The disaster of “political parties” with their own armies and long-range missiles
Hezbollah has 23 seats in the 128 seat Parliament in Lebanon. It also has its own army. Huh?
Imagine the Democrats or Republicans with their own private armies to carry out private foreign policies and to kill off particularly dangerous members of the opposition. Imagine the Green Party, from fortified strongholds in Berkeley and San Francisco, firing missiles into Alberta to protest that government’s protection of clergymen who refuse to perform same-sex marriages.
Absurd, you say. Ridiculous. No country could or would ever stand for that. A political party has to get power by winning elections. It can’t have a separate and private foreign policy that it carries out by force of arms. Yet that’s exactly what Lebanon has.
Listen to Lebanese MP Walid Jumblatt, the “patriarch of the Druze Muslim community,” in David Ignatius’s phrase, via the Daily Star (HT: FromBtoB):
Expressing disbelief over Israel’s “violent reaction to the abduction of two soldiers,” Jumblatt noted that “Lebanon officially said it was not responsible for the crisis.”
“It is imperative to discuss a solution with the United Nations and the terms to facilitate the spread of the Lebanese Army’s control over Lebanon, but right now we are under a chaotic and unjustified Israeli attack,” the Progressive Socialist Party leader repeated in separate interviews with BBC4 and L’Orient du Jour.
Asked whether he thought there was a hidden agenda behind Hizbullah’s continued rocket attacks on Israel, Jumblatt replied: “One must not forget that Hizbullah works according to a Syrian-Iranian plan in one way or another.”
“But I hope that Sayyed Hassan [Nasrallah] has a margin of freedom allowing him to put the interest of Lebanon above the Syrian and Iranian interests,” he added, in reference to the Hizbullah secretary general.
“The hidden agenda prods Syria to brag about Lebanon’s weakness without Damascus’s help and gives Syria a motive to draw attention away from the international court [being formed to try former Premier Rafik Hariri's assassins],” he said.
Concerning the likelihood of a solution to the crisis, Jumblatt said: “We must sit down with Hizbullah and discuss the means to integrate its forces into the Lebanese Army.”
It is hard to see how a country that permits private armies can govern itself successfully. It is hard to see what Lebanon can do to rein in Hezbollah if to date Hezbollah has been, with impunity, carrying out a “Syrian-Iranian plan” of bombing and provoking Israel. It is hard to see how one old Israeli remedy — creating a buffer zone in southern Lebanon — can ever work again, if Hazbollah is now armed with Iranian missiles with a 200 km range.
If Lebanon does not find a way to rein in Hezbollah, and if Hezbollah keeps firing its rockets, it is perhaps hard to see an end of this conflict without Israel attacking Hazbollah’s patron, Syria, to which it reportedly has given an 72-hour ultimatum — a report Israel has denied. It is hard to see Syria getting attacked without bringing Iran directly into the war, since Iran has said it would. And thus, at the moment, it is somewhat hard to see how this war, of Iran’s choosing and timing, ends before Iran shows off whatever “surprises” it has in store, from Shiite insurrections in Iraq to its oil weapon and perhaps even nastier weaponry.
We of course would be delighted to be wrong about any and all of this.
UPDATE
Tom Friedman makes some related points about the dysfunction of supposedly “democratic” governments that permit minority members of the Cabinet to in effect declare war and make foreign policy.