"The summer of all hopes!" This was how Sa'ad Hariri, leader of the majority bloc in the Lebanese parliament, described the new tourist season in July. He reflected the views of many of his fellow citizens. The 15-year-long civil war that ended in 1990 is a distant memory to most Lebanese, half of whom are under 30. For the first time in more than 50 summers, there were no foreign troops occupying Lebanese soil; the last of them, 14,000 Syrians, having returned home a year earlier. The cedar revolution of 2005, which had forced Syria to end its occupation, had also produced a surge of democratic energy leading to the nation's first free elections in three decades. Those elections had produced a coalition government that represented almost all of the country's 18 religious communities, and that was not beholden to any foreign power.
The Lebanese were also beginning to develop a new sense of security. The series of political assassinations, blamed on the Syrian secret services, that had started with the murder of former prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, seemed to have come to a halt, allowing threatened politicians, intellectuals and media people who had lived half underground for months to return to more or less normal life.
So confident were the various communities that the bad old days of sectarian feud and foreign meddling were over that they had begun a national discussion on modernising Lebanese democracy by downplaying its communitarian features, injecting a dose of federalism and disbanding the various security services, most of them infiltrated by Syria.
There was also good news on the economic front. For the first time in four years, Lebanon was experiencing growth, with foreign investment reaching record levels. The government of prime minister Fuad Siniora, a former banker, was talking of cutting the budget deficit and reducing foreign debt. Western tourists, returning to Lebanon's holiday resorts in large numbers for the first time since the 1960s, endorsed the nation's happier mood. This was taqarun al-saadayn, the coincidence of felicitous factors that gives men a glimpse of paradise. As always, however, kismet—fate—was writing a different script. Events outside Lebanon were conspiring to transform the "summer of all hopes" into a season of death.
The first of those events was shaped around the confrontation between Iran and the international community over Tehran's alleged nuclear weapons programme. The EU, backed by the US, had offered Iran a package of economic and scientific incentives to stop uranium enrichment. Tehran had been given until the middle of July to respond to the package or see the matter referred to the UN security council and thus face the threat of sanctions or even military action. Many in Tehran, including President Ahmadeinejad, believed that the US or Israel might use the security council referral as an excuse for air strikes against nuclear plants.
The second event was Syria's dispute with the UN over the international inquiry into Hariri's murder. The UN commission of inquiry had linked the Syrian regime with the murder and demanded to interrogate senior officials, including President Assad. Not surprisingly, the Syrians had rejected that demand, offering only to let investigators talk to minor, dispensable officials. The showdown between Syria and the UN had been due to break into the open this summer.
A third set of events was unfolding in Israel, where Ehud Olmert's coalition was discovering that returning territory to the Palestinians to build a state would not automatically buy lasting peace. A year after the last Israeli soldier left Gaza, it seemed that instead of "land-for-peace," Israel was facing "land-for-war," as Hamas, now running the Palestinian authority, and other radicals used Gaza as a base for attacks against Israel. Israel suspected that much of Hamas's fighting capability, and part of the cash that kept it alive, came from Tehran via the Hizbullah movement, founded by Iran in 1982.
There was a further thread in this tangled web of middle eastern conflict. The new Iraqi government faced a rapidly expanding sectarian war in which the Mahdi army, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, a junior cleric, was emerging as the deadliest of the Shia militias. And what was the Mahdi army? In the words of Sadr: "The Iraqi face of Hizbullah."
Finally, another event, less well understood in the west, was also unravelling within Lebanon itself: a power struggle within Hizbullah, as the authoritarian style of its secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah, began to come under criticism from factions inside or close to the movement. A number of prominent Hizbullah figures questioned Nasrallah's habit of excluding them from high-level decision-making on security grounds. The argument advanced by Nasrallah's critics was simple: the party had succeeded in driving Israel out of southern Lebanon in 2000 and thus had no reason to continue as a semi-clandestine armed group. With 14 seats in the 128-seat parliament and two cabinet portfolios (for water/power and employment) in the Siniora government, it was time for Hizbullah to become a mainstream party, relinquishing the weapons it claimed it needed against Israel. Nasrallah and his group also faced criticism on theological grounds, because they regard Iran's leader Ali Khamenei as the "supreme guide" of Shi'ism while more than 90 per cent of Lebanese Shias follow either Grand Ayatollah Ali-Muhammad Sistani in Najaf, Iraq, or Ayatollah Muhammad-Hussain Fadhlallah in Beirut. By late June, Nasrallah, for the first time since taking over in 1992, faced the beginnings of a revolt within his ranks.
How did these events combine to trigger the conflict? Iran was anxious to divert attention from its confrontation with the UN over the nuclear issue. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most radical president of the Islamic Republic since the 1980s, has been projecting a new image of revolutionary Iran as the leader of the Muslim world in a "clash of civilisations" with the US. His dream has faced one big problem: Iran is a Shia power, while the overwhelming majority of Arabs, and other Muslims, are Sunnis. The only way for a Shia power to claim pan-Islamic leadership was to promise to "wipe Israel off the map." Ahmadinejad's message was simple: where pan-Arabism, Arab socialism and Sunni Islamism had failed to deliver, revolutionary Shi'ism under Iranian leadership would succeed. It was necessary for Ahmadinejad to drag Israel into a limited but costly conflict to expose its vulnerability. The place to do that was Lebanon, where the pan-Shia Hizbullah movement, with sustained support from Iran, had been preparing for another round of asymmetrical war against Israel since the previous round ended in 1996.
Syria too needed a diversion, and saw a new crisis between Israel and Lebanon as convenient. A mini-war between Israel and Hizbullah would revive the idea that there is "no peace in the middle east without Syria." It would divert attention from the Hariri murder investigation, tempt Washington into reviewing its policy of shunning Syria, and persuade conservative Arab states that they needed the Ba'athists in Damascus to counterbalance the rise of Iran.
The new Israeli government might not have wanted this conflict in Lebanon. But it knew that southern Lebanon, from where Israel had withdrawn its troops six years earlier, had become another example of "land-for-war." Back in 2000, Olmert and his then party, Likud, had criticised the handover of southern Lebanon to Hizbullah; he could not now allow Hizbullah to use southern Lebanon as a base for a new offensive. Israel also knew of the thousands of missiles, including advanced anti-tank ones, supplied by Iran to Hizbullah, and of the preparations that Hizbullah had made for a long conflict with the Jewish state. In his television address declaring "victory" over Israel on 14th August, Nasrallah claimed that the main reason for his success was the fact that Hizbullah had spent years preparing for the fight. The unexpected difficulties that the Israelis faced in southern Lebanon seemed to confirm this claim.
For its part, the US has regarded Lebanon as part of the broader Iranian battlefield, which also includes Syria. Some American analysts looked on with a mixture of admiration and trepidation as Iran extended its influence to the shores of the Mediterranean via Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. (In June 2005, Iran's defence minister Ali Shamkhani boasted that for the first time since the 7th century, Iranian power had returned to the Levant.) Yet any plan to create a new "American" middle east—based on open societies, democratic institutions and market economies—was unlikely to succeed without substantial policy changes, if not actual regime change, in Tehran. The new Iranian leadership was determined to defeat the Bush strategy by offering its alternative vision of an "Islamic" middle east. Provoking a mini-war in Lebanon was the surest way of isolating the pro-western democratic forces and moderate Arab elites that Bush wished to mobilise in support of his vision.
Lebanon was the natural choice for the proxy war that may be the prelude to the main conflict between the US and Iran. After Bahrain, Lebanon is the smallest Arab state. It covers territory less than 1 per cent of Iran's. It also has the highest proportion of non-Muslims in the Arab world—some 40 per cent of the population (in other Arab states, non-Muslims account for between zero, in Saudi Arabia, and 15 per cent, in Egypt). To complicate matters further, Lebanese Muslims are divided into three sects: Shias (40 per cent), Sunnis (15 per cent) and Druze (5 per cent). And that is not all. Many of Lebanon's 18 communities have often looked to outside powers to defend their rights and, in some cases, even save them from annihilation by rivals. Years of civil war, followed by Syrian occupation and by an Israeli military presence in the south, had left Lebanon without proper state structures. Syria decided who would be president and prime minister of Lebanon and, with Iran's accord, also shaped the Lebanese parliament. The absence of state structures enabled Iran to build Hizbullah into a state within a state. By the time this summer's mini-war started, Hizbullah controlled almost a fifth of Lebanon's territory and over 10 per cent of its population. The party collected its own taxes, through the religious toll known as khoms (one fifth of all incomes), and ran banking and insurance systems, schools, hospitals and social welfare schemes (see Judith Palmer Harik, p24). It also owned and managed farms, factories, supermarkets, transport networks, travel agencies and even matrimonial services—activities that employed the bulk of the population under its control. To underline its independence, Hizbullah flew its own flag, had its own national anthem and even maintained "embassies" in several capitals.
The tactic Hizbullah uses to control its population is known as istitar (to cover), a secular version of taqiyyah, the Shia religious device of hiding one's true faith in adverse circumstances. The istitar tactic works like Russian matryushka dolls. In this case, the smallest doll is Hizbullah's military force, an elite unit of 2,000 complemented by a further 4-5,000 fighters. (Most fighters are not full time, and many live civilian lives until called up.) The function of the population is to serve as a human shield for that smallest, and deadliest, doll. This is why the latest mini-war ended up with over 1,000 civilian deaths on the Lebanese side, while the number of Hizbullah fighters killed is estimated at about 100.
The month-long war confirmed intelligence reports that Hizbullah held a large number of missiles. It used them against Israel at an average rate of 70 a day, which, if western estimates are right, means it could have continued its campaign for at least 200 days more without receiving fresh supplies from Iran.
On 12th August, the UN security council passed a unanimous resolution calling for a ceasefire and envisaging the creation of a multinational force to control southern Lebanon up to the Litani river. This, if implemented, could prevent Hizbullah from using its shorter-range missiles, mostly Soviet-designed Katyushas, against Israel. But there is no guarantee that it would not use longer-range missiles if and when it, or its mentors, deemed it necessary. (The UN's latest resolution envisaged no mechanism for achieving the objectives of the famous resolution 1559, which demands Hizbullah be disarmed.)
If Hizbullah is allowed to redeploy as an armed force north of the Litani, it will have won a major tactical victory. Moreover, it will turn into a gun pointed at the head of Siniora's fragile government. If Siniora is forced to dispatch more than half of the Lebanese army to protect the border with Israel, he will have even fewer troops to protect the country against a heavily armed and even more confident Hizbullah. In any case, most army recruits are Shias with sectarian sympathies for their fellow-Shia "resistance fighters."
But Hizbullah cannot be understood merely as an Iranian proxy. Many Lebanese Shias take pride in its success in putting their community at the centre of national politics for the first time. While aware of the organisation's darker side, especially its links with Tehran and its terrorist history, some non-Shias, including quite a few Christians, have rallied to it for nationalist and anti-Israel/US reasons.
The complexity of Hizbullah's position is illustrated by the fact that it is the only Lebanese political group to be in the government and in opposition at the same time. The present government's "project of peace" is backed by a coalition of parties that include Hizbullah. At the same time, Hizbullah is the leading partner in the so-called "project of defiance" alliance of opposition parties, which includes a bloc led by the Christian Maronite leader, former general Michel Aoun, and is tacitly backed by Emile Lahoud, the Syrian-imposed president of the republic.
The prospect of a Lebanese government dominated by Hizbullah is not fanciful. In addition to its well-armed militia, which is certainly stronger than the national army, Hizbullah has plenty of money and could, given the chance, neutralise its domestic political opponents with a mixture of assassinations and bribery. Its next move is certain to be an attempt at seizing control of the reconstruction projects with support from Iran and Syria. Iran has already announced a massive aid package, which, as always, comes with many strings attached.
The ceasefire ordained by the UN may or may not last as long as the last one, introduced in 1996. But even if it does, it will solve none of the problems that led to the fighting. Iran, Syria and Hizbullah will continue to work for their long-term vision of a middle east without Israel (or at least with a cowed and contained Israel) and free of US influence. They would also be ready to provoke other mini-wars as part of their strategy of wearing out the US and Israel through long, low-intensity conflict. One thing is certain: just as this summer's war was deadlier and costlier than the one that ended with the 1996 ceasefire, the next one will be deadlier and costlier still.
The mini-duel in Lebanon is the first of many battles likely to be fought in the broader war for reshaping the middle east, in the wake of regime changes in Afghanistan and Iraq. As things stand, Lebanon has an even chance of falling into either of the rival Iranian and American camps. The American camp could still win, provided the US rallies its western, Arab and Lebanese allies in support of the Siniora "project for peace." This would mean shifting the focus in Lebanon from the Arab-Israeli conflict to the task of building a modern and democratic Lebanese state that, while friendly with the west, would understand Lebanon's historical vocation as a buffer between rival powers. But if Lebanon falls to Shia jihadism, other Arab countries, starting with Iraq and Bahrain, could quickly follow. That could spell the end of Bush's dream of a democratic "greater middle east."
The Israel-Hizbullah duel, a proxy war between two visions of the middle east, has ended in a draw—at least for now. The latter has lost part of its arsenal, and may in time be driven out of most of its bases along the Israeli border. However, it has not suffered the crushing defeat promised by Olmert. Nor has it been forced to release the two Israeli soldiers whose capture triggered the war, although this is demanded by the UN resolution—a day after the resolution was passed, Hizbullah informed the Lebanese government that while it accepted the ceasefire, it would not automatically comply with all the demands set in the resolution (for the past 20 years, Hizbullah has never returned captured Israeli soldiers alive). The UN's apparent resignation to the fact that it cannot seek a full disarmament of Hizbullah is also a victory for Nasrallah. By not being crushed, he can claim victory—a claim echoed in Damascus and Tehran. Nevertheless, Hizbullah's weakness remains its unwillingness, or inability, to turn itself into a mainstream political party, something most Lebanese hope for.
Hizbullah is no different from most other guerrilla armies. It cannot be defeated militarily in a mini-war of a few weeks. However, in the long term it can be defeated politically. By helping to shift the battle to the political front, the US and its actual and potential allies, including possibly a majority of Lebanese, could help those within Hizbullah who wish to tone down Iran's influence and redesign their movement as part of the national political landscape. When Hizbullah was founded, most Lebanese Shias were poor peasants. Almost a quarter of a century later, the picture is different. Money brought in by Lebanese Shia emigrants in west Africa—where they dominate the diamond trade—and the US, has helped create a new Shia bourgeoisie in Beirut and the main cities of the south. Many Shia villages have been rebuilt, with stone houses, modern facilities and improved farming techniques. Iranian investment, channelled through Hizbullah, has also helped expand the new Shia middle class, which has a stake in a more peaceful and stable Lebanon. The outcome of its efforts to reform Hizbullah could affect the whole of Lebanon and, beyond it, the rest of the middle east.
Amir Taheri is an Iranian author. He is editor of "Politique Internationale," France's leading foreign policy journal
by Augustus Richard Norton
Both Syria and Iran have strong incentives to keep Hizbullah armed and dangerous
Hizbullah was founded after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. When Israel withdrew 18 years later, it was losing one of its own soldiers or a Lebanese ally for every Hizbullah fighter killed; a real accomplishment for a guerrilla force.
If Israel's occupation provided the original rationale for Hizbullah, it was Iran, and especially its ambassador to Syria, Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, that created the organisation. The founding cadre were mostly Iraqi-trained young clerics, many of whom had broken with the Lebanese reformist Amal movement of Nabih Berri, which had become too pro-US for their liking. Most founding members were connected to the Iraq-based Hizb al-Dawah, the "party of the Islamic call," which is now a respectable party in Iraq but was then considered a terrorist group.
Iran, and its ally Syria, had good use for the new Hizbullah, which would serve as a cat's paw for their interests. Hizbullah was relatively inchoate in 1983, but that autumn, men linked to the new group destroyed the US marine barracks, with help from the Iranian embassy in Damascus. Terrorists linked to Hizbullah were also responsible for kidnapping dozens of foreigners in the 1980s, including Terry Waite. Some kidnappings were intended to help Iran—then in the throes of a bloody conflict with Iraq—by lending it leverage to bargain arms for hostages.
As the 1990s began, Iran broadened its perspective on Lebanon. Not only was the Gulf war over, but Lebanon's 15-year-long civil war was drawing to a close. When elections were held in 1992, Hizbullah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, turned to Iran for advice. Should he participate in a political process he had condemned as corrupt? Yes, he was urged.
By this time, Hizbullah enjoyed a broad swathe of support in the Lebanese Shia community and was running a variety of social, economic and military institutions. Its leading role in the resistance to Israel buttressed its political role. I remember a Hizbullah election poster from 1996 with the slogan: "They resist with their blood; resist with your vote."
Israel launched fierce attacks on Lebanon in the 1990s, especially in 1993 and 1996. Hizbullah, armed by Iran and supported by Syria, proved a match for Israel: it established that if Israel hit civilian targets in Lebanon, Hizbullah would do likewise in Israel. But clear "rules of the game" emerged, including an understanding that civilians would not be targeted. As Hizbullah gained a reputation for being fierce but rational, its importance to Iran increased as a means of putting pressure on Israel. When fighting ended in 1993 and 1996, Iran played a key diplomatic role.
Hizbullah's relationship with Syria is less organic than the one with Iran. Syria's geopolitical importance is a fact, which Hizbullah's leaders acknowledge. But Hizbullah initially resisted Syria's influence; and in February 1987 Syrian forces killed 20 of its men, an incident that provoked public protest from leading Iranians. By the 1990s, though, Hizbullah had come to terms with Damascus. Senior Hizbullah figures have described their relationship with Syria as one of strategic co-ordination; Syria has not played a consistent day-to-day role in Hizbullah decisions. One respected pro-Hizbullah Shia said to me, holding up his wedding ring finger, "I like my ring, but I like my finger better." He meant that the tie to Iran is inherent, whereas the tie to Syria is dispensable.
In the 1990s, and especially after the 1997 election of Mohammed Khatami as Iranian president, Iran's support for Hizbullah waned. Iranian Revolutionary Guards were withdrawn from Lebanon (they have since returned in smaller numbers), and Iranian financial support—about $100m a year—was reduced. In the 1990s, Hizbullah officials told me that the organisation was beginning to feel the pinch.
When Israel eventually withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, Hizbullah had to confront its future. Many long-time members wanted to leave Israel alone and turn their attention to reforming Lebanon. This was not to be. Iran was anxious for the party to be a vehicle for expanding Iranian influence in the Arab world. Nasrallah shared that view, so it took little Iranian urging to convince him and his colleagues that Hizbullah would serve as a model of resistance for groups like Hamas. As for Syria, it feared that if southern Lebanon became placid, Israel would have no incentive to put the occupied Golan Heights on the negotiating table. Syria was too weak to confront Israel directly, so it needed a proxy to poke Israel.
So Hizbullah did not disarm. This was not just because of Syrian or Iranian wishes. Israel has killed about 20,000 people in Lebanon since 1978, including thousands of civilians. Hizbullah's Shia constituents felt the violent weight of Israel's army, and they came to believe that Hizbullah, rather than the Lebanese army, was best placed to protect them from Israel.
Since 2000, most Hizbullah attacks have been confined to the Shib'a farms—a small area of the Golan owned by Lebanese citizens—where the group has killed nine Israeli soldiers. For their part, Israeli officials readily distinguished between attacks on the occupied farms, which were periodic, and attacks across the border, which were rare. When Hizbullah launched its cross-border operation on 12th July, seizing two Israeli soldiers, it was breaking the "rules" that were fully understood on both sides.
My view is that Nasrallah thought he could stretch the rules, whereas Israel and the US were happy for a pretext to take out Hizbullah and thereby weaken Iran. Senior Hizbullah figures admit that they were surprised by the ferocity of the Israeli response, and Nasrullah denies any Iranian role in launching the July operation.
The irony of Israel's war in Lebanon is that not only has it elevated Hizbullah's regional reputation and provided a model for countering Israel's formidable military machine, it has also enhanced Iran's influence in Lebanon. Iran will step in to help fund the rebuilding of the ruined Shia villages and bombed-out apartments around Beirut. The Lebanese government avows its intention to supplant Iranian influence, but is unlikely to be able to do so. While many Lebanese are understandably angry at Hizbullah for provoking Israel and bringing ruin upon their country, their voices are likely to be drowned out by Hizbullah's supporters.
Any Hizbullah disarmament, as mandated by the UN, will be incomplete at best. Hizbullah fighters will not be integrated into the Lebanese army any time soon. Meanwhile, Syria and Iran have a strong incentive to thwart the pacification of Hizbullah. One suspects that the war's postmortem will reveal that Israel, and its US benefactor, will have accomplished just what their campaign was meant to stop: a lasting and durable challenge to US-Israeli hegemony.
Augustus Richard Norton has been writing about Lebanon for 25 years. He is a professor of international relations and anthropology at Boston University
Hizbullah knows that fire-breathing radicalism will not win it popular support
My first female Hizbullah student appeared in 1984 dressed in a chador, the full-length black veil that leaves only the face exposed. That was a surprise. But a greater surprise was the number of Hizbullah women partisans that came to class dressed like conservative women students of any other sect. True, over the years an increasing number of women wore scarves and men sported beards. But not all scarf-wearers were Shias, and not all Shias were Hizbullah partisans.
That was at the American University of Beirut (AUB). One might expect more chadors in areas where the party of God's influence is strongest. Yet that was not the case in the 1990s. During this time, research often took me to the capital's southern suburb, where Hizbullah's headquarters were located (before recently being obliterated by Israeli aircraft). The obviously poor women going about their business were wearing conservative Muslim dress, but trouser suits and jeans were also in evidence. There was no sign of the chador-draped ladies we often see on Hizbullah demonstrations, and most of the men were clean-shaven. Towns I have visited in the south and in the Bekaa valley reveal the same casual dress.
The difficulty Hizbullah has found in promoting a strict Islamic way of life among Lebanese Shias is well illustrated by the case of Miriam, a secular Shia professional nurse who looked after my mother from 2000 to 2003. She lived in a southern suburb of Beirut and came to work in t-shirt and trousers. A buxom lass, she sometimes changed into low-cut blouses and dangly earrings before she left work.
Miriam didn't like Hizbullah's strait-laced ways. However, she fell into the party's social service network when a heart attack sent her father to the Hizbullah medical centre, near Beirut airport. There she was surprised to see him admitted without the usual demand for money up front made by other Lebanese hospitals. Her father received good medical care at an affordable price. But Miriam was furious when she, the patient's daughter and a nurse, was denied entrance to the hospital because she was not wearing a headscarf.
As the parliamentary elections of 2000 drew near, Miriam's family were approached by Hizbullah volunteers, who said they were canvassing all patients who had spent time at the hospital, asking them to vote for Hizbullah candidates. On election day, she recalled, her father contacted every member of their extended family in the district, urging them to endorse Hizbullah. They did; Hizbullah's ticket won hands down.
Hizbullah will have to deal with many people like Miriam if it expects to continue the political inroads already made in Lebanon's Shia community. Its main rival, the Amal movement (which won 15 seats to Hizbullah's 14 in last year's parliamentary elections), is secular in orientation, as are the other three parties that Lebanese Shias support: the Ba'ath, Communist and the Syrian Social Nationalist parties. Hizbullah will not win over supporters of these parties by preaching an Islamic lifestyle.
Hizbullah well understands the impact and limits of its ideology, and plays it down when to do so serves its purpose. A recent electoral alliance the party made with Michel Aoun—a Maronite Christian ousted from Lebanon in 1990 by the Syrian army and today the most popular Christian politician in Lebanon—makes that clear. Aoun wants to be president, and Hizbullah can deliver the Shia vote, or at least a big part of it. Aoun will reciprocate by backing Hizbullah when the pressure is on, as it is in the aftermath of Hizbullah's struggle with Israel. It was Aoun's support that helped prevent the Lebanese government from backing immediate disarmament. Fire-breathing fundamentalists could not get this job done.
A further example of the Hizbullah approach to winning friends and influencing votes can be found in Hermel, a large town close to the Syrian border with a population of mostly small farmers and day labourers. The area has an agricultural co-operative set up by Hizbullah with communal tractors and a modern medical facility, courtesy of the good offices of Iran. More military recruits for Hizbullah have come from Hermel and its outlying areas than from any other locale. Portraits of local "martyrs" dot the roadsides.
In 1999 I went to Hermel to visit a family friend, a young Shia doctor, to find out what life was like in that part of Hizbullahstan. My friend heads a department at the American University Hospital in Beirut, but spends as much time as possible in Hermel. He is neither a member nor a close sympathiser of Hizbullah. I asked him if he felt any pressure to conform to Hizbullah's religious or political positions, since the party of God held sway in the town. His response indicated what he thought of my naivete. "These people are our neighbours," he said. "They are not about to start monitoring our alcohol consumption. Take my friend Hussein. As kids growing up, we did all kinds of things together. Then I went to AUB and he stayed here working his family's land. He became more religious and that may have led him to Hizbullah in 1983. But that doesn't stop him from joining my friends and me when we go out for a drink; we'll have beers and he'll take a lemonade. Is his wife covered up? Does he pray five times a day? I don't know and I don't care."
Judith Palmer Harik taught political science at the American University of Beirut from 1981 to 2003, and is now president of Matn University. www.judithpalmerharik.com
