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The Sunday Times July 23, 2006
God's army has plans to run the whole Middle East
Hezbollah, the group at the heart of the Lebanese conflict, is the spearhead
of Iran’s ambitions to be a superpower, says Iranian commentator Amir Taheri
‘You are the sun of Islam, shining on the universe!” This is how Muhammad
Khatami, the mullah who was president of Iran until last year, described
Hezbollah last week. It would be no exaggeration to describe Hezbollah — the
Lebanese Shi’ite militia — as Tehran’s regional trump card. Each time Tehran
has played it, it has won. As war rages between Israel and Hezbollah in
Lebanon, Tehran policymakers think that this time, too, they can win.
“I invite the faithful to wait for good news,” Iran’s President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad said last Tuesday. “We shall soon witness the elimination of the
Zionist stain of shame.”
What are the links between Hezbollah and Iran? In 1982 Iran had almost no
influence in Lebanon. The Lebanese Shi’ite bourgeoisie that had had close
ties with Iran when it was ruled by the Shah was horrified by the advent of
the clerics who created an Islamic republic.
Seeking a bridgehead in Lebanon, Iran asked its ambassador to Damascus, Ali
Akbar Mohtashamipour, a radical mullah, to create one. Mohtashamipour
decided to open a branch in Lebanon of the Iranian Hezbollah (the party of
God).
After many meetings in Lebanon Mohtashamipour succeeded: in its founding
statement it committed itself to the “creation of an Islamic republic in
Lebanon”. To this end hundreds of Iranian mullahs, political “educators” and
Islamic Revolutionary Guards were dispatched to Beirut.
Within two years several radical Shi’ite groups in Lebanon, including some
with Marxist backgrounds, had united under the Hezbollah name and became the
main force resisting the Israeli occupation of Lebanon after the expulsion
of Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1983.
Terror has been its principal weapon. Throughout the 1980s Hezbollah
kidnapped more than 200 foreign nationals in Lebanon, most of them Americans
or western Europeans (including Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s
envoy). It organised the hijacking of civilian aircraft and more or less
pioneered the idea of suicide bombings against American and French targets,
killing almost 1,000 people, including 241 US marines in Beirut and 58
French paratroopers.
The campaign produced results. After Hezbollah’s attacks, France reduced its
support for Saddam Hussein. America went further by supplying Iran with TOW
anti-tank missiles, shipped via Israel, which helped to tip the Iran-Iraq
war in favour of Iran. In exchange Iran ordered Hezbollah to release French
and American hostages.
Once the Iran-Iraq war was over, Tehran found other uses for its Lebanese
asset. It purged and then reshaped Hezbollah to influence the broader course
of regional politics while using it to wage a low-intensity war against
Israel.
In 2000, when the Israelis evacuated the strip they controlled in southern
Lebanon, Tehran presented the event as the “first victory of Islam over the
Zionist crusader camp” and Hezbollah was lauded across the Arab world.
Hezbollah taunted the Israelis with billboards on the border reading, “If
you return, we return”.
To prop up that myth, Tehran invested in a propaganda campaign that included
television “documentaries”, feature films and books and magazine articles.
The message was simple: while secular ideologies — from pan-Arabism to Arab
socialism — had failed to liberate an inch of Arab territory, Islamism, in
its Iranian Khomeinist version working through Hezbollah, had achieved
“total victory” over Israel in Lebanon.
Since 1984 Iran has created branches of Hezbollah in more than 20 countries.
None has equalled the success of the Lebanese branch, which until recently
enjoyed something akin to cult status among Arabs, including non-Muslims,
because of the way it stood up to Israel.
It has not even cost Iran very much. Hezbollah was launched with just £13m.
After that, according to best estimates, Iran spent £32m to £54m a year on
its Lebanese assets. Even if we add the cost of training Hezbollah fighters
and equipping them with hardware, Hezbollah (the strongest fighting force in
the Middle East after Iran and Israel) has not cost Iran more than £1.3
billion over two decades.
According to Naim Kassem, Hezbollah’s number two, the party has an annual
budget of £279m, much of which comes from businesses set up by the movement.
These include a bank, a mortgage co-operative, an insurance company, a
travel agency specialising in pilgrimages to Muslim holy places, several
hotels, a chain of supermarkets and a number of urban bus and taxi
companies.
In its power base in southern Lebanon, particularly south Beirut and the
Bekaa valley, it is possible for a visitor to spend a whole week without
stepping outside a Hezbollah business unit: the hotel he checks into, the
restaurant he eats in, the taxi that takes him around, the guide who shows
him the sights and the shop where he buys souvenirs all belong to the party.
Hezbollah is a state within the Lebanese state. It controls some 25% of
the national territory. Almost 400,000 of Lebanon’s estimated 4m inhabitants
live under its control. It collects its own taxes with a 20% levy, known as
“khoms”, on all incomes. It runs its own schools, where a syllabus produced
in Iran is taught at all levels. It also runs clinics, hospitals, social
welfare networks and centres for orphans and widows.
The party controls the elected municipal councils and appoints local
officials, who in theory should be selected by the central government in
Beirut. To complete its status as a virtual state, the party maintains a
number of unofficial “embassies”: the one in Tehran is bigger and has a
larger number of staff than that of Lebanon itself.
Hezbollah also has its own media including a satellite television channel,
Al-Manar (the lighthouse), which is watched all over the Arab world, four
radio stations, newspapers and magazines plus a book publishing venture. The
party has its own system of justice based on sharia and operates its own
police force, courts and prisons. Hezbollah runs youth clubs, several
football teams and a number of matrimonial agencies.
Its relationship with the rest of Lebanon is complex; it occupies 14 seats
in the 128-seat national assembly and holds two portfolios in the council of
ministers. But it still describes itself as “a people-based movement
fighting on behalf of the Muslim world”.
The backbone of all that is Hezbollah’s militia, a fighting force of about
8,000 men, trained and armed with the latest weapons by Iran and Syria. Of
these about 2,000 men represent an elite force under the direct command of
the party’s secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, a former pupil of the late
Ayatollah Khomeini, the man who founded Iran’s Islamic republic. But the
party also claims more than 30,000 reservists.
Arab and western experts concur that Hezbollah’s militia is a stronger
fighting force than the Lebanese army that is supposed to disarm it under
United Nations resolution 1559. Also, most soldiers in the official Lebanese
army are Shi’ites who would balk at fighting their own.
Accounts concerning Hezbollah’s arsenal of weapons vary. The militia is said
to be armed with Kalashnikov assault rifles and an Iranian rapid-fire gun
initially modelled on the Israeli Uzi. The party’s crown jewels, however,
are an estimated 14,000 rockets and missiles shipped in from Iran over the
past six years. Most of these are modified versions of the Soviet-designed
Katyusha. The party also has some Chinese-made Silkworm missiles for special
use in naval warfare.
“The Israelis would be foolish to think they are dealing with nothing but a
bunch of mad fanatics,” says a former Iranian diplomat now in exile.
“Hezbollah in Lebanon is a state in all but name: it has its territory,
army, civil service and economic and educational systems.”
A few minutes’ drive south from central Beirut takes you into what appears
to be a different country. Beirut itself has European-style architecture,
shops, hotels and cafes with men and women mostly wearing western clothes.
Once you enter Hezbollah land, the scene changes. You feel as if you are in
Qom, the Iranian holy city, with men sporting bushy beards and women covered
by mandatory hijab, milling around in noisy narrow streets fronted by
nondescript shops. Billboards that advertise global bands in Beirut are used
in Hezbollah land for pasting giant portraits of Khomeini and the Iranian
“supreme guide” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Not surprisingly Hezbollah describes
its territory as “Dar al-Iman” (House of Faith).
When it took over southern Lebanon, Hezbollah found a territory devastated
by years of domination by the Palestinian al-Fatah (the area had once been
called Fatahland) and the Israeli invasion of 1982. There were almost no
schools, no hospitals, few jobs and certainly no security.
Hezbollah provided all that. At the same time the movement imposed a strict
religious code that gave the poor Shi’ites a sense of moral superiority over
other Lebanese who aspired after western lifestyles. A generation of
Shi’ites in southern Lebanon has grown up in a world shaped by Hezbollah’s
radical ideology.
Over the years the Lebanese branch has been woven into Iran’s body politic.
Many Hezbollah militants and officials have married into Iranian religious
families, often connected to influential ayatollahs. Dozens of Lebanese
Shi’ites have worked and continue to work in the Iranian administration,
especially in the ministries of security, information and culture. Since the
mid-1980s, most of the Lebanese Shi’ite clerics have undertaken training in
Iran.
In exchange, thousands of Iranian security officers and members of the
Revolutionary Guards have lived and worked in Lebanon. As Ali Yunesi, Iran’s
former intelligence minister, said: “Iran is Hezbollah and Hezbollah is
Iran.”
Support for Hezbollah cuts across the political divides within the Iranian
ruling establishment. Whether “reformist” or “hardliner”, Iran’s ruling
mullahs and their political associates look to Hezbollah as a reflection of
their own revolutionary youth. Last week parliamentary members of the
Islamic Majlis in Tehran set aside their disputes to unite in their demand
to go and fight alongside Hezbollah in Lebanon if Sheikh Nasrallah called
them.
Why has Tehran decided to play its Lebanese card now? Part of the answer
lies in Washington’s decision last May to reverse its policy towards Iran by
offering large concessions on its nuclear programme. Tehran interpreted that
as a sign of weakness. Ahmadinejad believes that his strategy to drive the
“infidel” out of the Islamic heartland cannot succeed unless Arabs accept
Iran’s leadership.
The problem is that since the Iranian regime is Shi’ite it would not be easy
to sell it to most Arabs, who are Sunni. To overcome that hurdle, it is
necessary to persuade the Arabs that only Iran is sincere in its desire and
capacity to wipe Israel off the map. Once that claim is sold to the Arabs,
so Ahmadinejad hopes, they would rally behind his vision of the Middle East
instead of the “American vision”.
That strategy pushed Israel to the top of Tehran’s agenda. This is why, in
May, Tehran became the first country to grant the Hamas government in the
occupied territories an emergency grant of £27m to cope with a freeze
imposed by European Union aid and other international donations. As moderate
Arab countries have distanced themselves from Hamas, Iran along with Syria
has stepped in.
The pincer war launched by Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel is also
related to domestic politics. In the occupied territories, Hamas needs to
marginalise Mahmoud Abbas’s PLO and establish itself as the sole legitimate
representative of the Palestinian people. In Lebanon, Hezbollah wants to
prevent the consolidation of power in the hands of a new pro-American
coalition government led by Fouad Siniora, the prime minister, and Walid
Jumblatt, the Druze leader.
(Shi’ites make up about 40% of the population, Christians 39% and Sunnis,
Druze and others the remainder.) If the pincer war against Israel is won,
Iran would be able to expand its zone of influence, already taking shape in
Iraq and assured in Syria, to take in Lebanon and Gaza. This would be the
first time since the 7th century that Persian power has extended so far to
the west.
The strategy is high risk. If the Israelis manage to crush Hamas and destroy
Hezbollah’s military machine, Iran’s influence will diminish massively.
Defeat could revive an internal Hezbollah debate between those who continue
to support a total and exclusive alliance with Iran until the infidel, led
by America, is driven out of the Middle East and those who want Hezbollah to
distance itself from Tehran and emphasise its Lebanese identity. One reason
why Hezbollah has found such little support among Arabs in Egypt and Saudi
Arabia this time is the perception that it is fighting Israel on behalf of
Iran, a Persian Shi’ite power that has been regarded by the majority of Arab
Sunnis as an ancestral enemy.
In Lebanon, for the first time in two generations, a consensus is emerging
among the country’s different ethnic and religious communities that the only
way they can live together in peace is by developing a sense of
Lebaneseness.
This means that Arab Sunnis must abandon their pan-Arab aspirations while
Christians must stop looking to France as their “original motherland”. In
that context Hezbollah’s Iranian ideology cannot but antagonise the Sunnis,
the Druze and the Christians, many of whom are angry at the destruction of
their country that Hezbollah has brought about by once again antagonising
Israel.
The mini war that is taking place between Israel and Hezbollah is, in fact,
a proxy war in which Iran’s vision for the Middle East clashes with the
administration in Washington. What is at stake is not the exchange of
kidnapped Israeli soldiers with Arab prisoners in Israel. Such exchanges
have happened routinely over five decades. The real issue is who will set
the agenda for the Middle East: Iran or America?
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
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