Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East

by Robin Wright

  The implications are obvious—worldwide Islamic revolution.

  During the movement’s early years in the 1980s, I wangled the first Hezbollah press pass from one of its cells; it may still be the only one ever issued. As I spent more and more time in the dahiya, I wanted some kind of credential to avoid being detained, harassed, or taken hostage, especially as an American. Most other militias issued press passes to use at their checkpoints. Since Lebanon had many armed groups—almost forty at the height of the civil war, including foreign troops—journalists carried a wallet full of passes.

  The trick was pulling out the right pass at constantly shifting checkpoints. Several journalists who guessed wrong were detained or beaten; at least two were killed.

  In those days, Hezbollah had no headquarters, much less public officials. But one day when I was in the dahiya, heading to the office of a Shiite cleric, I saw an unfinished building nearby with a black, spray-painted stencil of the new Hezbollah logo; it had begun to appear on walls all over Beirut. I ducked inside. Several gunmen with beards and Kalashnikov rifles were in a ground-floor room that was plastered with Hezbollah posters.

  I explained who I was, described an earlier book I was writing, and then said that I wanted a press pass. One of the gunmen, who did not introduce himself, told me that the group did not issue press passes. When I persisted, he shrugged, walked over to one of the posters, ripped off a corner with the logo, and handed it to me.

  “Can’t you date it, or write your name on it, or something to make it look a bit more official?” I asked.

  “Just show it,” he replied, “and you won’t have any problems.”

  I assumed he was trying to get rid of me. But when I was stopped at a Hezbollah checkpoint a few days later, I pulled out the little piece of Hezbollah’s poster. The gunmen waved me through. I used it for years.

  The Party of God finally emerged from the underground—and as a single unit—in 1985 in an open letter addressed “to all the oppressed in Lebanon and the world.” It was read at a Beirut mosque and published in a Lebanese newspaper. Its tone was militant, its goals absolute. It called for an Islamic society in Lebanon and blasted Lebanon’s Christian Maronites.

  We don’t want to impose Islam upon anybody, as much as we don’t want others to impose upon us their convictions and their political systems. We don’t want Islam to reign in Lebanon by force as is the case with the Maronites today…. [But] we call upon you to embrace Islam so that you can be happy in this world and the next…. Only an Islamic regime can stop any further imperialist infiltration into our country….

  In more aggressive language, it also demanded the destruction of Israel.

  The Zionist entity is aggressive from its inception and built on lands wrested from their owners, at the expense of the rights of the Muslim people. Therefore our struggle will end only when this entity is obliterated.17

  The Party of God defiantly pledged that it would never compromise with the Jewish state. “We recognize no treaty with it, no cease-fire, and no peace agreements,” Hezbollah announced.

  The open letter also warned, “No one can imagine our military potential.”18

  Hezbollah’s first phase ended with Lebanon’s civil war in 1990 and the brief 1991 Gulf War to liberate Kuwait after Iraq’s invasion. Both events altered dynamics throughout the Middle East.

  The Iraqi invasion also, inadvertently, eliminated the prisoner issue. In one of those accidents of history, the Iraqis had opened Kuwait’s prisons—and unwittingly released Mughniyah’s cousin and other members of the Kuwait Seventeen, thus ending a key reason for the hostage abductions.

  The early era symbolically came to a close, after Iran’s intervention, when Hezbollah then freed its last foreign hostage, Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson, in 1991. Anderson was a friend; we had offices in the same building. A former Marine, he was nabbed after he came back from a tennis game in Beirut in 1985. He had been bundled into the trunk of a getaway car and held for the next seven years, much of it chained to a radiator or a bed.

  Hezbollah’s tactics shifted after that—at least in practice, if not in policy.

  Anderson returned to Lebanon five years later to purge the ghosts of his captivity. Among his stops was the Hezbollah headquarters to see Nasrallah, who had since assumed leadership of the movement. Anderson asked Nasrallah, who is often called sayyid as a man of religious learning, what he thought of kidnapping foreigners.

  “I’m not saying whether their methods were good or not, right or wrong,” Nasrallah told him. “These actions were short-term, with short-term objectives, and I hope that they will not happen again.”

  “Can you say, sayyid, flatly, that this was wrong or a mistake?” Anderson pressed him.

  “I can’t make such an absolute judgment,” Nasrallah replied.19

  Transitions from militancy into mainstream politics depend on a confluence of factors.

  Hezbollah began to evolve as it moved into a second phase in 1992. It coincided with Nasrallah’s sudden rise to the leadership, after Israel assassinated the movement’s secretary-general. The specific turning point was the most controversial decision Hezbollah had yet taken—to enter politics. It was Nasrallah’s first major act. And it was a major reversal.

  During its first decade, Hezbollah had rejected any role in Lebanon’s convoluted confessional system. The Shiite movement had considered itself above other parties, militias, clans, and the Lebanese government generally. The Party of God believed it was a bigger actor. It played on a regional stage, engaging with an outside enemy rather than in domestic squabbles.20 It had largely avoided the civil war, except for turf battles with Amal, the other Shiite militia. In politics, Hezbollah was the odd man out.

  But after a heated internal debate, and at Iran’s urging, the movement opted to run candidates for parliament in the first elections after Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war ended. Under pictures of its martyrs, its campaign posters appealed, THEY RESIST WITH THEIR BLOOD. RESIST WITH YOUR VOTE.21 At a rally for thousands assembled in a dahiya stadium on election eve, Nasrallah sounded like a conventional politician talking about Hezbollah representing Shiite interests in parliament.

  “We will seek to serve you in our new positions to end this area’s deprivation and oppression,” he said, exhorting a large crowd and pumping his arm in the air. “Tomorrow, God willing, our candidates will stand in the Chamber of Deputies to remind those who have forgotten that there is a deprived area in Lebanon called the southern suburb…. We refuse to let anyone deal with it as if it were foreign to Lebanon.”22

  The Party of God won twelve seats in the 128-seat parliament. Overnight, it became one the biggest of Lebanon’s seventeen political blocs. Former clandestine leaders in an extremist movement were suddenly elected officials. Hezbollah soon became engrossed in politics as an opposition party. It criticized government for corruption, ineptitude, and allocating inadequate funds for Shiites. It pushed for no-confidence votes. It was politically engaged.

  “We’ve taken the decisions that suit each stage,” Hezbollah external relations chief Nawaf al Musawi, an intense and portly man with a dark beard, told me during one of several interviews with Hezbollah officials in offices scattered around the dahiya.

  “I always remember a saying by the Greek philosopher Herodotus,” he continued. “‘You do not swim in the same river twice.’23 He meant, if you swim the river, the second time it will not be the same because the water will not be the same as it was the first time.

  “Politics,” Musawi pronounced, as his left hand flipped through a set of white worry beads, “is the same.”

  The shift was not universally popular. “When we took the decision to engage in the parliamentary process, not everyone wanted to participate,” he conceded. “There was one who opposed it, and he left.”

  Hezbollah experienced its first split over the 1992 elections. Sheikh Sobhi Tufayli—the movement’s fiery first secretary-general, who was controversial e
ven within Hezbollah—had bolted. He went off and later formed the rival Revolution of the Hungry.

  During the eight years of its second phase, Hezbollah also began to transform its strongholds in the dahiya and southern Lebanon. It built a major hospital, complete with the latest CAT scan and MRI technology, as well as several clinics, schools, discount pharmacies, groceries, and an orphanage. It built reservoirs in districts where water lines had collapsed or wells had failed; tanker trucks circulated weekly to keep them filled. It started a garbage service for the dahiya, where debris once simply piled up. It ran a reconstruction program for homes damaged during Israel’s 1982 invasion. It supplied school fees and college scholarships. It paid for emergency operations and health insurance stipends. It set up loan funds for small businesses. It ran farms, factories, and cooperatives. It eventually became one of Lebanon’s largest employers.

  In most Shiite strongholds, Hezbollah outperformed the state. Unlike many government agencies, it had a reputation for being frugal, uncorrupt, and organized. Members even bragged that the movement was so disciplined that the Hezbollah soccer team almost never chalked up penalties—in a country where games are notoriously rowdy.24

  Iran propped up Hezbollah, providing most of its initial funds—at least ten million dollars each month in arms, humanitarian goods, and cash, according to many estimates. “Iran stands by Lebanon on all the major issues, the government, the people, the army, the resistance,” Nasrallah told me, although he would not talk specific sums.

  “There are institutions, foundations in Iran that present aid of a social nature, and we run the branches in Lebanon, such as the foundations that take interest in the families of martyrs, and the refugee aid foundations, such as for the needy,” he said. “Iran presents aid and grants at a good level for farmers and for the projects that the farmers do.”

  In the 1990s, Hezbollah also increasingly raised its own funds, reportedly off both legal and illicit activities. Shiites are supposed to pay khums, an Islamic tax equal to one-fifth of their annual income, to their religious leaders for charitable causes. The Shiite Diaspora from Africa to Australia and both the Americas supplied remittances too. At home, “charity boxes” wrapped in bright yellow Hezbollah flags were strategically placed in shops, public facilities, and even at traffic stops.25 Hezbollah’s financial operations were run through the Bayt al-Mal, or House of Money, which in the Arab world was historically the caliph’s royal treasury or a financial institution for distributing taxes for public works. In 2006, the United States charged that the House of Money in Lebanon served as the bank, creditor, and investment arm of Hezbollah. Washington charged that it was under Nasrallah’s direct control, headed by one of his advisers, and used to fund Hezbollah’s services and companies.26

  Hezbollah supporters were also widely reported to be contributing cash off their own criminal activities, such as smuggling—diamonds in Africa, drugs and pirated compact disks in Latin America. Some Lebanese businesses abroad were also reportedly “taxed” by Hezbollah agents to help pay for its charity operations and public services.27 Fundraising was run by the Islamic Resistance Support Organization, the United States charged.

  Its new public services were an enormous boost to the Shiite movement’s local legitimacy. As its focus shifted, so did its language. By 1998, a new “statement of purpose” contrasted with Hezbollah’s inaugural proclamation in 1985.

  If Islam becomes the choice of the majority, then we will apply it. If not, we will continue to coexist…. We hereby affirm that our Islam rejects violence as a method to gain power, and this should be the formula for the non-Islamists as well.

  During its second phase in the 1990s, Hezbollah’s tone about the outside world changed as well. Nasrallah’s new gripe was that the United States provided only paltry foreign aid to Lebanon.

  “It is both ridiculous and ironic for the U.S. ambassador to donate $10,000 to a humanitarian institution or to come to the Bekaa Valley to distribute cows to farmers when the United States is giving Israel three billion dollars annually,” he groused at a 1997 rally in the Bekaa Valley.28

  The atmospherics in Hezbollah’s realm changed too. Baalbek was still a stronghold. Posters of Hezbollah martyrs were still plastered on public sites. But the military presence became less conspicuous. In 1997, the Baalbek Festival resumed after a twenty-two-year break. World-renowned cellist Mstislav Rostropovich played Dvoák under the floodlit Corinthian columns of the world’s largest remaining Roman ruins. Sting, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, and Michael Flatley’s Lord of the Dance were highlighted in subsequent years.

  Hezbollah’s shifts should not be mistaken for moderation. As for all Islamist groups in the Middle East, change has always been about survival of both cause and constituents, about reassessing and revising strategy in response to events around them. Hezbollah adapted because it had to.

  The end of Lebanon’s fifteen-year civil war altered the environment. When wartime Lebanon had no system, it had not mattered that Hezbollah operated outside the state. When a system emerged in peacetime, however, Hezbollah needed to be part of it to convince others of its special role. All militias were supposed to dismantle, according to terms of the final cease-fire. Hezbollah engaged in Lebanese politics in part to win approval to keep its weapons—on grounds that it was the only force capable of challenging Israel’s ongoing occupation. The Party of God’s participation in politics was also part of a joint strategy with Syria and Iran.

  And on Israel, Hezbollah’s raison d’être, Nasrallah’s rhetoric remained venomous.

  In 1998, Ashura commemorations of Hussein’s martyrdom coincided with Israel’s fiftieth anniversary. Nasrallah used the occasion to lambaste Israelis as “the descendants of apes and pigs.

  “A few million vagabonds from all over the world, brought together by their Talmud and Jewish fanaticism, are celebrating their victory over the nation of 1.4 billion Muslims,” he said, in a speech broadcast on television. “It is a tragic, painful, and bitter thing that a small number of people gather in Palestine, dancing and holding celebrations in the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy city [of Jerusalem] to celebrate their great victory over the nation of Mohammed.”29

  Hezbollah launched a small media empire in the 1990s to propagate its vitriolic message. Its new magazine was entitled The Fist of God. Its radio station was called God’s Light. Its modern television station was named al Manar, the Beacon. Most of its programming—news, game shows, kids programs, and docudramas—carried biting and sometimes bizarre propaganda against Israel and the United States.

  Hezbollah TV recruited suicide bombers, aired footage of their attacks, and then ran their pretaped last testaments. Programs appealed to mothers to surrender their sons “knowing that their blood will mix with the soil.” Martial music, Koranic verses, and flag-burnings were staples. Airtime between programs was filled with gruesome graphics. One set of pictures purported to show Jews killing Christian children to use their blood for Passover bread. The Statue of Liberty was re-created as an angry ghoul, her face a skull, a dagger rather than a torch in her hand, her gown dripping with blood.30

  By 2000, Hezbollah TV was beaming worldwide by satellite. Its audience expanded to an estimated ten million viewers daily. It soon ranked as one of the five most popular stations in the Middle East. Besides Arabic, it aired programs in English and French—and Hebrew.

  Hezbollah’s military attacks against Israeli troops in Lebanon also intensified between 1992 and 2000. The battlefield widened; Hezbollah’s strategy diversified.

  To suicide bombings and guerrilla attacks, the Shiite guerrillas added conventional tactics, including the famed Katyusha rocket. Katyusha is a Russian name equivalent to “Katie.” Russian troops named the inaccurate and inexpensive rocket during World War II after a song about young Katyusha pining for her beloved at war. Katyushas are fired individually or in multiple launchers, sometimes on the backs of trucks that can be quickly driven to another location. With deadly impact, the
short-range rockets were also widely used in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. In the 1990s, Iranian cargo flights flew thousands of short-range Katyushas into Damascus to be trucked into Lebanon.31

  In 1993, Hezbollah fired the first Katyusha into northern Israel, broadening the arena of conflict after weeks of tension and provocations by both sides along the border. The fighting became so intense across the border that the United States twice intervened to broker cease-fires, in 1993 and 1996.32

  Hundreds also died in clashes between Hezbollah and Israeli troops in the rocky hills and fields of southern Lebanon in the 1990s. Among the Lebanese casualties in a 1997 clash was Nasrallah’s eighteen-year-old son Hadi. Israel kept his body, as Hezbollah kept the bodies of Israeli troops, to be used in prisoner swaps. Nasrallah’s reaction to news of his oldest son’s death was still noted a decade later by Lebanese from all sects and Arabs of many nations. At a Hezbollah rally that evening in the dahiya, he paused only briefly from his speech to mention it.

  “We in the leadership of Hezbollah do not spare our children and save them for the future,” Nasrallah told a large crowd. “We pride ourselves when our sons reach the front line, and we stand heads held high when they fall as martyrs.”

  Iraq’s deputy prime minister, Barham Salih, a British-educated Kurd and a Sunni whose children were raised in America, brought it up out of the blue in a conversation in 2006. “This impressed me deeply,” Salih told me, shaking his head. “It was a lesson to us all. Nasrallah keeps his word. This is why he has such impact.”

  The arena for resistance also moved beyond the Middle East for the first time. Hezbollah and Iran were linked to two bombings in Argentina: In 1992, an attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires killed twenty-nine. The strike followed Israel’s assassination of Nasrallah’s predecessor; the two events were widely linked. In 1994, a second bombing at an Israeli cultural center killed eighty-five. The cultural center’s library was largely destroyed, including records that had been preserved through the Holocaust.