Center for a New American Security

Charlie awoke to find this email from The Namesake this morning (it seems he's forgotten how to lovingly write in the 3rd person since leaving the world famous blog):Charlie,

I was flipping through the archives here in Beirut this morning and came across this absolute gem by Robert Fisk. I'm sure the blog's readership will love it.

"ARIEL SHARON has done it again. ... Israel's new Prime Minister is accusing the Iranians of transferring new long-range missiles to Lebanon - capable, so he claims, of hitting the centre of Israel - and accusing Syria of using Lebanon's airports to transfer these fantasy missiles. It's important to use the word fantasy. In the hundreds of miles I travel across Lebanon every month, I have yet to see a long-range missile, let alone a transporter. Satellite pictures would easily identify such a rocket and Beirut airport is these days so hide-bound with security that you couldn't move a rifle through its terminal."
- Robert Fisk, The Independent (London), 30 March 2001.

Well! If Robert Fisk says they don't exist, they don't exist. Right? Because the odds of one of the world's most secretive guerrilla organizations being able to hide an advanced weapons system from Robert Fisk and his trusty driver Abed are approximately 0.00/1,000. You have no secrets that you can hide from Robert Fisk, Hassan Nasrallah, so don't even bother trying. He knows where you are right this very minute, in fact, and is coming to interview you this evening after he drives his obligatory hundred miles around the Bekaa Valley. (You're in Zahle today, right? Having ice cream? Fisk knew that. He also knows you summer in Ehden. No one else would have guessed that, but Fisk did.)

That 600mm Zelzal-2 (max. range 210km*) Hizballah tried to launch in 2006, by the way, must have been a special fantasy Zelzal-2. That was probably also a fantasy F-15 that the IAF claimed destroyed said fantasy Zelzal-2 in July 2006 and a fantasy Iranian official who admitted in August 2006 to supplying Hizballah with such fantasy weaponry.

*Or, for those of you who can't do the metric conversion, "capable of hitting the center of Israel."

Courtesy of this blog's namesake*, some quality commentary on the Israel-Hezbollah deal that took place last week (Charlie is derelict in posting, AM was, as always, very timely in providing good Hezbollah gouge):

From Ha'aretz:
Hezbollah has been touting the prisoner exchange deal with Israel as confirmation that the Shi'ite militant group ultimately defeated Israel in the Second Lebanon War, but the swap is at least as much of a Hezbollah victory within Lebanon.

From Slate:
Israel is a society in which everyone knows everyone, in which every soldier's fate matters to every citizen. It is a society that demands that every young man and woman perform military service, a society in which a state of war is a 60-year habit, in which national solidarity is always an existential question. For such a society, looking into the eyes of the father or wife of a kidnapped soldier and telling them that the price is just too high is something no leader is able to do. So, in the case of Israel—a country with a never-ending need for public trust in the military—the "emotional" can be the most "calculated" approach of them all.

From The Guardian:
The implications for Lebanon are striking too. It was Hizbullah, not the Lebanese government, which won the release of these prisoners, who will be greeted as national heroes by the country's president, prime minister and other leaders at Beirut airport.

"The result is that Hizbullah emerges as the force in Lebanon that can deliver, thereby perpetuating an important political dynamic — of the non-state actor which functions as the de facto state versus the state non-actor which merely enjoys the status of de jure state," analyst Amal Saad-Ghorayeb wrote on the openDemocracy website.

*Charlie's of half a mind to start referring to AM as "The Namesake." Objections?

Will someone please explain how Hassan Nasrallah's speech today (full text here, in Arabic) was intelligent in any way? Tactically, strategically, or even rhetorically? Because the early headlines are claiming Hizbollah supports "the resistance" in Iraq, and sure enough, Sayyid Hassan gave his blessing to "كل المقاومين العراقيين" ("all the Iraqi resistance fighters"). This makes it sound as if Hizbollah is lending its moral support to even the hardcore Qaeda-allied terrorists in Iraq. (And we can be pretty sure they're not inviting any Shia over for Friday dinner anytime soon.) That's certainly the way it's going to be interpreted in the West. And that begs the question: has Hizbollah lost it? Have they completely given up on the hope of ever being seen by the West as anything more than gun-toting thugs and terrorists? Or has the famously media savvy organization grown a tin ear in the past two years?

It used to be, prior to 2006, that Hizbollah was relatively open and eager to showcase their social programs to visiting journalists and researchers. But since the 2006 war, the party seems to have clammed up. And they seem to be making more and more dumb decisions, even if they are -- militarily and politically -- stronger than ever before. Because why on Earth would you...

a) celebrate the funeral of the second-most notorious terrorist in the world, Imad Mughniyeh, after denying any connection to the man and his acts for two decades and

b) give the United States and the rest of the Western nations one more reason to think of new and inventive ways to screw over you and your ~1.4-million strong constituency by talking in such a way as to make it sound as if you think al-Qaeda in Iraq is a swell organization full of heroic freedom-fighters?

(Note, though, that while Nasrallah called upon the government of Iraq to throw out the American occupation forces he also, implicitly, recognized that government's legitimacy. Kinda talking out of both sides of his bearded mouth if you ask us.)

Update: Gang, Abu Muqawama very much realizes Nasrallah's target audience here was Lebanese and other Arabs -- not Americans. (The first clue was that the speech was in Arabic.) But c'mon, folks. Lessons in strategic communication and public diplomacy apply to all sides. By now, even President Bush is smart enough to know that when he addresses Americans, other people are listening intently. So he should be careful about the language he uses. (Note to self: Do not refer to the Iraq War as a "crusade.") The State of the Union Address is broadcast on al-Jazeera, for goodness sake. In the same way that Western officials must be conscious of how their words will be spun and interpreted in the East, Hizbollah's leaders should be smart enough to be conscious of the way their words and speeches are going to be interpreted in the West. And if they're not -- or are consciously no longer making the effort -- what does that mean?

Apparently, Sir Alex Ferguson reads Abu Muqawama and -- because of us -- now thinks it's appropriate to call Real Madrid fascista. Which is awesome. Because whenever you can slur a football team by pointing out they were Franco's favorite team, you should do so. Often. And really, is there any doubt about who the notoriously left-wing Boy from Govan would have fought for in the Spanish Civil War?

In other news, check out this video of Hizbollah's show of force through the streets of Beirut. There are two things here worth pointing out:

1. The way in which Hizbollah gunmen hang out the windows like it's the %$#@ing Dukes of Hazzard. We can all agree this is awesome. (Has anyone seen Tom Wopat recently? Might he be in Lebanon?)

2. The way in which the vast majority of Hizbollah's vehicles are American-made SUVs. Seriously, this looks like the valet parking at a GOP convention. Abu Muqawama salutes Hizbollah for buying American. He can't condone those anti-American scooters they ride around in at the end of the video, though. You wouldn't be caught dead on one of those in Grundy Co., Tennessee, that's for sure.

geopolitique.com claims to have obtained a map of Hizbollah's telecommunications network. Abu Muqawama can't vouch for the veracity of this map, but it makes sense, roughly.

There are rival articles on the new realities in Lebanon in the New York Times and Washington Post today. Both speak of a massive Hizbollah victory but ask, at what cost?

At 9:30 p.m., residents said, Hezbollah's fighters were ambushed by Druze villagers in their heartland, some of whom, until that moment, had stood on opposite sides of the 18-month-long crisis, divided by politics and leadership. For perhaps the first time in Hezbollah's history, it had deployed as an army of conquest rather than an insurgent band, fighting Israel, that could exploit its own terrain and the support of its people.

Two hours later, residents said, its fighters were trapped on the Israeli-built road. Furious mediation secured their release, and, by 4 a.m., they began withdrawing.

"We're going to die in our village. We're never going to leave it," said Nadia Assaf, a 22-year-old resident of Niha, surveying the scene of the battle from a Druze shrine for the prophet Job. "It learned the lesson that it'll be defeated on our land."

The words were the same as those uttered by countless Shiite villagers in the 2006 war with Israel, when it invaded Hezbollah's stronghold in southern Lebanon.

Few missed that irony: "Hezbollah may gain a lot in terms of power. It certainly has the upper hand," said Salem, the analyst. "But it has lost a lot in terms of image."

In the eyes of many Lebanese, the resistance is now an occupying power. How will Hizbollah -- which has in the past divided the world into the oppressors and the oppressed -- adjust to the ugly new reality where they are seen as the former?

After this week's bad experience with Tom Friedman's column on the situation in Lebanon, Abu Muqawama was bracing for more stupidity when David Brooks started his column off by saying that Obama's statement on Lebanon had a "whiff of appeasement" about it. But since David Brooks is as a conservative writer intellectually responsible in the same way that Bret "Let's Bomb The Damascus Airport" Stephens is intellectually honest, Brooks actually called Obama for clarification.

The U.S. needs a foreign policy that “looks at the root causes of problems and dangers.” Obama compared Hezbollah to Hamas. Both need to be compelled to understand that “they’re going down a blind alley with violence that weakens their legitimate claims.” He knows these movements aren’t going away anytime soon (“Those missiles aren’t going to dissolve”), but “if they decide to shift, we’re going to recognize that. That’s an evolution that should be recognized.”

Obama being Obama, he understood the broader reason I was asking about Lebanon. Everybody knows that Obama is smart (and he was quite well informed about Lebanon). The question is whether he’s seasoned and tough enough to deal with implacable enemies.

“The debate we’re going to be having with John McCain is how do we understand the blend of military action to diplomatic action that we are going to undertake,” he said. “I constantly reject this notion that any hint of strategies involving diplomacy are somehow soft or indicate surrender or means that you are not going to crack down on terrorism. Those are the terms of debate that have led to blunder after blunder.”

Obama said he found that the military brass thinks the way he does: “The generals are light-years ahead of the civilians. They are trying to get the job done rather than look tough.”

Amen. The biggest problem Abu Muqawama -- along with many military officers, past and present -- has with neo-conservatives is their naive, childlike faith in the ability of military power to solve problems on its own. Abu Muqawama suspects Obama is right when he talks about there being a disconnect between the generals and the civilians. Abu Muqawama suspects some of the military leadership is horrified by the bluster and tough talk they hear from the civilian leadership. You can't talk yourself into a rhetorical corner to the point where direct military action is the only card you have left on the table. Force -- or the threat of force -- must be partnered with engagement. Where you strike the balance between the two is a key question.

That's partly why Bush's comments yesterday about talking to "extremists and radicals" being appeasement was, as Senator Biden said, bullshit. First off, you don't carry domestic foreign policy debates into the Knesset. And second, we're not talking to radicals now? Well, we better withdraw our embassies from every communist country on Earth, then, starting with China.

As much as Abu Muqawama admires Bob Gates and some of the adults who have been brought in during the later years of this presidency, he'll be happy to see the President go. Talking with people who have radically different ideologies, after all, should be part of the job description of any U.S. Secretary of State. Abu Muqawama understands you can't do it in such a way as to grant legitimacy to those who deserve none, but if you look at the people we spoke with to broker peace in Anbar -- or the people the British spoke with to broker peace in Northern Ireland -- we're talking about some pretty bad people.

Hell, despite what he says now, even John McCain would talk to Hamas...

Update: This. Is. Hilarious. Watch from around four minutes...

"Despite its rhetoric, Hizbollah knows that its military resistance would be terminated once Israel withdraws from South Lebanon." -- Hala Jaber, 1997

Okay, Abu Muqawama has no idea how long this video will remain up on YouTube, but this is a video of some Future Movement gunmen kicking and torturing wounded opposition fighters in Halba, North Lebanon. This video is not for the faint of heart.

There is torture and hostage-taking and unlawful killings taking place, it has been reported, on all sides in this latest Lebanese conflict. But unlike the civil war from 1975-1990 that featured some truly grisly massacres and stories of torture, this fighting is taking place in the age of the camera phone. What effect will this have on the battle? Will combatants of the other side view these videos, and will these videos encourage them to similarly mistreat the wounded and hostages? And from a geo-political angle, will March 14th's supporters in Washington see this video and think twice about funding a group whose militiamen are going to do such things? What effect will these kinds of videos have on external sponsors? (Abu Muqawama doesn't think the rulers in Tehran or Damascus could care less about this stuff, so Hizbollah and Amal can probably rest easy. But these kinds of videos don't go over well in representative democracies where congressmen and ministers of parliament can pull the plug on funding.)

Update I: "The U.S. has failed in Lebanon and they have to admit it. We have to wait and see the new rules which Hizbollah, Syria, and Iran will set. They can do what they want." - Walid Jumblatt
Update II: Hizbollah captures strategically important village in the Chouf. At this point, is there any place in Lebanon that Hizbollah would want to go/control but cannot? And at what point does the resistance become occupier? How will Hizbollah cope with and spin that dynamic?

Nir Rosen sent along this description of what it was like to patrol on the streets of Hamra with Hizbollah following their victory in West Beirut: "It felt just like being on patrol with young American soldiers in Dora in December. They operated that well, moved that well, and were as young as American soldiers on their first tour."

Meanwhile, fighting continues in the mountains east and south of Beirut. There are reports of heavy fighting near Tripoli as well. Overall, the March 14th forces have been taking one hell of a beating. Abu Muqawama has been searching for comment on the fighting from some of March 14th's strongest supporters in Washington, and he accordingly read David Schenker's piece for the Washington Institute. David has been a resolute supporter of March 14th, but he is intellectually honest, and his assessment of U.S. policy options seems, to this blogger, quite accurate:

Regardless of what drove the timing of the standoff, it appears the government miscalculated. Sadly, for Washington, there are few realistic policy options to reverse the Hizballah coup. It is highly unlikely that the UN -- which failed to even prevent the rearming of Hizballah -- would agree to more dangerous deployments in Lebanon.

David then pins his hopes on the Lebanese Army, but it seems to Abu Muqawama that, if anything, the Lebanese Army has sided with Hizbollah in the fighting. That is to say, they can obviously see Hizbollah is the strongest side and they've basically stayed out of it, happy to act as peace-keepers once the fighting has already reached some sort of conclusion but unwilling to step in between the two sides. Does this square with what everyone else is thinking, or no?

If you want to read stuff from hard-core March 14th supporters, check out Michael Totten's blog where Michael, Lee Smith, and Tony Badran (and David Wurmser) have all been blogging on the situation in Lebanon and policy options there. Oddly, Lee -- who Abu Muqawama likes very much and met in Lebanon, in 2005 -- seems more worked up right now over whether or not Obama might be less pro-March 14th than President Bush and not paying all that much attention to the fighting in Lebanon that might be making it more and more difficult to ... support March 14th.

But maybe this blogger is wrong. After all, it's not as if the U.S. government is going to suddenly switch horses and become pro-Hizbollah, right? So the question for the readership is: Given the events of the past week, what should America's policy be toward Lebanon? Should it change? And if so, how?

(Abu Muqawama is genuinely stumped here, so all answers are welcome.)

Update: Watch the BBC get shot at in what Abu Muqawama is guessing is the Chouf.
Update II: Read/Listen to Nick Blanford's report for the Christian Science Monitor. His article in the London Times today suggested he had been on the phone talking with Walid Bey at some point, though Abu Muqawama is guessing he has been reporting from behind Hizbollah's "lines." Stay safe, Nick!
Update III: Borzou Daragahi -- who used to write wonderful reports from Iraq for the Los Angeles Times -- has an article today from Beirut talking about American-led efforts to create a Sunni militia in Lebanon. What a militia that was! How much money did the U.S. spend to create a militia who threw down their weapons and ran when Hizbollah invaded their neighborhoods?
Update IV: At least Jumblatt's Druze fought in the Chouf. Reuters is reporting 14 Hizbollah militiamen were killed. Wasn't it Jumblatt who was always saying "The war of the mountain is finished" with respect to the war between the Maronites and Druze following the Israeli withdrawal in the 1980s? Well, I guess Round II is finished now too. Seriously, though, studies have shown the Lebanese militias always fought best when on their home turf, and though this one will go in the "L" column for the PSP, at least they put up a better fight than Sheikh Saad's Hamra All-Stars.