Hezbollah’s next target: UN resolutions on Lebanon

When the national dialogue sessions still had some meaning, the main item of discussion was examining ways to “spread the authority of the Lebanese state over all its territory.” This contrived formulation was a way of indirectly addressing Hezbollah’s establishment of its own state within the Lebanese state, backed by a private army allowing it to defend the party’s autonomy against its fellow countrymen who might disagree.

However, when Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, admitted that his men were arming Palestinian groups in Gaza, benevolent observers of the party who had always regarded it as essentially a Lebanese concern, woke up (rather late) to the reality that Hezbollah also had a well-developed regional agenda. And be prepared, if a Latin American or African government takes Hezbollah on within its own borders, to hear those same persons feigning astonishment that Hezbollah also has a global reach.

If you accept that Hezbollah’s main game board is Lebanon, then you can always find good things to say about the party as an authentic domestic manifestation against the corruptions and shortcomings of the Lebanese political and social order. But if the party is exposed as a regional and global player, then its admirers must accept that it is playing on behalf of someone, since a Lebanese militia really has no business training Mehdi Army militants in Iraq or setting up various types of networks in the deepest confines of Latin America and West Africa. That someone, or something, is Iran, and if Hezbollah is an extension of Iran, then there really is much less to say about the authenticity of its Lebanese agenda.

All this comes to mind following the condemnation last week of Hezbollah’s activities in Egypt by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in his latest report on Resolution 1701. Ban noted that in continuing to possess weapons, Hezbollah had violated Resolution 1559, and he wrote that “[t]he threat that armed groups and militias pose to the sovereignty and stability of the Lebanese state cannot be overstated.”

Indeed, Hezbollah is not only committed, and its representatives have said so openly, to undermining Resolution 1559, the central aim of which was to force a Syrian pullout from Lebanon and disarm Hezbollah, in that way re-establishing a sovereign Lebanese state after decades of Syrian hegemony; the party is also hoping to use that as a first step toward the dismantling of Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 summer war, sent the Lebanese army to the South, set up a stronger UN force there as well as a mechanism to prevent the arming of Hezbollah below the Litani River; and, incidentally, reaffirmed Resolution 1559.

Ban is understandably worried about Hezbollah’s activities in Egypt because he is much more profoundly worried about what the party, and its regional backers Iran and Syria, might do to the elaborate scaffolding of UN decisions on Lebanon that was set up starting in September 2004. This not only includes Resolutions 1559 and 1701, but also the series of resolutions following the Hariri assassination creating an investigative and legal framework to punish those guilty in the crime.

We can expect the June elections, if the opposition wins a majority, to be the first step in an Iranian and Syrian effort, through Hezbollah, to burn down the edifice of UN resolutions on Lebanon. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Hezbollah’s allies, such as the Aounists, are eager to participate in the bonfire. However, the Christians on both side of the political divide, who will ultimately decide the election outcome, are so taken up with their parochial calculations, so narrowly obsessed with ensuring that their Christian rivals will be eliminated, that Hezbollah faces no electoral obstacle to advancing its goal of replacing the UN framework with a new one that protects its weapons, legitimizes and expands its autonomy, and puts the Lebanese state at the service of the resistance.

Lest we forget, that is precisely what Hassan Nasrallah’s “defense strategy” is all about.

That is the stake in the upcoming elections, and it is also why Hillary Clinton came to Beirut last Sunday. The secretary of state and her aides, notably Jeffrey Feltman, the assistant secretary for Near East affairs, can surely sense that the UN decisions on Lebanon are slowly crumbling. Even the Hariri investigation has lost much momentum in the past four years. We too should worry, particularly if Hezbollah comes out of the elections stronger. Lebanon would be isolated internationally, the UN would lose interest, and Hezbollah would be delighted to inherit the levers of power in a country that has fallen between the cracks.