Hizbullah article appears
The article on Hizbullah that I worked on over the Christmas holiday weeks has finally come out. It's in the April-May issue of Boston Review.
Knowing that the text would look a little outdated by the time it came out, I'd begged the copy editor to put a date at the bottom of the piece, which I think is a very classy way of "signing off". To no avail. For your information I signed off on that text on March 18th or so.
I also asked 'em to put a reference to JWN in my tag-line (the two-line piece of biographical identifier they use there.) Again, no dice. Oh well, next time.
Anyway, I don't mean to carp. I always love working with the folks at BR. Josh Cohen, one of the Editors, is a brillant and widely published theoretician of democracy who has also been the chair of the departments of both Politics and Philosophy at MIT. Deb Chasman, the other Editor, is another really great person to work with. Working with super-competent editors is a real joy. (Yes, even when they cut one-third of the my original draft out "for length reasons"...) There aren't many great editors out there-- people who really work with a writer to hone the meaning of the words, the balance of the sentence structure, the flow of the meta-narrative, and the broad thrust of the argument.
Josh Friedman, the Managing Editor, was also good to work with. (Even though he did cut out my footnotes completely. My footnotes! Imagine!)
Well, in case any of you wants to delve into my footnotes, I'm going to upload the last footnoted version I have on my desktop-- from February 12. That was two days before Rafiq Hariri was killed, so it underwent a bit of updating between then and March 18th. But if you're a footnote sleuth as I am, you might enjoy some of these ones. Here it is.
From the point of view of reconstituting the nation of Lebanon, disarming and absorbing Hizbullah would seem to be quite important, yet Helena's CSM article doesn't take that point of view.
Further, the impending nuclearization of Iran, which believes in the liquidation of Israel, and the alliance between Iran and the suicide bombers of Hizbullah, clearly warrants urgent world attention and the regularization of the entire Lebanese Shiite community within greater Lebanon. Helena has somehow not thought of this threat to world peace.
We all must clearly be suspicious that Hizbullah is putting on it's "Democratic face" to preserve its maneuvering room until it can get its hands on nukes from Iran. That Hamas is behaving in a similar manner supports the idea that this democratization is part of a grand strategy. Helena has also neglected to mention these possibilities.
In the past, Hizbullah has been willing and able to kill hundreds of people at a time in Lebanon and as far afield as Argentina. Helena should be worried that Hizbullah would set off nukes even in Virginia. Instead, Helena publishes an article that has the overall effect of muting any and all concerns with Hizbullah, by concentrating on the domestic support it provides to the Lebanese.
I think portraying Hizbullah as a water company is, well, weak.
WW, I can appreciate that many people have very grave and quite reasonable fears about Hizbullah. (Though your specter of them setting off nukes in Virginia-- or even acquiring nukes at all-- strikes me as just a tad far-fetched.) In the piece, I tried to be sensitive to such fears in general, and also to point out there were reasons that lebanon's Shiites have very grave and quite reasonable fears fears about US and especially about Israeli policy...
I guess my main point is that given the existence of these reciprocated fears, and given the fact that neither of these broad "sides" is going to disappear, where then can they meet? Meeting on the battlefield has been tried (primarily by Israel), and caused enormous amounts of loss, harm, and suffering, and took the Israelis back exactly to where they were prior to 1982 (i.e. gained them, in terms of their relationship with Lebanon, absolutely nothing.)
Meeting on the field of a democratic encounter in which both sides are respectful and disciplined strikes me as far better.
Thanks for a very informative article. It filled in a lot of detail to the history I was generally aware of. Not mentioned was the nasty war fought between Hizbullah and Amal, or Musa Sadr, the "missing imam" who worked hard to activate a sleepy shia' community.
I will try not to be rude, but the fact that someone thinks that Hizbullah would detonate a nuclear bomb in Virginia is scary to me. The clerical hierarchy (which firmly controls Hizbullah) would never allow it. This is the source of their restraint, and Hizbullah's evolution from tribally based street gangs to what it is today represents a success for forward thinking clerics. That is why Lebanon represents a working model for Najaf to emulate as it assumes political power in Iraq. There is a lot of affection between Iraqi and Lebanese Shia', and the ties are actually deeper than with Iran. It would be very problematic for the U.S. to meddle too much with Hizbullah, as relations with the Iraqi Shia' community would impacted in a very negative way.
The dogma of Hizbullah that you cover in your "Hating Israel" section overwhelms everything else about Hizbullah. As you point out Hizbullah has the explicit goal of "obliterating the State of Israel". In light of that Israel has every right to see Hizbullah as a dire threat to its existence. The rhetoric of Nasrallah's comments about Sheikh Yassin are horrific, evoking images of a Second Holocaust to annihilate Israel, with Hizbullah's admirers cheering it on.
Any talk of democratic encounters with Hizbullah has to start with the complete repudiation of that core dogma. How can anyone talk about Hizbullah acting "respectful and disciplined" with such a monstrous belief at its heart? At the end of your section you talk about how Hizbullah is effectively deterred and that Nasrallah is too pragmatic to follow through with his horror. That's not good enough. Hizbullah can't get away with apparently acting restrained toward Israel but saying it wants to destroy it; how absurdly contradictory. Trusting that deterrence will keep Hizballuh in line is playing Russian Roulette with the situation; there'll never be a bullet in the barrel.
In light of this stance all the social work Hizbullah has done is meaningless. It's bribery of the people. I believe in New York the Gambino crime family used to make a lot of contributions to youth centers in areas where it operated. That's one reason why John Gotti would always get cheers. People should have access to this health care and education, but it's a catastrophe to accept this as payment for a deal with the devil where the people rally behind Hizbullah's apocalyptic vision.
For Hizbullah to repudiate those that brand it a terror group it has to completely renounce its goal to obliterate Israel. A renouncement of that goal would not mean an abandonment of the Palestinian people. It would not absolve Israel of any injustices its government has committed over these years. It would not mean that Israel can annex the West Bank and Gaza. Israel and the US must acknowledge the fears Lebanese have about any threat to them. But the core ideology of the destruction of Israel has to go. Otherwise Hizbullah deserves its condemnation as a terrorist group, no matter how many people they brainwash into sheeple in their social service centers.
Thanks for hearing me out.
The sad irony here is that the southern Lebanese Shia' were not Israel haters until they were occupied. But after sacrificing the blood of their sons and daughters to liberate their own land, what can one expect? It's not like Israel has offered to pay reparations.
The rhetoric that Hizbullah uses is common across the middle east, and it is what the masses want to hear. Imagine if the Arab world actually does experience a democratic transformation. But one thing is clear: This is a political issue, not a military one. Their military mandate ends at the Israeli border.
"Further, the impending nuclearization of Iran,...."
I want to know, are Iran's nuclear bombs invisible like Iraq's - or are they the visible kind like USA and Israel?
I'm pretty convinced they are the invisible ones, but not as convinced as I was about Iraq's WMDs.
lake powell