When will Hezbollah leave Syria?
Hussain Abdul-Hussain/Now Lebanon/July 11/16
No actor can fight a war indefinitely. By continuing their intervention in Syria, the Party of God is only harming themselves and the Lebanese as a whole
Members of Hezbollah wave the group
Wars have goals, but for its involvement in Syria, Hezbollah has repeatedly redefined its mission and moved the goal posts. After all has been said and done, Syria today looks like a stalemate that can be only resolved in tandem with global changes. Yet Hezbollah keeps on fighting.
This is not to bash Hezbollah or belittle its prowess. Hezbollah has showed discipline, stamina and power that puts it way ahead of most fighting forces across the region.
But even superpowers, like America, cannot fight open-ended wars. In 2006, America turned against former President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. When Bush said that Washington was going to “stay the course,” he further inflamed Americans from both parties. So great had the heat against Bush become that he was forced to seek counsel from elder statesmen, after which he gave the military whatever it needed to stump the Iraqi insurgency and give America an honorable exit.
Beirut is not Washington and Hezbollah’s partisans are not free-thinking citizens. The supporters of Hezbollah, mostly Shiite, will support the party’s leadership whatever the consequences, in line with the long-honored tribal protocol.
Yet Hezbollah seems to be abusing this loyalty, with Lebanon’s Shiites either too weak to say no to their men dying in Syria, or too scared, or both.
The Hezbollah leadership has always used sectarianism to contain the anger of its base. After the 2006 war with Israel, which took a heavy toll on many of its loyalists, Hezbollah instigated its followers against their Sunni and Druze rivals. By vilifying former Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and his cabinet, and by accusing Druze lawmaker Marwan Hamadeh of playing marksman for the Israeli air force, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah deflected the brewing Shiite anger against his party toward helpless Lebanese politicians like Siniora and Hamadeh.
Nasrallah has been using the same 2006 playbook to deflect Shiite anger against his party’s open-ended involvement in the Syrian war. Since 2011, Nasrallah has had to redefine his militia’s mission repeatedly, from merely the defense of Lebanese Shiites living on the border with Syria, to defending Shiite shrines in Damascus, to preemptively fighting Sunni radicalism inside Syria before it finds its way to Lebanon.
Every now and then, Nasrallah would vilify someone. One night he would attack the House of Saud, the sovereign family of Saudi Arabia. Another night he would go after America or Israel or Lebanon’s Sunnis.
Despite all his rhetorical acrobatics, Nasrallah has failed to mitigate the disaster that has befallen Lebanon’s Shiites: Hundreds of their men are dying in the Syrian quagmire. Hezbollah’s senior military leadership has been depleted in such a way that makes Nasrallah one of the few men still alive of those who founded the militia together in the 1980s.
“Sunni radicalism” as incarnated by the Islamic State (ISIS) or Al-Nusra Front is a worldwide problem that Hezbollah cannot possibly tackle. Dozens of the world’s best armies are pounding ISIS day and night. Dozens of intelligence services are hunting down ISIS’s leaders. And despite all the blood, the most optimistic assessments suggest that — once it loses control over its territories — ISIS will turn from a state into an insurgency, which means that its terrorist suicide bombings will increase, a surge whose early signs have already been seen in the series of ISIS bombings in Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
There is no clear military goal for Hezbollah in Syria, other than fighting a war of attrition to keep Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in power. And even for Assad, it has become known that the world will not let him collapse, but will also not let him rebound or regain control of the rest of the country. The world is simply supervising the Syrian stalemate until further notice.
And in the absence of a clear goal in Syria, Hezbollah better withdraw immediately and let the Shiites lick their wounds and bury their dead. The Syrian quagmire will haunt the Shiites of Lebanon for generations to come.
Hezbollah might be a heavyweight in a small country like Lebanon. But on a bigger scale in countries like Syria, the party’s weight is diluted and its power — though potent — can achieve little.
Perhaps this is why, during its golden years in the 1950s and 1960s, Lebanon simply sat out the regional wars between the Arabs and Israel. Say what you want about Lebanon’s Christian leadership at the time, but it was much smarter than its current descendants. In the past, the Christians realized that when the big parties fight, small kids on the block better stay out. Today, neither Christian leaders, nor their Shiite allies, seem to understand that lesson.
