[Peace-discuss] Khalidi in Chicago Tribune

[David Green]

Hezbollah gaining strength where democracy once dwelt

By Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab studies at the
Middle East Institute at Columbia University

Published August 13, 2006

President Bush recently said that it was necessary to
get to "the root of the problem" in Lebanon. By this,
Bush certainly did not mean Israel's 18-year
occupation of south Lebanon that created Hezbollah
following the 1982 invasion. Nor did he mean Israel's
39-year-plus occupation in Palestine. For him, the
problem is Hezbollah's nature as a "terrorist
organization," which is how it is framed in most of
the American media.

It is worth considering how Hezbollah is now regarded
elsewhere. As recently as a month ago in democratic
Lebanon, (touted by the Bush administration as a great
achievement of its Middle East policy), there were
sharp differences over Hezbollah, its armed presence
in south Lebanon and its links with Syria and Iran.
The Lebanese government and much of the country's
political establishment were closely aligned with the
United States and France in opposing Hezbollah. Few
observers, however, paid attention to the fact that
all the elected representatives of the largest
community in Lebanon, the Shiites, were not part of
this happy consensus.

Now, a month after Israel unleashed its air force
against Lebanon, killing more than 700 civilians,
there is near-unanimity among Lebanese in supporting
Hezbollah's resistance to the grinding advance of
Israeli troops in the south, the third such invasion
in 28 years. Hezbollah is once again seen by almost
all Lebanese as a resistance movement, as it was after
it succeeded in 2000 in forcing Israel to evacuate
occupied territory (a feat that the Lebanese and
Syrian governments, and the Palestinians, all failed
to achieve).

Americans, who have been fortunate never to live under
foreign occupation, may not understand that invasion
and occupation inevitably breed resistance.

Hezbollah's rocket attacks on Israel, initially
condemned by some Lebanese, are now seen as a
justified response to Israel's offensive against
Lebanon. For the Lebanese, the fact that most of their
casualties were civilians, a third of them children,
and that the bombing has created a million refugees,
severely damaged the environment and systematically
destroyed the country's infrastructure--from bridges
and power plants to airports, milk factories and
lighthouses--substantiates this belief.

The idea that this or any other Lebanese government
will act against Hezbollah after the fighting ends is
therefore perfect fantasy. The "successes" of American
and French diplomacy over the last year in driving a
wedge between Lebanese and isolating Hezbollah, a
futile exercise in any case, have gone up in the smoke
of Israeli air raids on every part of Lebanon.

In their place is bitter anger at the United States,
which has once more shown that neither Lebanese
democracy nor Arab civilian casualties, nor anything
else in the Arab world, counts in American
calculations when Israel's perceived interests (and
President Bush's "war on terror") are at stake.

This is also the impression left in the Arab world by
the reduction of a third Arab country--Iraq, Palestine
and now Lebanon--to smoldering ruins as part of what
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the
"birth-pangs of a new Middle East." No one there any
longer takes seriously the idea that U.S. policy has
anything to do with democracy. The crushing of an
elected Palestinian government (many of its leaders
kidnapped by Israel) and the humiliation of an elected
Lebanese government at the hands of Israel and the
United States have dissolved the last illusions in the
region as to this flimsy pretext for American actions.

Beyond further angering Arabs and others in the Middle
East, U.S. support for Israel's offensive in Lebanon
has also gravely embarrassed undemocratic pro-American
Arab regimes. Some were so unwise as to criticize
Hezbollah publicly in the first days of this conflict,
and have been forced to eat large amounts of crow
since then, as their publics have massively supported
Hezbollah. All of these regimes have now been obliged
to line up behind the diplomatic position of a
Lebanese government that is closely coordinating its
stand with that of Hezbollah.

So a month of unlimited American support for Israel's
war in Lebanon has been disastrous even in terms of
the Bush administration's questionable Middle East
objectives. It has shattered a Lebanese coalition the
U.S. and France painstakingly built up over more than
a year, it has exposed the United States as the enemy
of democracy in the region (all of the bleating in
Washington to the contrary notwithstanding), it has
weakened undemocratic Arab clients of the U.S., and it
has shown that nothing in the Middle East counts for
the Bush administration as much as the self-fulfilling
ideological obsession with "terror" that it shares
with Israel.

These policies do not serve the true interests of the
United States, or for that matter those of Israel.
American involvement, direct or indirect, in new
Middle Eastern wars, which some zealots in Washington
are calling for, would mean even more Iraqs. The
Israeli government and the Bush administration both
suffer from the foolish illusion (one easy to
understand among warmongers in Washington who have
never been near a battlefield) that war is the
solution to problems in the Middle East. The idea that
Arabs understand only force, which underlies American
and Israeli policies, is racist and profoundly
mistaken. As long as such dangerous illusions reign,
innocents will continue to die in Lebanon, Palestine,
Iraq and Israel. 

Copyright © 2006, Chicago Tribune 



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