The Hezbollah project

Joe Klein reviews a book about Hizbullah by journalist Thannasis Cambanis.


Created in the early 1980s, Hezbollah was a joint venture of Israel and Iran. Israel inadvertently provided the motivation with its brutal 1982 invasion of Lebanon and attempt to establish a pro-Israeli puppet government there — undoubtedly, the worst foreign policy decision the Jewish state ever made. Iran, intoxicated by the euphoria of its 1979 revolution, provided the money, military training and equipment to its fellow Shiites in south Lebanon who, up till then, had been a disdained underclass in Lebanon’s polyglot ethnic mash-up. Israel continued to provide the motivation, by occupying a sliver of southern Lebanon until 2000, and Iran — using its Syrian ally as a go-between — continued to provide money and arms. But along the way, an extraordinary thing happened: Hezbollah developed a successful formula for governing the Shiite districts in southern Lebanon.

Klein is a shrewd observer of US politics, and has written numerous books, including the infamous Primary Colors.

Nasrallah is an extraordinarily shrewd leader. He lives modestly and has made sacrifices for the cause; he lost his oldest son in the war. He can be funny and self-deprecating in public. He has an “almost erotic” appeal for his followers, many of whom are afflicted by an eschatological delusion (the return of the Mahdi) that is remarkably similar to the Christian Rapture myth. Nasrallah’s rhetoric is fierce and his anti-Semitism flagrant, but, Cambanis writes, he has none of the pomposity that characterizes the family dynasties in the rest of the region. He makes smart decisions — refusing to take vengeance on those who collaborated with the Israelis during their occupation; allowing a looser, more permissive form of Islam to Lebanon’s Mediterranean sunbathers and beer-drinkers than his Iranian sponsors permit. And, most important of all, he is an ingenious marketer, especially in his ability to redefine success: victory is survival.

The ability to define vistory over Israel in any form is a major coup.

He also fails to put Lebanese Hezbollah in the context of Iran’s larger terrorist network — which includes Saudi Hezbollah and a surprisingly active Latin American wing. Who runs those? How does Hezbollah fit into Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Quds Force structure? 

Hezbollah, sadly, may prove over time to be the strongest indigenous response to the colonial hubris visited upon the Middle East by Western powers since the end of World War I.