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Jewish World Review May 16, 2008 / 11 Iyar 5768 Understanding Hizbullah's power play By Caroline B. Glick
What is interesting about Hizbullah's successful overthrow of the elected
government in Lebanon is that after his forces defeated their foes,
Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah ordered his men to retreat to their
customary shadows. Why didn't Hizbullah just overthrow the government?
Understanding why Hizbullah refused to take over Lebanon is key not only for
understanding Hizbullah but also for understanding Hamas, Fatah and the
insurgency in Iraq.
A compelling answer to this question is found in David Galula's classic
work, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice. Galula, who died in
1967, was a lieutenant colonel in the French Marines. He served as a company
commander in Algeria during the FLN's insurgency there. Counterinsurgency
Warfare, which he wrote in 1964, is based largely on the French experience
in Algeria and Indochina and on Chinese Communist revolutionary
theory. In Counterinsurgency
Warfare, Galula provides a clear and concise description of insurgent or
revolutionary movements, their strategies and tactics. Conversely he
provides clear guidance for counterinsurgents for defeating them.
As Galula explained, one of the main advantages that insurgents have over
the governments they seek to overthrow is their lack of responsibility for
governance. Far from seeking to govern the local population, the goal of
insurgents is simply to demonstrate through sabotage, terror and guerilla
operations that the government is incapable of keeping order. And it is far
easier and cheaper to sow disorder and chaos than to maintain order and
secure public safety.
In Hizbullah's case, Nasrallah and his Iranian bosses have no interest in
taking on responsibility for Lebanon. They don't want to collect taxes. They
don't want to pick up the garbage or build schools and universities.
Hizbullah and its Iranian overlords wish to have full use of Lebanon as a
staging area for attacks against Israel and the US. They wish maintain and
expand Hizbullah's arsenals. For this they need unfettered access, and if
necessary, control over Lebanon's borders, its seaports and airport.
They need to raise and train Hizbullah's army and cultivate Hizbullah's
loyal cadres among Lebanon's Shiites in order to fight Israel. And so they
need to cultivate loyalty and dependency among Lebanon's Shiites in order to
use their villages as launching pads for attacks on Israel, as cover to hide
from Israeli counterattacks, and as recruitment centers to fills their lines
with fighters.
Over the past week, Hizbullah secured this freedom through its successful
attack on the Saniora government. Today no one will utter a peep of
complaint as Hizbullah imports ever more sophisticated weapons systems from
Syria and Iran. No one will say a word when Hizbullah openly asserts control
over the border with Israel, or places its commanders in charge of Lebanese
army units along the border.
Galula argues that the primary goal of insurgents in the early stages of
their long campaigns is to secure the support of the local populations. In
light of this, it could be claimed that by attacking the Saniora government
and its supporters, Hizbullah was acting against its interests. But we are
no longer in the early stages of Hizbullah's insurgency. At this advanced
stage of its game, Hizbullah considers the sentiments of Lebanese Druse,
Christians and Sunnis irrelevant. None have the power to challenge its
primacy.
Hizbullah's refusal to take responsibility for the country that it
effectively controls confounds the logic that has guided Israeli governments
since 1993. From the onset of the "peace process" with the PLO in 1993,
through the IDF's withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000, to Israel's
withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 to the Olmert-Livni-Barak government's current
transfer of control over the Palestinian cities in Samaria to Fatah militias
and curtailment of IDF counterterror operations in Judea, Samaria and Gaza,
successive Israeli governments have argued that Israel can compel its
non-state foes — the Palestinians and Hizbullah — to end their asymmetric
warfare and take responsibility for public order by retreating.
The repeated assertion is that once Hizbullah and the Palestinians were
placed in charge of territory, and didn't have Israel to kick around
anymore, they would transform themselves from insurgents into respectable
civilian authorities that would be compelled to abandon war in favor of
building economies and keeping public order.
The basic problem with this Israeli strategic assertion is that it ignores
the basic interests of the other side. Hizbullah and the Palestinians have
no interest in instilling order in the territories they wrest from Israeli
control. They wish to use those territories to continue their war against
Israel and use the local populations to advance their war efforts.
To the latter end, their aim is not to develop local economies but to foster
dependency among the local population. The only ones permitted to become
prosperous in areas they control are their senior officials. The masses are
made dependent on the insurgents for their basic welfare services. And
through the provision of welfare, the insurgents indoctrinate the locals to
their cause.
That is, successive Israeli governments have failed to recognize the simple
fact that the absence of Israeli control on the ground can no more compel
Hizbullah, Hamas or Fatah to act responsibly and peacefully than the hapless
Saniora government can compel Hizbullah to accept its authority.
Galula explained that the starting point of all insurgencies is finding and
advancing a political cause or ideology. "The best cause for the insurgents'
purpose is one that by definition can attract the largest number of
followers and repel the minimum of opponents," he wrote.
In both Lebanese and Palestinian societies and indeed throughout the Arab
world, that cause is the destruction of Israel.
Recognizing the inherent hostility of its enemies' cause, until 1993 Israel
used classic counterinsurgency tactics to defeat them. It sought to instill
order in Judea, Samaria, Gaza and in its security zone in South Lebanon and
to a large degree, it succeeded. The Palestinian uprising of 1987 was fairly
tame and by 1991, it was defeated and discredited. South Lebanon, under
Israel's security umbrella and controlled by the South Lebanese Army was the
most prosperous area in civil war-wracked Lebanon.
But then the Israeli peace movement took over. At base, the goal of the
peace movement is to legitimize the cause of Israel's enemies, delegitimize
Israel's own cause and so force the government and Israeli society to
capitulate to our enemies in the interest of "peace." By 1993, the peace
movement had asserted its ideological preeminence over Israel's governing
classes and so inserted Israel directly into the trap of insurgent ideology.
Galula explained, "The [insurgent] cause must be such that the
counterinsurgent cannot espouse it too or can do so only at the risk of
losing his power."
Israel cannot successfully embrace its enemies' cause because their cause is
Israel's destruction. Yet that is essentially what Israel has done for the
past 15 years. In the Palestinian case, the thinking has been that Israel
can compel the Palestinians to accept its right to exist by giving the
Palestinians a state. Yet here too, Israel has failed to acknowledge the
nature of its enemies or the rationale of their cause. Both the Palestinians
and Hizbullah are supported by states whose support for them stems from what
is perceived as their role as the vanguards of the global jihad. Israel is
perceived by Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others as the Little Satan
who must be destroyed in order to bring down the Great Satan — America.
Writing in the 1960s, Galula's insurgents were largely sponsored by the USSR
and Communist China. They fought in the name of global Communism in its war
against capitalism and imperialism. This global nature of local insurgencies
barred all possibility of reaching an accommodation between insurgent and
counterinsurgent. As Galula explained, "A local revolutionary war is part of
the global war against capitalism and imperialism. Hence a military victory
against the local enemy is in fact a victory against the global enemy and
contributes to his ultimate defeat."
This statement is equally true if Communism is replaced with Islam and
capitalism and imperialism are replaced with democracy and Zionism. Given
the war against Israel's crucial role in jihadist ideology, there is no way
the insurgents can reach an accommodation with it. All Israeli retreats must
be perceived as capitulations.
On the surface, Hamas's takeover of Gaza from Fatah militia tends to argue
against Galula's thesis. If Hamas wants to sow chaos then why did it run for
office and so presumably tether itself to territorial and economic
responsibilities?
The fact is that neither Fatah nor Hamas have used their control over
territory and local populations to facilitate order. To the contrary, under
both Fatah and Hamas, the Palestinian Authority has refused to accept
responsibility for anything. It has required Israel and the West to finance,
feed and care for its population while the PA leadership builds terror
armies and indoctrinates Palestinian society to the cause of Israel's
destruction. If in Lebanon the central problem is that the Saniora
government is no match for Hizbullah, in the PA the central problem is that
everyone is Hizbullah. And in the unlikely event that Fatah's leaders were
to accept Israel's right to exist, Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas has far less
power to take action against Hamas than Saniora has against Hizbullah.
US President George W. Bush has repeatedly asserted that the antidote to
insurgencies is freedom. And there is much truth to this claim. One needs
only to look to the stunning developments in Iraq over the past year — where
Shiites and Sunnis are standing up to insurgents and the Iraqi government is
conducting a successful counterinsurgency in Basra and Baghdad to see that
liberty can trump jihad. Yet the difference between Iraq and Lebanon and the
PA is that the US military in Iraq is combating insurgents and thereby
enabling Iraqis to choose liberty. Until 1993, Israel fought Palestinian
insurgent groups and enabled rank-and-file Palestinians to make that same
choice. And until 2000, Israel enabled residents of South Lebanon to choose
freedom as well. Israel only failed in the end because it convinced itself
that its enemies had justice on their side.
What we learn from Hizbullah's retreat to the shadows, from Hamas's use of
Gaza as a launching pad to bomb Israeli maternity clinics and schools, and
Fatah's jihadist kleptocracy then is that there is no way to force
insurgents to change their nature through retreat or by empowering and
legitimizing them. The only way to enable freedom to trump jihad is for
forces of freedom to take control of insurgent enclaves, defeat them and so
empower local populations to choose to be free. In Iraq, the US military is
bravely advancing this near Sisyphean task. In South Lebanon, Judea, Samaria
and Gaza, the only force capable of successfully defeating the jihadist
insurgents is Israel. Until it does, Hizbullah, Hamas and Fatah will
continue to sow chaos in their societies, terrorize Israelis, and confound
the Israeli peace movement by refusing to take responsibility for their
people.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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