| inbluevt | Date: Wednesday, 2013/07/24, 3:43 AM | Message # 1 | DMCA |
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The EU has finally blacklisted the “military wing” of Hizbollah, the Shia Islamist paramilitary movement that has become a non-state hyperpower in the Middle East, as a terrorist organisation. But in their long and conflictual relationship with this Lebanese group, the offspring of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution and Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, neither the Europeans nor the US seem to have worked out exactly what the self-proclaimed Party of God is.
The usual definitions of Hizbollah are definitely ripe for revision. It has long been more than a “non-state actor”, and it is no longer a mere state within the state. A reality upgrade would reveal that, by any relevant measure, its power now comfortably exceeds that of a Lebanese
state it has helped turn into an institutional wasteland.
Hizbollah not only has military and political power, financial might and welfare patronage from health and education to pensions and housing, all independent of the Lebanese state. It has strategically uncoiled a tentacular reach and grip on the levers of that state. It has become a state above the state.
This became X-ray clear after Hizbollah sent its fighters to break the deadlock in neighbouring Syria’s civil war, on behalf of the regime of Bashar al-Assad but on the orders of Iran
and its supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. This not only contradicts the agreed policy of the Lebanese state and its multiple sects, to which Hizbollah is signed up: to stay “dissociated” from an increasingly
sectarian conflict that risks blowing back into a Lebanon still nursing the wounds of its own civil war in 1975-90. It has also spotlit Hizbollah regionally as Iran’s Mediterranean arm, the spearhead of
Tehran in the Levant – the frontline of the struggle between the western-backed Sunni Arab powers and the Shia (and Persian) Islamic Republic. “They are acting like an imperial power”, says one Shia
intellectual perplexed by Hizbollah’s latest adventure.
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Message edited by inbluevt - Wednesday, 2013/07/24, 3:46 AM |
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