There was no Winograd-style commission of inquiry in Lebanon, although Hezbollah’s critics, who had remained quiet during the war, certainly felt the party should be held accountable for triggering a conflict that had left around twelve hundred Lebanese dead and caused several billion dollars’ worth of damage.
Nasrallah acknowledged that sentiment with an unusual mea culpa in a television interview two weeks after the cease-fire. He said that if Hezbollah’s leadership had thought there was a “one percent” chance that Israel would respond in the fashion it did following the abduction of the two soldiers, they would not have approved the operation in the first place.
But Nasrallah also began a carefully constructed narrative that turned Hezbollah’s mistake in triggering the war into a stroke of luck in that it had prematurely forced Israel into a conflict it planned to wage anyway. If not in July, then September or October. Israel, he said, had made plans for a massive strike on Lebanon involving a ground invasion of the south, amphibious landings at the mouth of the Litani River, and bombing campaigns against southern Beirut and the Bekaa Valley. “This was the plan. What took place on July 12 cost the Israelis the element of surprise after the capturing, and after there were deaths and injuries.… We were ready for the war when it started. The element of surprise was therefore lost,” he said.
It was natural that the IDF would have devised a series of war plans to take into account future contingencies, yet there was no public evidence to suggest that Israel was planning to unilaterally launch a massive strike against Hezbollah in the fall of 2006. Since 2000, Israel had followed a policy of containment along its northern border. Though unhappy with Hezbollah’s arms buildup, Israel had little desire to risk upsetting what was proving to be the longest period of calm along its northern border since the late 1960s.
But Nasrallah’s explanation was accepted by the Hezbollah support base. Furthermore, Nasrallah asserted that it was “divine will” that had forced the Israelis into a war prematurely. The war, Hezbollah proclaimed, was nothing less than a “victory from God,” which, by happy coincidence, was also the meaning of the Hezbollah leader’s family name.
“Hezbollah Is Stronger Than the State”
Divine or not, Hezbollah’s “victory” was certainly Pyrrhic. It had exposed the bunker networks so painstakingly constructed in the previous six years, and prematurely revealed tactics, electronic warfare capabilities, and weapons systems. Furthermore, the war inflicted devastating punishment on Hezbollah’s core Shia support base. Iran had channeled millions of dollars into upgrading Hezbollah’s military capabilities from 2000, which were squandered in a war that should never have been started in the first place. No wonder Nasrallah admitted that Hezbollah would not have ordered the kidnapping if the leadership had known what the consequences would be.
The level of destruction in the southern suburbs of Beirut and some villages in south Lebanon was staggering. The government estimated that 125,000 houses and apartments throughout Lebanon were destroyed. As much as 80 percent of some villages in the south were reduced to rubble. Ninety-one bridges were blown up, and highways, roads, and lanes were cratered and rendered impassable from the south all the way up to the remote Akkar district in the far north of Lebanon. The government estimated direct damages from the 2006 war at $2.8 billion and lost output and income at $2.2 billion. Losses to the economy over the following three years were estimated at $15 billion.
The Shias of southern Lebanon are a stoical breed and remarkably resilient in the face of hardship and adversity, a trait rooted in Shia traditions of suffering and sacrifice as well as the bitter experience of living in an area plagued by conflict for four decades. Most of them displayed a fatalistic acceptance of this latest calamity. But it was possible also to detect the first rumblings of disquiet from a community that had been solidly behind Hezbollah. One man I met in Siddiqine, one of the most badly damaged villages in the south, gave a phlegmatic reaction to the near destruction of his simple single-story home.
“We are used to this. God and Nasrallah will provide,” he said. I spent about an hour with him as he stumbled over the rubble collecting personal belongings that lay scattered around the ruins. After a while, he relaxed his guard slightly in talking to a foreign journalist and began questioning the point of the war. This was the third time his house had been blown up in the past ten years, he said. All he wanted to do was to cultivate his tobacco and watch his children grow up in peace.
“We thought all this had ended in 2000,” he muttered, referring to Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon. “Why must my house be blown up again, six years after the Israelis left?”
But his voice trailed off when two unsmiling men approached and hovered nearby at an indiscreet distance.
Hezbollah was acutely sensitive to signs of unhappiness among the Shia constituency, whose continued goodwill was critical to the party’s survival. Not for the first time, nor the last, Hezbollah was caught in the paradox of trying to fulfill its obligations to Iran while trying to satisfy the interests of Lebanese Shias.
In tandem with the propaganda campaign defining the war as a historic and divinely ordained victory, Hezbollah, on a more prosaic level, attempted to win the peace and mollify aggrieved Lebanese Shias by launching a program of financial benefits for those whose homes had been damaged or destroyed. With impressive speed, Hezbollah took over schools and community centers and began handing out $12,000 in cash to homeowners in Beirut and $10,000 to those living in the rural areas. In June 2007, Hezbollah said that it had spent so far $300 million on compensation and reconstruction.
Hezbollah guards, discreetly carrying their AK-47 rifles in soft sheepskin-lined holsters, surrounded the Mahdi high school in Beirut’s southern suburbs, where hundreds of claimants filed through the doors to collect their cash handouts. The high security was not without good reason. There must have been millions of dollars stacked on tables and in cardboard boxes. Posters on the walls urged claimants to be patient, remain organized, and follow instructions. Hezbollah workers, equipped with walkie-talkies and earphones, almost outnumbered the claimants. Hezbollah marching songs blared from loudspeakers.
Abdel-Hussein Hodroj did not even bother to count the inch-thick wad of crisp hundred-dollar bills to make sure all $12,000 was there. The grizzled seventy-two-year-old with a stubbly beard and crew cut thanked the bearded young Hezbollah man seated behind the desk. Three of Hodroj’s sons were killed fighting the Israelis in the 1980s, and he proudly told me that his ancestral village in the south was the birthplace of Nasrallah. “We have been with them since the beginning,” he said.
Hezbollah also launched a massive reconstruction effort dubbed Al-Waad, “The Promise,” to rebuild the southern suburbs. It was a daunting task. The heart of Haret Hreik, the former Hezbollah “security quarter” where the leadership lived, had disappeared, reduced to a stormy sea of shattered concrete, twisted metal, smashed furniture, and gaping bomb craters. The lopsided, pancaked upper floors of half-demolished apartment blocks threatened to slide into the rubble below at any moment. The air reeked of rotting garbage and the thick dust tickled the back of the throat. Hezbollah’s press office, where I had interviewed Sheikh Nabil Qawq just a month before the outbreak of the war, was gone, transformed into a sad pile of rubble thirty feet high. Red banners stuck in the debris proclaimed “The New Middle Beast,” a pun on Condoleezza Rice’s ill-advised reference to the war’s representing the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.”
The speed and organization with which Hezbollah turned to the relief and reconstruction effort underlined just how powerful it had grown in Lebanon. Its construction wing, Jihad al-Bina, had leaped ahead while the government remained mired in spats over which ministry or agency would handle the process and which companies—usually owned by politicians—would win the lucrative contracts to clean up the mess.
“Hezbollah is stronger than the state. This is a fact. This is not Hezbollah’s problem, this is the government’s pro
blem,” Bilal Naim, the head of Hezbollah’s Al-Mahdi Scouts, told me as he directed the work of volunteers in the southern suburbs.
“Fighting a Political War”
Hezbollah knew as soon as the fighting with the Israelis ended that a new struggle would be waged on the political front in Lebanon. The battle lines were drawn up in the weeks following the cease-fire, with Hezbollah going on the offensive against its critics, whom the party decried as “traitors,” accusing them of urging the United States and Israel to finish off the “resistance” once and for all.
The March 14 political group accused Hezbollah of dragging Lebanon into a ruinous war and insisted that it dismantle its military wing. Ali Ammar, a Hezbollah military policeman, responded in a rally by declaring that “the weapons of the resistance will remain, will remain, will remain.”
By the end of October, Lebanon was locked into a deepening political crisis. Hezbollah and its opposition allies were demanding the formation of a new government of national unity in which it would possess a one-third share, allowing Hezbollah to block any legislation of which it did not approve. The March 14 parliamentary majority suspected that Hezbollah’s main motivation was to thwart cabinet moves sanctioning the creation of an international tribunal to handle the investigation and future trials of those indicted for the murder of Rafik Hariri.
The UN investigation into the murder had been under way since June 2005. Its first progress report was released that October and made for sensational reading. It said there was “converging evidence” pointing toward the involvement of senior Lebanese and Syrian officials in Hariri’s death.
In early November, the political crisis came to a head when all five Shia members of the government abruptly resigned after a week of failed talks on forming a new cabinet. The walkout came on the eve of a cabinet vote on a draft agreement with the UN to establish the Hariri tribunal. March 14 supporters hollered that Hezbollah had engineered the cabinet resignations in a desperate attempt to avoid having to vote for a tribunal that could end up prosecuting the party’s allies in Damascus. The government met as scheduled and voted in favor of the tribunal agreement, a move that the opposition decried as unconstitutional because the Shia ministers had not been present.
Still, there was much more at stake than a tussle over the fate of the Hariri investigation. Lebanon was the pivotal battlefield in a regional “cold war” pitting Israel, the United States, and its mainly Sunni Arab allies such as Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia against a so-called “resistance front” grouping Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other small pro-Damascus Palestinian factions. For the United States, bringing Lebanon within the Western orbit would weaken Syria’s influence and thwart Iranian efforts to influence the Arab-Israeli conflict via Hezbollah, thus helping to preserve Israel’s security.
The “resistance front” sought to deny Washington its Levantine toehold and bring the tiny country back once more into the Syrian fold. Isolated internationally since 2005, Syria had dug in its heels and strengthened its alliance with Iran, refusing to buckle to Western pressure. Syria’s relations with its Arab neighbors also were fragile. Bashar al-Assad caused deep offense to the Saudi leadership by describing them as “half men” for failing to support Hezbollah in the war. To the ossified Saudi royals, such insults from the feckless young Syrian president were as intolerable as Damascus’s deepening ties to Iran.
The political deadlock between the government and the opposition intensified in early December when Hezbollah and its allies staged a mass sit-in in downtown Beirut, blocking streets, erecting tents, and bringing the commercial hub of the city to a standstill.
“We are continuing the war through political means,” said Wissam Srour from Aitta Shaab, who lounged in a canvas tent with other Hezbollah supporters one Saturday morning. “First we fought a military war against Israel and now we are fighting a political war against America and its [Lebanese] pupils.”
A barricade of coiled razor wire, armored vehicles, and red-bereted Lebanese special forces troops separated the protesters from the imposing façade of the Grand Serail, the Ottoman-era army barracks that today houses the government’s offices on a hill overlooking downtown Beirut. Siniora and most of his cabinet colleagues had been working and sleeping in the building as a security measure since Pierre Gemayel, the industry minister and son of Amine Gemayel, the former president, was gunned down in his car a few weeks earlier. Gemayel was the latest victim in a spate of killings following the Hariri assassination that had claimed the lives of prominent politicians, security personnel, and journalists known for their anti-Syrian views.
But Siniora and his colleagues proved more tenacious than Hezbollah had expected. A political paralysis developed as 2006 turned into 2007, with both sides refusing to yield and tensions steadily building between Lebanon’s Shia and Sunni communities.
ELEVEN
The “Last War with Israel”
I assure you that we fear no war … in all our previous wars we relied on God and we won … we will continue to do so. We will defeat the enemy and change the face of the region.
—SAYYED HASSAN NASRALLAH,
January 15, 2010
Hezbollah will not surprise us again.
—ISRAELI DEFENSE MINISTER EHUD BARAK,
September 16, 2010
SEPTEMBER 3, 2006
TYRE, south Lebanon—Shaven-headed Italian naval commandos clad in black neoprene wet suits beached their black Zodiac inflatable speedboats on the pristine sand beside the Rest House hotel. A gray Sea King helicopter shuttled between a battleship riding the swell off the coast and the hotel’s parking lot, depositing stern-faced blue-helmeted Italian marine commandos. As the spinning rotor blades whipped up clouds of stinging dust, the soldiers took up a defensive perimeter around the parking lot as if expecting to come under immediate attack by Hezbollah. The soldiers muttered curses as enthusiastic Lebanese photographers tripped over their rifles and stacked knapsacks. A handful of bemused Lebanese looked on. These troops looked very different from the congenial peacekeepers they had grown accustomed to in south Lebanon.
“We have to forget the previous UNIFIL. The previous UNIFIL is dead,” observed Major General Alain Pellegrini, the peacekeepers’ French commander. UNIFIL was undergoing its most fundamental transformation since it had first arrived on Lebanese shores twenty-eight years earlier. Before the war, UNIFIL’s strength had consisted of some two thousand armed observers, composed mainly of contingents from Ghana and India. The Ghanaians had been in Lebanon since 1978 and were easygoing peacekeepers. The Indian troops brought with them military traditions redolent of the British empire, with bagpipes and drummers and shelves groaning with regimental silver in the officers’ mess.
UNIFIL had long ago grown accustomed to the realities of peacekeeping in south Lebanon and had an acute understanding of the parameters within which it could function. Other than providing an international window onto the perennially tense Lebanon-Israel border, UNIFIL’s most important role in the 2000–2006 period was to serve as interlocutor between Hezbollah and Israel. This discreet channel of communication allowed messages to be passed that helped allay misunderstandings about each other’s moves along the border and defuse the occasional outbreaks of violence between the two sides. It was in some respects a cozy existence for the small peacekeeping force. But all that came to an end following the cease-fire. UNIFIL 2, as it was initially dubbed, was to be a more robust force composed of up to fifteen thousand troops, spearheaded by contingents from leading European nations—France, Italy, and Spain. The UN also sanctioned a Maritime Task Force to patrol some five thousand nautical square miles off the Lebanese coast, the first naval force built by the UN to support peacekeeping operations.
The first Spanish troops to arrive in south Lebanon were drawn from the elite Spanish Legion, the equivalent of the French Foreign Legion, tough commandos who sported goatees and had seen combat in Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The Spanish were deployed in the eastern s
ector, facing the Shebaa Farms hills. A huge sprawling military compound was built over a hillside north of Marjayoun, dwarfing the old Indian battalion headquarters on a nearby hilltop. The new camp was ringed with twelve-foot-high security fences and coils of razor wire. The entrances were heavily guarded, with concrete blast walls and chicanes to slow traffic.
“The UN of 2006 is not the UN of ten years ago,” Jean-Marie Guehenno, the UN undersecretary for peacekeeping operations, told me as we watched the Italians disembark at Tyre. “We have drawn lessons from past experience. We have robust rules of engagement so that we can defend ourselves and not be humiliated anymore.”
Those were bold words, given Lebanon’s grim reputation as a graveyard for well-intentioned international peacekeeping missions. There was little appetite among European nations for seeing their troops caught in armed confrontations with Hezbollah and the Israelis; the initial deployment of the French peacekeepers was delayed until Paris was satisfied with the rules of engagement. Like UNIFIL’s previous incarnation, the success of the newly reinforced mission would remain dependent on maintaining the goodwill of the local population. If Hezbollah and the residents of the south turned against the peacekeepers, no number of battle-hardened European troops would save UNIFIL.
Yet the first wave of European troops to arrive in Lebanon were mainly drawn from rapid reaction forces used to deploying quickly to hot spots around the world. These were elite soldiers trained to fight rather than to wave civilian traffic through checkpoints, hand out soccer balls to children, or spend hours gazing from an observation post at a tranquil frontier. Furthermore, having fought the Taliban in Afghanistan or Shia and Sunni insurgents in Iraq, many of these incoming soldiers were instinctively predisposed to regard Hezbollah as an enemy and a potential threat.
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