New steps by Hizballah

A recent article from the Washington Post says that Hizballah has redeployed its long-range rockets "deep into northern Lebanon and the Bekaa valley"--that is, away from the southern border with Israel--which would mean conflicts between Hizballah and Israel would now involve a much broader territorial swath of Lebanon, probably forcing a conflict between the two states (or a crackdown by the Lebanese government on Hizballah, which seems unlikely, though I would be fascinated to see how that would play out--it would be very tricky PR for the government and a very interesting test of the rebuilt Lebanese army).

This is an interesting development for its own sake, but particularly so coming fairly quickly after Hizballah's announcement of its new political platform, which has been received by most observers as a sign of moderation and a swing away from militiadom and toward full-fledged political party status. Qifa Nabki agrees.

Nabki in particular is not necessarily saying that this represents a moderation or a path toward full political engagement and military quiescence, but that is a sense I get from much of the commentary. I didn't quite buy this notion at the time and I still don't. Hizballah is and has been a political movement for a few years now; they are also, at the same time, a guerrilla fighting force. I don't think they have any plans to give up either end of the operation, because what they are is, in fact, something different from either of these characterizations. I'll wait to talk more about what that is after I've actually written my thesis, but this is what it's about.

In addition, I find this bit from the WaPo article interesting:

Hezbollah "learned their lesson" in 2006, when vital intelligence enabled the Israel Defense Forces to destroy the group's long-range launch sites in the first days of the conflict, said reserve Gen. Aharon Zeevi Farkash, a former head of IDF intelligence. In effect, he said, "the 'border' is now the Litani River," with Hezbollah's rocket sites possibly extending north of Beirut.

It's an interesting statement because the original objective of Israel's 1978 intervention into Lebanon was to make the Litani river the actual border (see Benny Morris's Righteous Victims). The notion of annexing Lebanon south of the Litani and leaving the rest for a Christian Maronite state that would enter an alliance of religious minorities with Israel in a sea of Arab Muslims goes back to David Ben Gurion.

I have no way of knowing if it was Gen. Farkash's intention to reference this particular tradition. If it was, it's an unfortunate reference to make on the public record (or at all, one would like to think). Either way, his statement seems to interpret Hizballah's move as a defensive one, a form of retreat. This is inaccurate. It represents, as most other observers have concluded, Hizballah's confidence in its penetration of greater areas of Lebanon and its aim to strategically invest more of Lebanon in its endeavors, rather than remaining limited to the South. (Of course, the Bekaa is and has been a Hizballah stronghold for years, but as far as I know this represents a new level of military investment.)

I'm interested to see what Hizballah's next move is.

The revolution will be socially networked

The Iranian election and subsequent protests have been fascinating and heartwrenching. I wish I knew more about Iran, but I really only know the basics--my focus has been on Levantine Arab countries.

At any rate, what's going on right now is history in the making. (I wonder how many theses will be written on these clashes--even if the protesters are unsuccessful--a few years from now. Get me out of academia.) Basically, it seemed like the reformist challenger, Mousavi, was probably going to win. Supporters had been in the streets for days. Then the initial election results were confusing, muddied, and then started to just look funny with a ridiculous margin for Ahmedinejad. At this point, it's pretty clear the election was stolen. It seems the regime has abandoned appearances altogether and is just going for broke. Mousavi is under house arrest, people are screaming and marching and bleeding in the streets. I don't know where this is going to go.

A "victory for the Iranian people," Ahmedinejad has called it. In a sense, he's right: the regime would have been far better off allowing Mousavi to win and curry favor with the U.S. and others while the nuclear project plugged away and the theocracy got some street cred. The ridiculously ham-handed way they've done this has made the fiction impossible. If they crack down hard enough and people give up, then they will have won a huge authoritarian victory, as Digby describes here. If they fail to do so...who knows? The whole thing would be cracked wide open. So whether Ahmedinejad's coronation is a victory for the people or not, it's definitely not good for Ayatollah Khameini. (This begs the question of what on earth Khameini thinks he's doing at the moment, other than panicking--this is in large part his doing--but this is the sort of thing those theses I mentioned will be dealing with. The data's not there now and may not be for years.)

So far he has been congratulated by the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizbullah (if I remember correctly), and...Syria. I don't know if Syria anticipated being out in front alone like that; I wonder if they'll regret it. I have no idea how this will affect Iran's regional clout or the way Arabs view the country. I simply don't know enough about this topic to speculate in any remotely worthwhile manner.

The regime seems to have blocked cellphones and many websites, but Twitter and Youtube keep updating with reports and footage of protests, police brutality, statements by both sides, and so on. Here are some resources:

The NYTimes Lede Blog

Andrew Sullivan

niacINsight

Nico Pitney at HuffPo

Juan Cole with Top Pieces of Evidence the election was stolen.

Should Bush be tried for war crimes?

AOL of all places is hosting a poll on whether Bush should be tried for war crimes. Here are the current results:



I find the disparity between "yes" and "no" disappointing but not surprising. I do think that the list of which particular states ended up in the "yes" column contains some surprises, though (click See State Results and allow the pop-up): Alaska? North Dakota? (Admittedly I know nothing about ND politics). Hawaii, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Maine are obvious candidates for the "yes" column, and one could argue perhaps that the demographics in any state more likely to vote "yes" are also less likely to patronize AOL, but regardless I'd be interested to see what Nate Silver would have to say about this--or, preferably, about a more rigorous and methodologically sound poll.

Tin-eared

...and on the heels of Ehud Olmert's bizarre confessional, the Israeli parliamentary election committee bans Arab political parties from participating in the upcoming elections.

I don't understand how an entire country, apparently, could suddenly be overtaken by political tone-deafness. I mean, the last party to be banned from elections was the party that advocated for expulsion of Arabs from Israel. Does that not suggest to Labor, Kadima, and the other parties that supported this that this might be a bad plan? Especially in the context of invading and shelling Gaza?

Meanwhile, Ehud Barak, Labor chairman, "did not comment on the vote and his aides said he would not deal with political issues these days."

The war, of course, being entirely apolitical. I can only imagine how this is going to play in the Arab world.

I should make it clear that I think this is terrible, although I'm not as up in arms as I might be since most seem to think this will get struck down in the Supreme Court fairly quickly. It's a really sad comment on Israel's political climate regardless. But for the record, I'm not just apoplectic over poorly executed political posturing; I am, however, more surprised at bad Israeli politics than I am at Israeli dislike for Arabs.

Hizballah's political maneuverings

Fascinating analysis from Electronic Intifada of Hizballah's perspective on the current conflict in Gaza: what the organization thinks about this, whether it might intervene, under what conditions, how it has coordinated with Iran to put pressure on Egypt, etc.

It is quite long, but it's worth a read, especially for the politicking:

While many have dismissed Nasrallah's verbal barrage on the Mubarak regime as little more than a diversionary or compensatory tactic designed to divert attention from or compensate for Hizballah's inaction, such a view fails to appreciate the unprecedented nature of this attack, as well as the wider strategy underpinning it. Not since the 1980s has Hizballah adopted such an inflammatory discourse against an Arab regime, or even singled out any one for attack. Not even during the July War, when Arab complicity with Israel was at its peak, did Nasrallah call on the Arab masses to exert pressure on their governments, nor did Hizballah's relations with those regimes take a turn for the worse thereafter. At the time, Hizballah clearly did not want to burn its bridges with Arab regimes or provide them with ammunition to invoke the Shiite scarecrow and stoke Sunni-Shiite tensions. In Gaza though, Hizballah has not found any such room for diplomacy and self-restraint. In his 7 January speech, Nasrallah warned that although Hizballah did not make enemies of those who had betrayed it during the July War, "we will make those who collaborate against Gaza and its people our enemies."

Hizballah's policy shift and its coordination with Iran on this matter signal a joint Iranian-Hizballah strategy of exposing the Mubarak regime's collusion with Israel and pressuring it to lift its siege of Gaza. These goals also fulfill the grander objective of shaking the foundations of the Egyptian-Israeli alliance which, in turn, would serve to weaken Israel's regional position. A strategy of this kind is deemed necessary given Egypt's "public embrace" of Israel, as one Israeli journalist put it (Haaretz, 9 January).

[...]


While Nasrallah's strategy has failed to persuade Mubarak to open the crossing, it did serve to greatly embarrass his domestic and regional standing and reduce his regime's role to a purely defensive one, preoccupied with formulating lamentable counter-arguments to the Hizballah chief's accusations, and rallying its moderate allies to its defense.

I argued, in a recent paper, that both Hamas and Hizballah are pseudo-states, political actors with comparable clout to that of the governments of the countries where they are located. (A proper explanation of this reasoning will have to wait for another time.) To me, Hizballah's alliance with Iran and its pressuring of Egypt signal that the organization is a political actor on par with regional governments. In the paper, I had discussed domestic aspects of pseudo-statehood: supporting a population (service delivery) filling a power vacuum, control of the use of force, etc. It's interesting to see a similar phenomenon occurring in an international context as well.

You'll notice that no one seems to care what Lebanese President Michel Suleiman has to say about Gaza.