Nir Rosen - Aftermath

Musawi was feeling triumphant. “We are always thinking about how a threat can become an opportunity,” he told me. “The situation in Lebanon is different than Iraq. The Future Movement doesn’t have a future without an agreement with us. Experience shows that facing us is a losing battle for them. If they threaten us with Salafis, they are committing suicide. Dai al-Islam works for the Saudis, but his environment is an incubator for killer takfiris . We avoid any form of sectarian conflict.”

Future had a plan to control Beirut, Musawi explained. It was a good plan, he admitted: Future wanted to seize neighborhoods, isolate Dahiyeh from Beirut, surround Shiite neighborhoods, and close the roads around Dahiyeh and the Beqaa. The Future plan was not to occupy opposition areas but to besiege them and have an extended period of street fighting so that the government would tell the UN that Hizballah was an outlaw group. Then there would be an excuse to invite international forces into Lebanon and press the issue of Hizballah’s arms. “We had a quick operation, and we caused this plan to fail,” Musawi said. “As an organization we had good intelligence.” He explained that Hizballah had the centers of power in Beirut surrounded. “We had the head. The Saudis lost on the battlefield.”

Hizballah and its allies did not seek to change the government by force, nor did it seize control of government officers. Its demand was merely the revocation of the government’s two decisions targeting the resistance. On May 13 the government finally relented. Following the clashes in Beirut, a delegation from the Arab League managed to establish a truce. Roadblocks were removed, the country was reopened, and militias removed their weapons from the streets. Then the parties to the conflict were flown to Qatar, where the national dialogue resumed to resolve the crisis. For the Saudis it was a double humiliation: not only had their proxies been defeated in Lebanon but they had lost their lead diplomatic role to their rival Qatar.

March 14 proved itself utterly dependent on the Bush administration and the neoconservatives, widely perceived as closer to Israel and more anti-Arab than any other American regime. But Hizballah also suffered a blow to its credibility because it had violated its longstanding commitment never to use its weapons internally. In this sense American and Saudi proxies scored a victory by portraying Hizballah as merely one more sectarian militia in Lebanon, and no longer the national resistance.

“Backed by Syria and Iran, Hizballah and its allies are killing and injuring innocent citizens and undermining the legitimate authority of the Lebanese government and the institutions of the Lebanese state,” said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. “Seeking to protect their state within a state, Hizballah has exploited its allies and demonstrated its contempt for its fellow Lebanese.”

The May incidents demonstrated the futility of Future adopting any kind of armed program. Hizballah’s brief takeover of Beirut demonstrated how little the Saudis, Americans, and French were willing to do for their local proxies in Lebanon, and in Doha March 14 was forced to conform to most of the opposition’s stipulation.

In Palestine the Americans had pushed Fatah and Hamas to the point of civil war, and then in Lebanon they had also managed to push political tension to armed conflict. In both cases the goal was to discredit overwhelming popular movements, subverting democracy and ignoring the popular will. In Lebanon the Bush administration pressured the ruling coalition not to compromise with the opposition. In December 2009 Nasrallah condemned Arab states—not for being silent, he said, but for their partnership with Israel in the murder of Palestinians. He called on the Egyptian people and army to protest and pressure the Egyptian dictatorship to open the siege on Gaza. It was the first time Hizballah had ever singled out an Arab state. Even during Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, the movement had not gone this far. The next month Nasrallah stated that although Hizballah had not made enemies of Arab states that supported Israel in the 2006 war it would make enemies of those that collaborated against Gaza and the Palestinians. If the Egyptians opened the border, he said, then food, medicine, and even weapons could reach Gaza—and the victory of the resistance in Lebanon could be repeated.

Sunni Islamists resent Hizballah for monopolizing the struggle with Israel and denying them access to fight the Zionists. The American invasion of Iraq gave them a worthy enemy for the first time since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. It must have been galling to Al Qaeda leaders to see Hizballah regularly praised on Arabic satellite networks while it was condemned, to see that Nasrallah was the most beloved individual in the Arab world while bin Laden and Zawahiri were reviled or ignored. In September 2008 one of the Muslim world’s most prominent Islamic scholars, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who had condemned Al Qaeda in the past, denounced Shiites as heretics and warned that they were trying to penetrate the Sunni world.

In 2006 a poll of majority-Sunni Egypt revealed that Nasrallah, Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hamas leader Khalid Meshal were the three most popular figures in the country. But following the execution of Saddam there was a backlash against Shiites. Some Fatah supporters took to labeling Hamas as Shiites because it received help from Iran. Iranian nuclear intransigence has led the Americans to seek an alliance with Sunni Arab dictatorships. The Americans and Israelis campaigned to convince regional governments that Iran was their real enemy. The notion of “moderate Sunni” states was propounded by the Americans, but the people of these states hated their regimes.

Throughout the region the Iraq War reinvigorated pre-existing sectarianism and provided a new framework for reviving sectarian politics. Since the mid-1970s Kuwait had been the most important center of Shiite radicalism and organization in the Gulf, with movements there reaching out to Shiites in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. Kuwait had historic tensions between Shiites and Sunnis, which occasionally flared. Sunnis would gang up on Shiite candidates in parliamentary elections to sabotage their electoral chances. The social contract in which the ruler protected Kuwait’s Shiites from persecution collapsed after the Iran-Iraq War, but after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait it was restored because of the exaggerated role of Shiites resisting the Iraqi occupation. Some said that Shiites hadn’t fled from Kuwait like others because the Saudis wouldn’t let them across the border. Following the American invasion of Iraq tensions increased, fomented by members of the royal family. Given regional fears of a Shiite revival, Kuwait was vulnerable to these machinations.

After the February 2008 assassination of legendary Hizballah commander Imad Mughniyeh, up to two thousand Kuwaiti Shiites marched in his honor, including two Parliament members. They were met with anger and political maneuvering because any expressions of sympathy for Hizballah, Iraqi Shiites, or Iran were seen as disloyal.

Like in Kuwait, sectarian tensions in Bahrain had been a regular feature of the political landscape since the 1980s. They were typically initiated by the government but there were also flare-ups initiated by Shiites, who are the majority. Following the American invasion of Iraq the ruling family in Bahrain, like that of Kuwait, was better able to play the sectarian card—warning of a powerful Iran, a Shiite-dominated Iraq, and a fifth column at home.

In July 2009 Egypt charged twenty-six men with spying for Hizballah and plotting to attack tourists. “Iran, and Iran’s followers, want Egypt to become a maid of honor for the crowned Iranian queen when she enters the Middle East,” Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit declared. The next month Jordan put six of its citizens on trial for fomenting religious sectarianism and promoting Shiism. The Moroccan dictatorship severed its ties with Iran after accusing it of spreading Shiism in Morocco. Yemen accused Hizballah of training Zaydi rebels in the north. The Yemeni dictatorship was in the midst of two civil wars: one against southern secessionists and one against Zaydi tribesmen in the north. Zaydis, who ruled Yemen for centuries, are related to Shiites but are also very close in their beliefs to Yemen’s Sunnis. The Yemeni dictatorship had manipulated its sects, supporting Al Qaeda-like Salafis and veterans of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan when it suited it, and then supporting Zaydis to counterbalance the Salafis. Now it was invoking the phantom Iranian and Hizballah threat as well as an exaggerated Al Qaeda presence to bolster its weak status, with American and Saudi help. Hizballah did admit to supporting Hamas, but it denied getting involved in conflicts between regimes and their people.