Hizbullah serves us a reheated meal

Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s speech last Monday, outlining Hizbullah’s latest “political document,” was a compendium of positions and interpretations the party had developed over the years. In that sense it offered few surprises. More revealing was that Nasrallah felt he had to make the speech now, recognizing that much has changed in Lebanon since 2005, when Syrian soldiers withdrew from the country and the favorable political environment Hizbullah had benefited from collapsed.

Nothing in the political document suggests that Hizbullah has altered its outlook when it comes to its relationship with the Lebanese state. The party continues to defend its military autonomy, and demands that we all come around to doing the same; it strives to push Lebanon in directions hostile to the United States and even Western Europe; at the center of its preoccupations are the Palestinian cause and the rescue of Jerusalem, casting serious doubt on Hizbullah’s willingness to limit its ambitions to liberating the Lebanese half of Ghajar and the Shebaa farms; and Hizbullah remains especially loyal to Iran, so that “the creation of contradictions with it represents a harming of the self and of Arab issues.”

And yet something has changed when Nasrallah feels the need to issue a second document on Hizbullah’s worldview to the Lebanese public (the first being the party’s Open Letter of 1985, announcing its political program). The party’s “Lebanonization” will never amount to much for as long as Hizbullah rejects the premises of sovereign Lebanese statehood. However, there can be no doubt that after 2005 Hizbullah was forced to contend much more with Lebanon, for whose domestic political ways and byways Nasrallah had expressed such contempt before that time, when Syrian cover gave him the luxury of focusing on his conflict with Israel.

Hizbullah’s record when it comes to Lebanon has been much more mediocre than Nasrallah cared to admit. It was amusing to hear the secretary general mentioning the need to respect Lebanon’s consociational system, just after his denunciation of sectarianism, perhaps because Hizbullah has systematically violated the rules of consociationalism and remains among the most sectarian of organizations. But that inconsistency helped better to explain why Hizbullah’s “rediscovery” of Lebanon after 2005 proved such a failure.

Over the past year, there has been much hand-wringing, particularly in the March 14 camp, that the May 2008 military onslaught of Hizbullah represented some sort of a victory. The view is simplistic. The offensive did substantiate that the party would resort to arms when its interests were at risk, but the long-term costs of that undertaking were prohibitive, and continue to rise. Hizbullah gained a blocking third in the Cabinet, and it did get the election law it wanted. However, neither brought the party very much. The impact of the blocking third was significant symbolically, but otherwise its repercussions were contained, while the election law did not produce an opposition victory last June as Hizbullah had hoped.

On the negative side, Hizbullah’s takeover of western Beirut highlighted its limitations. It showed the party could not afford to act against Christian areas, and that its capacity to hold hostage predominantly Sunni neighborhoods was limited in time. For its efforts, Hizbullah earned undying Sunni animosity, confirming it could only really get its way by resorting to its guns, undermining Nasrallah’s earlier claim that he would not turn his weapons on the Lebanese. Worse, Sunni anger and rising Christian doubts, expressed in the parliamentary elections, established that there no longer was a national consensus behind the “resistance.” Nasrallah’s credibility remains only as good as his threats.

Nasrallah’s need to submit his program to the Lebanese may have been surreptitious recognition of the setbacks brought about by the May confrontation. By communicating with his countrymen, the secretary general perhaps sought to publicly acknowledge that, somewhere, he had to be more transparent about his aims, more willing to address Lebanese society on equal terms, transcending the violence of the past.

But if that was indeed Nasrallah’s objective, his message all but neutralized it. Rather than being an instrument of interchange, Hizbullah’s document is a hypocritical effort to conceal that the party has every intention of imposing its priorities on Lebanon, regardless of what anyone else wants. The national dialogue over Hizbullah’s weapons will remain a sham. Nasrallah’s vision of a “state of resistance,” with Hizbullah as its vanguard, will continue to generate great tension, since a sovereign state and a sovereign militia cannot coexist. By reciting from his old song book, Nasrallah betrayed that for all his purported willingness to communicate, his preferred communication method is the monologue.

The secretary general will not persuade very many people to get over Hizbullah’s actions in 2005 and afterward. Most Lebanese will not soon overcome their suspicions of Hizbullah’s role in the assassination of Rafik Hariri and several others, regardless of whether the party is guilty. Few will forget Nasrallah’s speech on March 8, 2005, in defense of Syria, then and now the only serious culprit in the former prime minister’s killing. Few will soon forget the 2006 war, with its devastating consequences amid vacant exclamations of a divine victory; and even fewer can fail to grasp that the next war will be far worse, because Nasrallah’s vision, as outlined in his party’s latest document, only guarantees this.

In that light, the Nasrallah speech, like the document he read, has only heightened the contradictions in Lebanese society. Hizbullah realizes that the partial Syrian return to Lebanon, facilitated by Saudi Arabia, may restrict the party’s ability to maneuver in the way that it had been able to do until recently. Nasrallah’s effort to anchor himself better in the Lebanese political reality may be, in part, an effort to widen its political latitude with regard to Damascus, even as Hizbullah remains Syria’s main tool of intimidation in Lebanon. However, that only confirms the inconsistencies at the heart of Nasrallah’s reasoning.

We were waiting for something new on Monday; instead Nasrallah merely reheated yesterday’s meal. This demonstrated that Hizbullah is in more of a bind than it will disclose, devoid of fresh ideas. They’re here and we’re here, and for Lebanon’s misfortune only one of us can come out on top.