red background. Neither Hezbollah nor Amal allowed Khoury’s people to place the billboards in the Shia regions, where “resistance” propaganda and portraits of suicide bombers were erected instead.
“Hezbollah intimidates me on their TV channel,” he said. “They are calling me a racist now because of this campaign, because I’m implying that they love death.”
Hassan Nasrallah himself, though, said Hezbollah’s greatest advantage was its romance with death and destruction.
“Most civilizations die by their own hand,” my friend, colleague, and Middle East expert Lee Smith wrote in The Strong Horse,3 “a lesson that originates with Ibn Khaldun, whose cyclical theory of history explains that civilizations in their final stages are incapable of defending themselves—in other words, they lose their will to live. The issue with the Arabs is not that they will not fight, but their appetite for warfare disguises the fact that the Arabs are losing their will to live. Never before in the annals of history has suicide played such a large role as it has in the last quarter century of Arab warfare.”
Smith’s diagnosis may sound over the top, but I’m not sure it is. Khoury’s I Love Life campaign wouldn’t elicit much notice, let alone controversy, in the West, yet it enraged Hezbollah and resonated powerfully with Lebanon’s liberals and moderates. Palestinian suicide bombers inspired the term “death cult” to describe the ideology that led young men and even women to annihilate themselves and others, but it was Hezbollah that popularized suicide bombings in the Arab world in the first place.
David Samuels quoted a Lebanese Shia in the New Republic who was despondent about the party’s necrotic obsessions.4 “Did Hassan Nasrallah ever have an espresso at a café in Beirut?” the man said. “Did he ever go out to a restaurant and eat a steak? He was talking about death [in a recent speech]. He was asking, ‘Have you ever heard of the last moments before death?’ You have no idea how terrible these moments are. He was describing the very precise nature of this pain. His point was that the only way to die is as a martyr. He said, ‘As you know, everyone dies. So why not choose to die as a martyr, and save yourself the pain of these awful moments between life and death?’ I am driving my 2009 car, and this guy is telling me how to die better. Two hours before, I was talking with my financial adviser in Boston. So, practically, you see, this is our problem.”
“The whole concept of Hezbollah is to use human shields,” Khoury said back at his Quantum Group office. “Not everyone in Lebanon understands this, though, because Hezbollah tries so hard to cultivate an image of decency. Also, politicians here are reticent to say everything they believe. They have to be careful how far they go when they criticize Hezbollah and the Syrians. Sometimes they go back and forth for a while and contradict themselves before they are able to take a firm stand.”
We saw this sort of reticence even with Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, who was at that time the fiercest critic of the Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah axis in the country. Jumblatt actually called for regime change in Syria, and he accused Hezbollah of having a hand in the ongoing assassinations of journalists and members of parliament. He had kept his ties with Hezbollah for a while even after the Syrians left, however, referring to its fighters as a legitimate “resistance” army, saying they should be allowed to hold onto their weapons, and so on. Not until the end of 2005 did Jumblatt’s opposition to Hezbollah become absolute.
“The Israelis bombed these bridges all over the country,” Khoury said and sighed. “Why? If you want to hit the most important bridge bringing weapons into Lebanon, hit Syria. Why do they want to protect him?”
It did sometimes look, from Lebanon anyway, like Israel was perversely aligned with al-Assad. In the real world this was nonsense, of course, but from a practical point of view, it hardly made any difference. While most Lebanese wanted either regime change or regime punishment in Syria, the Israeli government openly and categorically opposed any such thing. The Israelis dreaded the idea of post-Baathist Syria, fearing the reactionary Muslim Brotherhood might take over in Damascus and transform the country into something like Gaza.
“Ninety-nine percent of our problems are Syrian,” Khoury said. “An Alawite government in Syria is good for us. Just not this Alawite government. Anything, even a bin Ladenist government, would be better than the Baath government.”
Most Lebanese people I knew, including liberal Shias, would have been perfectly happy had the Israelis bombed Syria after Hezbollah killed and captured their soldiers. A large number of people in an Arabic-speaking country openly supporting an Israeli war against another Arab country would have been something to see. It might have changed forever some of the geopolitical dynamics in the Levant.
“If the Israelis were smarter,” Khoury said, “there would be a lot more pro-Israeli opinion in Lebanon. Most of us sympathized with Israel’s response for the first couple of days, until they bombed the airport. We thought it was fishy, though, when there was no ground war. They fought the war like it was a Nintendo game. I know the Israelis are careful with their targets, but you never know if the guy flying the bomber over your head at any given moment might miss.”
His personal assistant brought him a thin, boring sandwich.
“I’m on a diet,” he said as she slid the plate toward him across his desk, “so this is all I get. I eat when I get stressed. Nasrallah makes me gain weight. I put on ten kilos during the war.”
“The Israelis were hoping Lebanon would rise up against Hezbollah,” I said.
“How are we supposed to deal with Hezbollah,” he said, “when Israel’s Syrian buddies keep arming them? And when the Israelis themselves can’t beat Hezbollah?”
The Israelis used to believe Lebanon would be one of the first Arab countries to sign a peace treaty, but that was before Khomeini’s revolution in 1979, before the rise of Hezbollah, before the Israeli-Maronite alliance went sideways, and before Syria’s invasion and de facto annexation. Lebanon was still more open to the idea of eventual reconciliation than many, if not most, Arab countries, but it often didn’t appear that way from the outside.
“There’s an old idea that’s been around in Lebanon for a while now,” I said, “and I think it confuses a lot of people. Prime Minister Siniora recently said it again, that Lebanon will be the last Arab country to make peace with Israel.”
“The last Arab country,” Khoury said. “This is the statement of those who want to make peace but know that they can’t. They don’t want to get ganged up on by the Arabs. We are the least anti-Israel Arab country in the world.”
Lebanon has some broadly liberal traditions, and many Lebanese are non-Arab Christians who, under different circumstances, might be Israel’s natural allies. Even so, some looked no less probl
ematic for Israel and the West than the region’s Pan-Arabists and Islamists. Michel Aoun, leader of the predominantly Maronite Free Patriotic Movement, appeared, at least from a distance, like some kind of Christian crypto-jihadist when he forged his tactical alliance with Hezbollah.
“Aoun just wants to be president,” Khoury said. “He doesn’t give a flying fuck how he gets there, even if he destroys Lebanon. He’s positioned himself as the bottleneck so he can be the solution. He learned this well from the al-Assad regime. His intelligentsia is gone. He’s left with people who think he is right about everything. Twenty percent of Aoun’s people are militant and will do whatever he says. Another 20 percent believe his silly story that Saudi Arabia is trying to take over Lebanon.”
Maronites rightly feared and loathed the extreme Wahhabi sect that many wealthy Saudis spent millions of dollars promoting outside their borders, but Aoun was wrong about the Saudis in Lebanon. They weren’t trying to take it over, and even if they were, austere desert Islam didn’t sell well in this generally open and oftentimes Westward-looking society on the Mediterranean.
Saad Hariri, son of the former prime minister, headed his father’s Future Movement party, and he certainly was not a Wahhabi. He built mosques, sure, but he was far more interested in secular politics, capitalism, video games on his Xbox console, and justice for his father’s murderers.
The Saudis liked Lebanon the way it was. They liked having a decadent playground where they could romp around like playboys without having to travel to Europe, where they felt less comfortable and less welcome.
Aoun had to have some kind of excuse for his alliance with an Islamist militia. He couldn’t just blow it off with his Maronite constituents as though it was not a big deal, and playing the Saudi card was no more absurd than anything else he might have come up with.
Nadim Koteich, a liberal Shia who worked as a journalist for Hariri’s Future TV, explained to me what he thought Aoun was up to.
The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel Page 22