Kevin Sites reports from Lebanon that the Hezbollah are perhaps telling people not to leave and are stockpiling weapons in their homes:
…a Hezbollah stronghold north of the city of Tyre. Here, I am told, few families have fled. Instead, they are waiting for the call of Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah to come south to fight the Israelis.
[…]
Then, from the corner of the closet, next to some shirts on hangers, he pulls out an American-made M-16 assault rifle and places it on the mattress in the room next to the ammo belt. He goes back to the closet and from the same corner reaches for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and two canvas shoulder bags. He places these on the bed as well.
I ask if nearly every house in the neighborhood has a stash of small arms like this.
“Some have more,” he says, pulling an AK-47 from one of the canvas bags and locking on a 30 round banana clip, named for its banana-like curve. “But the larger weaponry is kept somewhere else.”
Not in the houses, he says later, but in secret places.
Mosques?
“Where does the M-16 come from?” I ask.
He says that Hezbollah buys all the weapons, sometimes even from the Lebanese Army.
He then pulls a grenade from the closet, screws on a cylinder of propellant behind it and then loads it into the grenade launcher. He shows me what has to be done before the trigger can be pulled to shoot it.
“Have you ever fired one of those?” I ask.
He smiles as if it were an obvious question. Yes, of course, he replies.
He then puts all the weapons back on the bed for a moment so I can photograph them. Although it’s not uncommon for households in the Middle East to have at least an AK-47 around the house, it’s incongruous to see the three rifles and grenade launcher beside a baby’s bassinet.
This basically means any opposition to the Hezbollah has either to go room-by-room through every village at great risk of life, or use superior firepower and run the risk of harming babies in the bassinets. This is a classic dilemma for any military leaders, where overwhelming force is meant to bring quick resolution and reduce loss of life. I wrote about General Sherman’s justification of his successful Georgia strategy here. The Economist does an excellent job discussing the ethics of warfare and proportionality here:
Most Western thinking about military ethics has its roots in Augustine, the sainted Christian writer from North Africa whose elaborate theory of “just warfare” has provided a framework for debate over the 16 centuries since his death. And for philosophers in the Augustinian tradition, proportionality is one of the things you should consider when contemplating war. Others are the probability of success and whether warfare is a last resort: have all the other options been tried? In this context, the proportionality question is judged by the destruction which the war will cause, weighed against the good it may do.
Put like that, proportionality is a concept that most Israelis can live with. They would argue that the good which might be achieved by smashing Hezbollah (and the threat it poses not only to Israel but also to Lebanon and other states) does outweigh the travails of Lebanon’s civilians.
It also might be important to note that in 2000 when Israel unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon (for two reasons: to comply with a UN Security Council resolution, but also to adjust to domestic weariness with the occupation) the Hezbollah then rushed in to displace any Lebanese who opposed their rule. Christians, Druze and Shiites, especially the remaining members of the South Lebanon Army (SLA), and their families fled their homes in fear of Hezbollah retribution. Israel thus allowed persecuted Lebanese families into Israel and provided housing, residency permits that included the right to work, health insurance, schooling for their children and other social benefits (income). Given that history, do you think Kevin Sites will encounter any opposition to Hezbollah’s use of village bedrooms and bassinets to stash their weapons and stage attacks? Lebanese civilians who resisted Hezbollah may have been chased away, detained in remote prisons or killed many years ago.
In fact it seems that the remaining opposition to Hezbollah even in Beirut was in process of being declawed as part of a mission to avoid complying with UN Security Council Resolution 1559 — ensure the right for a militant fundamentalist group to maintain control over the destiny of a country trying to achieve a more egalitarian base.
Those who argued that a heavily armed Hezbollah, embedded in civilian areas, would help prevent Israeli agression should now recognize that it was in fact the very cause of the latest conflict. Perhaps they knew and secretly hoped for this outcome. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute:
Lebanese journalist Khairallah Khairallah harshly criticized Hizbullah policy, saying it was damaging to Lebanon. One cannot ignore the fact that since [southern Lebanon] was liberated [from Israel], Hizbullah has maintained a policy… aimed at perpetuating Lebanon as an arena for regional struggle. [It does this] by insisting on keeping its weapons, under the pretext of liberating the Shab’a Farms – thereby bringing Lebanon into conflict with the international community.
I actually don’t think the Shab’a Farms were sufficient war-making fodder for the Hezbollah, since the UN made several very clear and unanimous statements about International acceptance of the borders, so they just held it up as a red-herring. More significant was that Lebanese independence and detente with Israel would deflate their influence and force them to integrate into society. To avoid this they used the prisoners in Israel as a convenient pre-text for launching attacks into Israel to re-establish themselves as a prominent force in a regional conflict:
Defying growing international and domestic pressure to strip Hizbullah of its arms the militant Islamist Shia group pledged to “use all available means” to win the release of three Lebanese nationals still held by Israel.
That apparently means using civilians as camouflage and declaring all Israelis as targets. Not to excuse the Israeli strikes on civilian centers, or tragic loss of lives, but Kevin Sites shows that Lebanon is dangerously infiltrated by Iranian/Syrian-backed militants who intend to manipulate the country into a staging-point for their objective — to attack Israel and continue to destabilize the region. This reminds me of how South Africa used to destabilize its neighbors with war in order to prevent them from forming any sort of alliance against Apartheid. Iran and Syria fear a Lebanon that could make peace with itself, let alone Israel.