Engaging Today's Global Citizens

Wounding Hezbollah, Killing Democratic Reform

When I struck out on July 14 for Bowling Green University in a rental car with a teenage step-daughter in tow, I knew I was going to lecture scores of leading student activists on US foreign policy issues at a national event sponsored by Americans for Informed Democracy, a group that was formed in response to 9/11.

What I did not know, until I read with disbelief the front-page news in the Toledo Blade, was just how topical my keynote would be.

My disbelief is based on my own recent travels to the region in January 2005 and March 2006. Most Americans think of Beirut as the hopelessly strife-ridden country that battled itself, with outside interventions by neighboring states, from 1975 through 1989. What most Americans probably do not know is that Lebanese businessmen have been steadily returning to the country ever since the end of their civil war, that hotels were fully gearing up for a wave of European tourism, that most of Beirut's infrastructure has been patiently rebuilt from the ground up with World Bank funds and donations by regional Arab giants such as Saudi Arabia. A new, sleek international airport was constructed to usher in a new age of finance, trade, and tourism—three positive goods that Lebanon has been particularly noted for around the world in the decades prior to 1975. Indeed, the last thing that one hotel porter told me as I hopped in a cab for the airport in March was, "Make sure you tell our friends what a great place Beirut is."

These trips now seem like a hallucination. As shown on television, water, electricity, bridges, highways—all major infrastructure—are in various states of demolition. Westerners are fleeing for their lives, and Israel has announced that it will bomb Lebanon back 20 years, if it has to, in order to destroy Hezbollah.

But even more importantly, Israeli strikes and US support for them are now purposefully destroying the one party that represents the majority Shia in Lebanon. As obnoxious as Hezbollah's aid to West Bank terrorists is, within Lebanon it is the only real actor standing up for the Shiite's rights. The group provides fair, consistent, and necessary medical aid, social welfare benefits, education programs, job training, and a host of other socioeconomic needs to Lebanon's largest sectarian bloc—which, thanks to colonial-era constitutional provisions left behind by the French, remain disproportionately poor (most of the booming finance and banking connections are managed and owned by other minority sects, such as the Maronites, Christians, and Sunni).

Why does this matter? Because the recent history of Iraq has shown what happens when an outside intervener decapitates a major mass party without any idea of what political or social forces will replace it. The leveling of the Ba'ath party structure in Iraq—what the Bush administration called "de-Ba'athification" in 2003—summarily fired hundreds of thousands of political, social, and economic elites without compensation, and did away with the social networks emanating from the Ba'ath structure. The military was also summarily dismissed, regardless of the fact that most of the worst actions by the Ba'ath were done by the very top, core set of elites surrounding Saddam himself. These suddenly unemployed, unpaid, and largely destitute people have since made up a good part of the Sunni insurgency that has bedeviled the US occupation in Baghdad.

Israel's strikes, as with the US de-Ba'athification campaign in Iraq, will end up producing costs all out of proportion to the immediate security benefits. The 1.3 million Shiite people will remain in southern Beirut and southern Lebanon after the smoke clears. They will still need health, education, and other social services that the fledgling democracy in Lebanon is not yet providing on a fair and equal basis.

Put in this light, the United States and Israel together are sacrificing the true security solution for the region: socioeconomic development, open civil societies, and economic growth through privatization. Bombs cannot bring about these latter outcomes. Only patient foreign aid, political pressure on elites to undertake reforms, and diplomacy between disputing states (Israel-Syria), between major internal blocs (the factions in Lebanon), between a trusted ally and its primary political-military foe (Israel, Hamas), and between the global superpower and rogues (US, Syria, Iran) can bring about this more far-reaching, more permanent change in the region's politics, security, and economy.

All bombs can do is put off the day of reckoning, create more strife, and increase the chances that currently hostile relationships between and within countries across the Arab world will continue to fester and grow in severity.

—Michael Kraig