Meanwhile, what the Israeli government called its “Dahiyeh Doctrine” potentially placed all of Lebanon in its crosshairs if and when another war with Hezbollah broke out.
“The only way to deter the other side and prevent the next round,” IDF Major General Giora Eiland said,12 “or if it happens, to win—is to have a military confrontation with the state of Lebanon.”
“In the end,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in September of 2009,13 “it is the Lebanese government that is responsible for upholding the cease-fire, and we view it as responsible for any violations and aggression directed at us from Lebanese territory.”
A spokesman for his office said essentially the same thing to me personally when I asked, in late January 2010, what Israel intended to do if Hezbollah fired off its missiles again. “Since Hezbollah is now a member of the official Lebanese government,” he said, “the government will be held responsible for any belligerence that Nasrallah might instigate.”
That was the on-the-record response.
I heard off-the-record talk from credible sources in back channels that the Israelis actually intended to target al-Assad’s government instead of Hariri’s. Once in a while, this sort of talk even leaked into the public.
“Not only will you lose the war,” Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said to al-Assad in February of 2010,14 “you and your family will no longer be in power.”
Lieberman was publicly chastised in Israel by his own government after he said that—a not uncommon occurrence. He was a polarizing and at times blustering figure who flirted with extremists, and many Israelis thought he was terrible. Perhaps he let his mouth get in front of his head and tipped off al-Assad when he shouldn’t have. Maybe what he said was not even true. He may have been ordered to say what he said, knowing in advance that it would be retracted, as part of an Israeli good-cop, bad-cop routine. I don’t know. I was never able to nail down the Israeli government’s real intentions toward Syria, Iran, and Lebanon, not even off the record.
There was nothing ambiguous about Hezbollah’s intentions. Its spokesman and leaders said the same things on the record and off.
In December of 2009, Hassan Nasrallah announced the release of a fresh manifesto, the first since Hezbollah’s “Open Letter” in 1985. Its author again displayed reverence for Iran’s Islamic Republic founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, his Velayat-e Faqih ideology, and his successor Ali Khamenei. He denounced Sunni Arabs who resisted Iranian hegemony—which included nearly every Sunni Arab head of state in the world—as Israeli and American tools.
He vehemently denounced the United States, as usual, along with “global capitalism” and its supposed architects, whom he accused of using Israel as a beachhead. Hezbollah again referred to itself as a “resistance” army rather than a terrorist army, reserving that most perfidious of designations for the United States. “American terrorism,” the manifesto said, “is the origin of all terrorism in this world.”
And Hezbollah called once again for the destruction of Israel in its typically belligerent language. Jerusalem, the manifesto said, should be “liberated” from “the cantankerous occupying Zionist.” (I am quoting here from Hezbollah’s own official translation.15)
“There is not a shred of evidence to suggest that these sentiments are intended for the printed page only,” scholar Jonathan Spyer wrote.16 “Indeed, recent visitors to Lebanon speak of a high, almost delusional state of morale among circles affiliated with Hezbollah. In the closed world around the movement, it is sincerely believed that the next war between Israel and Hezbollah will be part of a greater conflict in which Israel will be destroyed. . . . Current events in Lebanon show its local Shia manifestation to be in a state of rude health. It is brushing aside local foes, marching through the institutions, as tactically agile as it is strategically deluded. Yet its latest manifesto suggests that it remains the prisoner of its ideological perceptions. The recent history of the Middle East, meanwhile, indicates that gaps between reality and perception tend to be decided—eventually—in favor of the former.”
Strategically deluded or not, Hezbollah was more capable of wreaking destruction than ever. Israeli and American intelligence sources both claimed Nasrallah had a much bigger and more formidable arsenal than he had during the July War, and Nasrallah concurred. He was now able to hit any and every place in Israel with long-range missiles, meaning that, unlike in 2006, Hezbollah could strike not only the northern cities of Kiryat Shmona and Haifa but also Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion International Airport, and the Dimona nuclear power plant. So while the Arab states, the Western countries, and the United Nations Security Council fretted over Iran’s nuclear weapons program, Ahmadinejad and Khamenei were quietly arming their chief terrorist proxy with more advanced conventional weapons, weapons that by themselves could make the July War look like a bar fight if a new one broke out.
Hezbollah was far more dangerous than any Palestinian terrorist group that had ever been fielded from the West Bank or Gaza, and it was far more dangerous than it had been in the past, when it was already strong enough to wear out the Israelis to a draw. If Israel’s nuclear power plant came under fire, if Tel Aviv skyscrapers exploded from missile attacks, if Hezbollah managed to turn all of Israel into a kill zone where there was no place to run, Israelis may well panic like they hadn’t since the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when it briefly appeared the Egyptian army might overrun the whole country. If that were to happen, they would likely respond with a determination and fury not seen for a generation.
And what of Iran itself?
In the spring of 2010, Ayatollah Mohammad Bagher Kharrazi, head of the Iranian branch of Hezbollah, boasted that Tehran would soon be the capital of a new “Greater Iran,” which he called the Islamic United States.17 This new Persian Empire would stretch from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean and would necessitate the destruction of Israel.
His vision was one of apocalypse. The birth of the Islamic United States, he said, would finally trigger the appearance of the Mahdi, the occluded twelfth Shia imam who has been hidden for more than a thousand years and is destined to return, sword in hand, on Judgment Day, with Jesus Christ at his side, to promote peace and justice in the world by smiting all of God’s enemies.
It was nonsense, of course, but that didn’t mean Kharrazi and his comrades in Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps didn’t believe it.
The Israelis, understandably, felt more threatened by a nucleararmed Iran than anyone else. They were the ones the Iranian leadership threatened to obliterate, whether or not Tehran meant to go through with it. No one could know for sure what the Iranian regime would do with a bomb, nor did anyone know if the Israelis were willing to wait and find out. They hinted that they might destroy the weapons facilities with air strikes, and Hezbollah threatened to retaliate with an epic missile barrage if they did.
A preemptive strike against Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities could instantly trigger a regional war engulfing not only Israel and Iran but also Lebanon, Gaza, and Syria. The Iranians might even retaliate in Iraq and drag an unwilling United States into the fight. It has been a long time since the Middle East has experienced a war on so large a scale and involving so many countries at once, but it was shaping up as a real possibility.
Christopher Hitchens still walked with a limp from our run-in with the Syrian Social Nationalist Party when he decided to attend a rally in the dahiyeh commemorating Hezbollah’s deceased military commander Imad Mughniyeh, who was killed the previous year by a car bomb in Damascus. Our mutual friend and colleague James Kirchick went with him. I was invited to join them, but I had an appointment on Mount Lebanon that I couldn’t cancel. What Hitchens and Kirchick saw at that rally gave them the chills.
They told me all about it at the bar in the lobby of the Bristol Hotel, and Hitchens reported it in Vanity Fair.18
“Try picturing a Shia Muslim mega-church,” he wrote, “in a huge downtown tent, with separate entrances for men
and women and separate seating (with the women all covered in black). A huge poster of a nuclear mushroom cloud surmounts the scene, with the inscription OH ZIONISTS, IF YOU WANT THIS TYPE OF WAR THEN SO BE IT!”
This was, to the best of my knowledge, the first time Hezbollah, or any other terrorist group for that matter, seconded the Iranian government’s threat of nuclear war.
“There is keening and wailing,” Hitchens continued, “while the aisles are patrolled by gray-uniformed male stewards and black-chador’d crones. Key words keep repeating themselves with thumping effect: shahid (martyr), jihad (holy war), yehud (Jew). In the special section for guests there sits a group of uniformed and bemedaled officials representing the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Was the Lebanese government aware of just how much trouble Hezbollah was threatening to bring down on everyone’s heads? I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. Lebanon had come full circle. After temporarily freeing itself from Syrian overlordship, it had been effectively reconquered by proxy.
The idealistic young people and their more cautious elders who descended on Martyrs Square in 2005 set the agenda for a while, but despite their electoral victory, they had been replaced with fanatics and their bloodthirsty cries of shahid, jihad, yehud. Beirut in 2005 wasn’t Berlin in 1989. It was Budapest in 1956.
Hitchens sat on his bar stool at the Bristol and told bawdy scotchsoaked jokes to the waitress and a circle of colleagues. She found him charming and laughed heartily, as did I. But when I took a sip from my glass of Johnny Walker Black Label, Lebanon’s portentous prewar feeling drowned out the gaiety. I savored the slow alcohol burn as I closed my eyes, slowly exhaled, and wondered how long it would be this time before the blood, fire, and mayhem returned, dreading the fact that the next round might be the worst, hoping it would be the last.
EPILOGUE
death to the dictator
Iran’s Shia farm must be shut down, and its residents set free.
—ABU KAIS
After Iran’s presidential election on June 12, 2009, the Islamic Republic regime vividly revealed itself as an enemy of the people.
The whole thing was a sham from the start. Neither voters nor independent political parties were allowed to choose the four candidates. Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei handpicked them all.
The incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, severely damaged Iran’s image abroad with his buffoonish Holocaust denial, his sinister threats to annihilate Israel, and even a creepy televised appearance at Columbia University in New York where he absurdly denied that any gay people lived in Iran. The country was in ghastly condition, the economy was on its back, and the religious authorities were bullying and harassing everyday people more than they had in years.
A mass movement of citizens desperate for change rallied behind Ahmadinejad’s most viable opponent, Mir Hossein Mousavi. He was Iran’s prime minister during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s and a creature of the regime as Ahmadinejad was, but he seemed to have a moderate streak in him, at least by comparison. Many, if not most, of his supporters were considerably more liberal-minded than he was, but they backed him because he seemed the best of a sorry lot and might better their lives by a few increments.
Mousavi branded himself with the color green, and his supporters strung up green ribbons and flags all over Tehran during the campaign’s final days. Iran almost looked like a democracy then, even if most in the Green Movement would have rallied behind a different standard-bearer had they been given the chance.
The carefully crafted illusion of a semidemocratic Iran did not last but weeks.
Ahmadinejad was declared the winner without a single vote being counted. Villages, towns, cities, and entire regions of the country that overwhelmingly backed Mousavi were said to have elected Ahmadinejad in a landslide, even in Iranian Kurdistan, where support for him was weakest. The announcement was beyond incredible, as if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney won San Francisco and Berkeley in a rout.
Iran exploded. Millions of furious citizens took to the streets and demanded their votes be counted. Tehran briefly looked a little like Beirut on March 14, 2005, but that didn’t last. The government sicced thousands of heavily armed riot policemen and plainclothes Basij militia thugs on the demonstrators. Rumors quickly spread that the authorities even imported Arabic-speaking club-wielders from Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Foreign correspondents on journalist visas were hardly allowed to leave their hotel rooms, but local people recorded hundreds of videos of enormous crowds of antigovernment protesters with handheld cameras and uploaded them onto the Internet. Their videos were seen all over the world, first on YouTube and later on news programs like CNN and the BBC. The government organized rallies in support of itself but was caught using software to alter images that made its loyal subjects appear more numerous than they were.1
Few in Tehran seriously believed Ahmadinejad won in the capital, but some thought he still had lots of support in the conservative countryside. Even that idea was swiftly debunked, however, by Eric Hooglund at the Tehran Bureau website.2
“Take Bagh-e Iman, for example,” he wrote. “It is a village of 850 households in the Zagros Mountains near the southwestern Iranian city of Shiraz. According to longtime, close friends who live there, the village is seething with moral outrage because at least two-thirds of all people over 18 years of age believe that the recent presidential election was stolen by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. When news spread on Saturday (June 13) morning that Ahmadinejad had won more than 60 percent of the vote cast the day before, the residents were in shock.”
Foreign journalists were banned outright after their visas expired. I planned to visit myself on a tourist visa, which would have allowed me to work with fewer restrictions if I was careful not to get caught, but I was strongly advised by colleagues who knew Iran better than I did that it would be a terrible idea now that the country was in turmoil. The government was more paranoid and aggressive than it had been in more than a decade.
Nearly lost in all the media coverage was the fact that one faction of the Iranian establishment had just clobbered the others. Journalist and professional Iran watcher Kevin Sullivan at RealClearPolitics called it a coup.3
“Iran hawks prefer to label the Iranian police state as simply ‘The Mullahs,’” he wrote, “but the legitimate clerics in this dispute are the ones standing with Mir Hossein Mousavi against one mullah and his secular police apparatus. If the election has been rigged in such a fashion, then what you are in fact seeing is the dropping of religious pretense in the ‘Islamic’ Republic of Iran. This is a secular police state in action.”
Danielle Pletka and Ali Alfoneh at the American Enterprise Institute published a piece in the New York Times detailing how Ahmadinejad spent the previous four years placing Revolutionary Guard Corps officers in positions of power all over the country. He and Khamenei heeded warnings by guard commanders that the Islamic Republic might eventually succumb to a “soft regime change” or an “orange revolution” if hard-liners failed to seize firm control of the country.
“In the most dramatic turnabout since the 1979 revolution,” they wrote,4 “Iran has evolved from theocratic state to military dictatorship.”
Days passed, demonstrations overwhelmed much of the capital, and the government stepped up its internal repression. Activists were shot dead in the streets and taken to Evin Prison, where they were tortured, raped, and sometimes executed. Civilians on the streets, even women, fought back against the riot police and Basij militiamen with their hands.
The country was paralyzed, and the longer it dragged on, the less it looked like a mere series of protests. “We can say,” Iran expert Michael Ledeen wrote,5 “at least for the moment, there is a revolutionary mass in the streets of Tehran.”
Ahmadinejad and Khamenei must have been terrified. Ever since 1979, “Death to America” was the Iranian rallying cry. Not all Iranians felt such antipathy to the “Great Satan,” of course, and fewer felt this way over time
. Many younger Iranians weren’t old enough to remember the heady days of the revolution and the anger at America for supporting the Shah, and they never felt particularly hostile toward the United States. “Death to America” remained the rallying cry even so, even after the fire had mostly gone out.
But now the government—or at least one part of the government—brazenly and contemptuously defied the wishes of the Iranian people and proved, once and for all, that it, not the United States, was the enemy.
Thousands climbed onto the roofs of their houses and apartment buildings and screamed “Allahu Akbar,” the war cry of 1979, and “Marg bar diktator,” or Death to the dictator. Somebody uploaded a chilling video to YouTube showing the skyline of Tehran at three o’clock in the morning. You could hear the whole city screaming, the sound like a stadium roar, in defiance and rage at the state.
Suddenly, an alternative future presented itself, one that was not clear from Beirut as Hezbollah dug in for war. Another horrific round of armed conflict in the Levant might not be inevitable after all if Iranian citizens could replace their regime with something more moderate, more civilized, and perhaps even democratic and liberal. A new regime in Iran could radically transform the region by kneecapping terrorist armies created and funded by the Islamic Republic.
Walid Jumblatt understood perfectly well that his country’s Hezbollah problem could not be resolved in Beirut. “The solution is not in Lebanon,” he told me before he was forced to surrender. “The solution is in Tehran.”
The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel Page 34
