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The dilemmas of being an Iranian bullet

By Michael Young

Daily Star staff

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Hizbullah's efficient ward heelers are handing out cash, reportedly much of it Iranian, to persuade the party's Shiite supporters that the destruction of their homes and livelihood was worth it. However, a more pressing question is: At what point will Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbullah's secretary general, be forced into making an impossible choice where he must either reimburse his expanding debt to Iran or, by doing so, risk losing the backing of his own community? In other words, when will Hizbullah have to truly decide whether it is Iranian or Lebanese?

The question is ever more relevant in light of the ongoing tension between the international community and Iran over the latter's nuclear program. Iran had wagered on Hizbullah's missiles being a deterrent in the event of a conflict with the United States and Israel. That effect has been mostly lost thanks to the month-long Lebanon war. Hizbullah still has many rockets, and its infrastructure in the South is probably intact. But what it no longer has is a blank check from the Shiite population to pursue a new war of "honor" that will surely put most of them back in the streets again.

Amid the sanguine assertions of a Hizbullah victory, a colder assessment is needed to gauge just what the party achieved, or, rather, lost after July 12 - specifically what it lost Iran. Aside from Hizbullah's spent deterrence capability (only revivable at a high price) is the element of surprise when it comes to the party's training, tactics, and defenses. In the next war, the Israelis will come better prepared. The Lebanese Army is in the South, and a broader international force will probably soon deploy in the border area. That hardly makes a new war impossible, but were Hizbullah to take its weapons out of their containers to resume the fight, it would have to first confront the Lebanese state and the international community, meaning bearing a heavy responsibility for the aftermath.

Then there is the matter of Iranian calculations. If you were a Revolutionary Guards chief in Tehran, how would you view the latest conflict with Israel? You would doubtless marvel at Hizbullah's training (Iranian of course), but the ovation would end there. If it's true that hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on arming and preparing the party, and that hundreds of millions, if not billions, more will be needed to rehabilitate Lebanon's Shiite community, then the Iranians got little for their outlays. The Lebanon war was useless to them, only making their nuclear program more vulnerable. That's one reason why Tehran organized military exercises before its formal answer on Tuesday to an international offer on ending uranium enrichment. The Iranians would have preferred to use Lebanon as a cushion to keep the conflict away from their borders; but Hizbullah torpedoed that by miscalculating the Israeli and American response to the July 12 abductions of two Israeli soldiers.

So now Nasrallah has a mounting debt owed the Iranians and little room to tell them that he cannot implement a request to heat Israel's northern border if the nuclear issue demands it. Worse, the Hizbullah leader knows that even a devotee like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will have to explain to his own poor electors why billions of dollars are being spent on building Shiite homes in Lebanon, while Iranians continue to face grinding poverty - poverty that might get worse if the UN Security Council manages to impose sanctions. How much can the Iranian regime bear financially when it comes to buoying up Nasrallah's base? Even Shiite businessmen, whether in the Gulf or Lebanon, may hesitate to offer substantial funding if they sense a new war is looming.

What can Nasrallah do if Iran asks Hizbullah to resume military operations against Israel while Shiites are slowly rebuilding their lives? By refusing, Nasrallah could lose his sponsor and financier; by agreeing, he could lose his supporters. If one had to guess, the Hizbullah leader would obey Iran and hope for the best when it comes to the Shiites. Yet the risks of such a strategy are immense, because Nasrallah's allegiances would be there for all to see, particularly his coreligionists. And that's not mentioning how negatively Hizbullah's actions would be received by the other Lebanese communities, who would again see their country devastated in a proxy war. Hizbullah has lost what little it once retained of the consensus behind the "resistance" (prompting Nasrallah to threaten his critics on Al-Jazeera last month), but a renewal of conflict, fed by Iran, could lead toward a more violent domestic standoff.

The irony is that Nasrallah has spent the better part of 15 years deftly avoiding hard choices. His strategy has been to hop from one side of Hizbullah's personality to the other, depending on the circumstances. When, in July, he was attacked by Walid Jumblatt for claiming that the war with Israel was that of the umma, he changed tack in a subsequent speech and mentioned he was doing it all for Lebanon. When, in the national dialogue, he came under pressure to advocate a drawing of the Syrian-Lebanese border in the Shebaa Farms, Nasrallah obliged, only to later backtrack when the Syrians showed they were not amused. And last week when, in a televised speech, the secretary general criticized the slowness of the Lebanese state in financing reconstruction (implicitly advocating Iranian suitcases of cash as a panacea to that problem), he also insisted Hizbullah was part of the state. In each case one was left wondering: Is Nasrallah all expedient maneuvering?

Another war with Israel, fought on behalf of Iran, would not allow such gymnastics. Hizbullah has largely used up its Shiite card, but has valiantly tried to save it by selling the notion that what happened in the past month was a military victory. Fair enough, since no emperor can long go without clothes. But if Hizbullah is merely Iran's bullet, at some stage Nasrallah will have to decide whether he wants to be more than that.