60.
A HARBINGER OF the troubles to come hit with explosive force on Sunday, October 23, 1983. That morning, in Beirut, Colonel Tim Geraghty awoke as usual at dawn, slipped on his camouflage uniform and combat boots, splashed cold water on his face, and walked downstairs to his operations center. A youthful-looking veteran of the Vietnam War and service with the CIA, handsome and square-jawed, he was the commander of the Twenty-Fourth Marine Amphibious Unit. Its 1,800 marines were part of a multinational peacekeeping mission dispatched to the Lebanese capital the preceding year.
The marines had come originally in August 1982 to oversee the evacuation of PLO fighters after the Israeli invasion. They returned in September, following the murder of Lebanon’s Christian president, Bashir Gemayel, and the subsequent massacre committed by Christian Phalangist militia in two Palestinian refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila. The marines’ ambiguous mission was to “establish a presence” and somehow ameliorate the agonies of Lebanon’s civil war, then in its seventh year. They were supposed to be strictly impartial, but, because the United States supplied and trained the Christian-dominated Lebanese armed forces, the marines were increasingly drawn into the civil war on their side. Shiite and Druze militiamen who were fighting the Lebanese army began targeting the marines too.
Throughout September 1983 the marines suffered casualties from sniper and artillery attacks on their headquarters at Beirut airport. A tenuous cease-fire had taken hold, however, on September 26. When he got up on October 23, Geraghty found the situation “relatively quiet.” Only a small number of cooks, sentries, and other marines were awake at 6:22 a.m.—the moment when, Geraghty recalled, “shards of glass from blown-out windows, equipment, manuals, and papers flew across my office.” His ears still ringing, he grabbed his helmet and a .45 pistol to find out “what the hell” was going on. As soon as he stepped outside, he found himself “engulfed in a dense, gray fog of ash,” of the kind that would be familiar two decades later to survivors of 9/11. Looking north he could see little through the “acrid fog.” Standing next to him was a major who looked south and gasped, “My God, the BLT building is gone.” More than three hundred marines and sailors had been billeted in the headquarters of the Battalion Landing Team, the ground-combat component of Geraghty’s force. Now the whole building had been reduced to rubble.
There had been a few suicide car bomb attacks in Lebanon during the preceding two years, including a costly attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut the prior spring, but nothing on this scale. A yellow Mercedes Benz truck traveling at more than thirty-five miles per hour had plowed straight through a barbed wire and concertina fence into the main entrance of the battalion headquarters. Packed with the explosive PETN (pentaerythritol tetranitrate) augmented with compressed butane, the truck went up in a “bright orange-yellow flash” with the equivalent of 12,000 pounds of TNT—one of the biggest nonnuclear blasts on record. Across Beirut people could hear the “horrendous dull roar” and see a mushroom cloud rising over the airport. The four-story building, made of steel-reinforced concrete, was lifted clear off its foundations before collapsing on itself.
Geraghty found a “heinous scene” reminiscent of “those black-and-white newsreels of Europe during World War II”: “Mangled, dismembered corpses were strewed throughout the area in a grotesque fashion. One Marine’s body, still within his sleeping bag, was impaled on a tree limb.” As rescue crews arrived, they could hear “mournful moans beneath the ruins.” There were so many dead that the marines ran out of body bags and had to request an emergency resupply.
In all 241 marines and sailors had been killed—the corps’ greatest single-day loss since the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. At almost the same time, another truck bomb hit a building housing French paratroopers two miles away, killing 58 of them. Both attacks were claimed by a shadowy group calling itself Islamic Jihad. This was an ultra-radical breakaway faction of the Shiite Amal movement that would soon become known as Hezbollah. Its initial acts showed that this new movement was willing and able to operate on a more ambitious scale than previous terrorist groups, from the Ku Klux Klan and the Socialist Revolutionary Combat Organization to the PLO and the Baader-Meinhof Gang, which had been limited by either a lack of resources or a lack of will from killing too many people. Most of these past groups had calculated that if they went beyond a certain point they would spark a self-defeating backlash. From the outset, Hezbollah displayed fewer such compunctions—although more than Al Qaeda and its offshoots subsequently were to evince.22
THE BIRTHPLACE OF this effective and remorseless new organization was Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, where 1,500 members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps had been dispatched with Syrian cooperation to train militants who would fight the Israeli invaders. The Iranians found many volunteers eager to fight the “Zionists” and “infidels” from among the Lebanese Shia, a disenfranchised group that had been increasingly organized and radicalized since the early 1970s. Among the most prominent volunteers were a pair of young Shiite clerics, thirty-four-year-old Subhi Tufeili and thirty-year-old Abbas Musawi, both educated in the seminaries of Najaf, Iraq, where Ayatollah Khomeini had lived in exile until 1978. They would become Hezbollah’s first two secretaries-general.23
Even more important to the organization’s early development was its de facto director of military operations, Imad Mughniyeh. A terrorist prodigy born in south Lebanon and raised in the slums of Beirut, he was only twenty years old in 1982 but had already served in the PLO’s elite Force 17. After the Israel Defense Forces evicted the PLO from Lebanon, he joined Hezbollah. Over the following two decades, he would work closely with Iranian operatives to carry out virtually all of Hezbollah’s high-profile attacks, from suicide bombings to hostage takings. One of his Israeli adversaries called him “one of the most creative and brilliant minds I have ever come across.” Prior to Osama bin Laden’s emergence, Mughniyeh was the world’s most wanted terrorist, but unlike Bin Laden he shunned the media spotlight. He even underwent plastic surgery to disguise his appearance. Marines saw him in 1982–83 directing attacks on their positions, but they did not know his name; they called him “Castro” because of his bushy beard. Hezbollah disclaimed any knowledge of his existence until his death in 2008, when he was celebrated as one of its reveredshaheeds (martyrs) and honored with his own museum.24
This was symptomatic of the secretiveness that surrounded the entire organization; it would not admit its existence until the release in 1985 of a manifesto denouncing the “aggression and humiliation” inflicted by “America and its allies and the Zionist entity.”25Hezbollah preferred to make its mark with spectacular attacks, especially suicide attacks, rather than bombastic statements. The very first target struck by suicide bombers in Lebanon was the Iraqi embassy; a 1981 attack killed 27 people. (Iraq was then at war with Iran, whose proxies were behind the blast.) The next year it was Israel’s turn: in November 1982, a Peugeot full of 1,300 pounds of explosives rammed the Israeli headquarters in Tyre, Lebanon’s southernmost city, killing 75 Israelis and perhaps 27 Lebanese prisoners. This was the first suicide attack on an Israeli target but far from the last. Almost exactly a year later, another Israeli headquarters in Tyre was struck by an explosives-packed Chevrolet pickup, killing 28 Israelis and 35 prisoners. The U.S. embassy in Beirut was another repeat target. It was first hit in April 1983 by a GMC pickup truck, killing 63 people. The following year, in September 1984, an attack on the U.S. embassy annex in a Beirut suburb, this time by a Chevrolet van, killed 24 more.
Such attacks made Hezbollah synonymous with suicide bombing—a tactic that had not been used by Palestinian terrorists of the 1970s or even by the Afghan mujahideen. Although employed sporadically by some terrorists of the past such as the turn-of-the-century Russian socialists and the medieval Assassins, suicide attacks had been associated most prominently with the Japanese kamikazes. Their use in the waning days of World War II highlights the fact that this is the weapon of the weak—and the fanatical. That made it a natural tactic for Hezbollah since the Shiites have always been weak by comparison with the Sunnis, who comprise 90 percent of the Muslim world. The very foundation of the Shiite faith is veneration of a shaheed, Muhammad’s grandson, Hussein, slain in AD 680 by a caliph who rejected his claim to be the rightful heir to the Prophet. In the 1980s Iran made ample use of suicidal volunteers, the Basij, to fight the better-equipped Iraqi army. Tens of thousands of boys, some as young as ten, were given plastic keys to heaven and sent to run through minefields in human-wave attacks.26
Hezbollah brought the same ethos of martyrdom to its operations, even though the Koran expressly forbids suicide and the killing of innocents. “Every man, young and old, loves to blow himself up to tear apart the bodies of the invading, occupying Jews,” Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, declared in 1998. The willingness of its members to forfeit their own lives, Hezbollah proclaimed, could allow it to vanquish better-armed but supposedly softer foes such as the “fearful and cowardly” Israelis—a refrain that would be echoed in later years by many other Islamist groups. Unlike many of its successors, however, Hezbollah limited its suicide attacks to military targets.27
Suicide attacks were only one weapon in Hezbollah’s arsenal and became progressively less important as the group developed other capabilities. Indeed, as of 2011, Hezbollah had not mounted a single suicide operation since 1999. It also flirted early on with airplane hijacking before abandoning this tactic too. Its most famous skyjacking was the seizure of TWA flight 847 in Beirut in June 1985 which led to the murder of an American sailor, whose body was dumped on the tarmac.
A third tactic, popular with Hezbollah during its infancy but since discarded, was hostage taking. It began with the seizure in 1982 of David Dodge, acting president of the American University in Beirut. He was released 366 days later after having been smuggled in a crate to Tehran. Almost a hundred other Western hostages were seized in Lebanon in the following decade. The longest-held was the reporter Terry Anderson, who spent almost seven years in captivity (1985–91). He was luckier than two other hostages—CIA Station Chief William Buckley and Marine Lieutenant Colonel William “Rich” Higgins, who was part of a United Nations peacekeeping mission. Both were tortured and murdered.
These attacks were not simply the result of cruelty or blood lust. They were part of a calculated strategy designed to drive Israel, the United States, and other Western influences out of Lebanon, leaving Iran and its allies predominant. That strategy worked. Less than four months after the attack on their headquarters in Beirut, Ronald Reagan “redeployed” the marines out of Lebanon. To Colonel Geraghty’s disgust, the United States never mounted any retaliation, refusing to join in French and Israeli air strikes on Iranian and Hezbollah positions in the Bekaa Valley. The hostage taking that followed exposed “the greatest Satan of all”28—the United States—to further humiliation when Reagan’s aides secretly contrived to sell arms to Iran in return for their release. Three hostages were let go but more were taken, and meanwhile the administration was almost brought down by the Iran-contra scandal. Iran and its proxies finally gave up on hostage taking in 1992 following the death of Ayatollah Khomeini and the advent of a slightly more moderate regime in Tehran.29
HEZBOLLAH’S ATTACKS ON Israel (“a cancerous growth that needs to be eradicated”)30 were even more pervasive and just as effective. The Shia had at first welcomed the Israeli invasion of Lebanon as a reprieve from the PLO’s oppressive rule, but the Israelis overstayed their welcome in an unsuccessful attempt to establish a friendly, Christian-led government in Beirut. Hezbollah undoubtedly would have been formed even if the invasion had never occurred, but Israel’s presence accelerated the militarization of the Shia. Hezbollah’s 1982 suicide bombing of the Israeli headquarters in Tyre was just the start of a guerrilla campaign to drive the invaders out.
Israeli security forces responded by setting up roadblocks, rounding up and harshly interrogating suspects, destroying villages, bombing Hezbollah hideouts. But, as Israeli commanders later acknowledged, their heavy-handed approach only alienated the population—much as the French had done in Algeria and Indochina.31 For all their efforts, Israel’s feuding intelligence agencies could not crack the insurgent cells that sniped at, and bombed, their troops. Suicide bombers sometimes rammed Israeli convoys, but the “Islamic resistance” also used sophisticated roadside bombs provided by Iran that stymied Israeli jammers. In 1985, amid disaffection at home and mounting casualties (650 dead, 3,000 wounded),32 the Israel Defense Forces pulled back to a security zone in the south of Lebanon. It was the first military defeat in Israel’s history but not the last at Hezbollah’s hands.
Israel’s retreat emboldened Hezbollah to pursue its ultimate aims—the “final obliteration” of the “Zionist entity” and the creation in Lebanon of an Islamic republic modeled on Iran.33 In seeking to accomplish its grandiose objectives, Hezbollah was able to reach far outside Lebanon, thanks to the assistance of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards and its intelligence organizations. In 1992 their operatives blew up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 people. In 1994, another bomb tore apart a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing 85 people. Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guards were also widely suspected in the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 American airmen.34 In addition Hezbollah provided training and support to numerous other terrorist groups, ranging from Al Qaeda in the 1990s to Iraq’s Jaish al Mahdi after 2003. Many subsequent terrorist attacks, such as Al Qaeda’s truck bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and various roadside bombings of U.S. troops in Iraq after 2003, were modeled on the methods Hezbollah had pioneered in Lebanon.35
In fighting back, Israel claimed a notable success in 1992 when one of its Apache gunships blew up a car in which Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Abbas Musawi, was traveling along with his family. Sixteen years later, in 2008, the onetime terrorist prodigy Imad Mughniyeh met his end in Damascus—killed, appropriately, by his favorite weapon, a car bomb, in an attack attributed to Mossad. Sometimes terrorist organizations are crippled by the removal of their leaders; that was the fate of Peru’s Shining Path after the capture of Abimael Guzmán in 1992 and, in the more distant past, of the Lusitanian rebels against Roman rule in Spain after the death of Viriathus in 139 BC. Hezbollah was already so well established, however, that it would not be slowed by the elimination of Musawi and Mughniyeh.
Musawi was immediately succeeded by his corpulent protégé, Hassan Nasrallah, a thirty-two-year-old cleric from the slums of East Beirut who was the son of a fruit and vegetable seller but wore the black turban signifying descent from the Prophet Muhammad. Like Musawi, he had studied in Najaf, where he had imbibed Khomeini’s teachings. He revealed himself to be at least as shrewd, ruthless, and charismatic as his predecessor. He was even gifted with a sense of humor, willing to laugh at his speech impediment and other foibles—something it would have been hard to imagine Osama bin Laden doing.
Nasrallah won the devotion of his followers when his oldest son died in a 1997 clash with Israeli commandos. The sons of most Middle Eastern leaders were dissolute playboys. That Hezbollah leaders—like an earlier, somewhat heretical, Shiite terrorist, Hasan-i Sabah, founder of the Assassins—were willing to sacrifice their own offspring significantly enhanced their credibility.36
Nasrallah moved Hezbollah away from being purely a terrorist organization. Like Mao, Ho, and Castro, he recognized the importance of political action. Unlike them, he was even willing to compete in more or less free elections, although Nasrallah continued to use considerable coercion to turn out the vote and to silence critics. Over the objections of some members, Hezbollah became a political party that, starting in 1992, competed in Lebanon’s elections and appointed cabinet ministers. It also expanded its role as a provider of social services to Lebanon’s poor Shia, running a vast network of schools, hospitals, construction companies, loan providers, and other businesses funded mainly by Iran, which provided Hezbollah with an estimated $100 million a year.37 It had its own version of the Boy Scouts, the Mahdi Scouts, and a Martyrs’ Association to help the widows and orphans of suicide bombers. It even sold souvenirs to tourists such as the bracelet and lighter adorned with Nasrallah’s image that this author purchased in the Bekaa Valley in 2009. More importantly it set up its own website, four newspapers, five radio stations, and a satellite television station, Al Manar (The Lighthouse), to get its message out. Amazingly, this nonstate group did a more effective job of spreading its message than its Zionist adversaries, who had the full resources of the Israeli state behind them.38
Its foray into politics did not, however, mean that Hezbollah was eschewing military force. Far from it. Lebanese politicians, generals, and journalists who stood in its way—or in the way of its patrons in Damascus and Tehran—were liable to meet a nasty end. The organization was suspected, most notoriously, in the massive 2005 car bombing that killed former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, who was intent on forcing Syrian troops out of Lebanon. But most of Hezbollah’s martial energies went into the struggle against Israel, which it used to justify its refusal to disarm in common with other militias following the end of Lebanon’s civil war in 1989.
THE 1990S SAW many bloody guerrilla struggles around the globe. Any list of the grim lowlights would have to include the former Yugoslavia, where Orthodox Serbs were battling Muslim Bosnians, Catholic Slovenians, and other ethnic groups; Kashmir, where Pakistan-backed Muslim insurgents were resisting rule by Hindu-majority India; Chechnya, where Orthodox Russian soldiers were trying to suppress resistance from Muslim Chechens; Nagorno-Karabakh, where Armenian Christians were seeking autonomy from Muslim Azerbaijan; Somalia, where various clans and parties were fighting for control after the breakdown of central authority; and Rwanda, where hard-line Hutus were slaughtering the Tutsi minority and moderate Hutus. For all of their diversity, each of these conflicts was rooted in differences of ethnicity that were seized upon by nationalist ideologues and that were exacerbated in most cases, Rwanda and Somalia excepted, by differences of religion. It was such conflicts that led the political scientist Samuel Huntington in 1993 to claim that the world was seeing a “clash of civilizations.” His thesis was overstated—there were at least as many clashes within civilizations as between them—but it gained widespread currency because it seemed to account for the prevalence of conflict in the first decade after the end of the Cold War. Certainly Lebanon fit the mold. In the 1990s, this small Mediterranean state was still recovering from its own civil war, and it was relatively peaceful by comparison with countries such as Rwanda, where over 800,000 people would die, but it too saw a struggle rooted in ethnicity and religion.
Throughout that decade Hezbollah waged a guerrilla war in southern Lebanon against the IDF and its 2,500 proxies, primarily Christians, in the South Lebanese Army. Hezbollah had only a few thousand full-time fighters, but that was enough to harass the larger and better-equipped IDF. Its low-level attacks in the southern “security zone,” often employing roadside bombs, killed an average of 17 Israeli soldiers a year along with 30 South Lebanese Army soldiers39 and sparked a potent antiwar movement in Israel led by the mothers of slain soldiers. Hezbollah knew it did not have to kill that many people, because it could magnify its attacks through its powerful propaganda arm. It cleverly nurtured antiwar sentiment in Israel by broadcasting images of dead or wounded soldiers followed by the Hebrew-language tagline “Who’s Next?”40
In May 2000, Prime Minister Ehud Barak finally withdrew Israeli troops from Lebanon after eighteen years. Nasrallah promptly claimed a “great historic victory . . . achieved by martyrdom and blood.” The lesson that Hezbollah and others drew—including the Palestinians, who soon thereafter launched the Second Intifada—was that, in Nasrallah’s words, even “with all its atomic weapons, Israel is weaker than cobwebs.”41 Far from admitting that its raison d’être—opposing Israeli occupation—had been removed, Hezbollah made fresh demands for Shebaa Farms, a small sliver of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights that had previously belonged to Syria, not Lebanon.
Long-simmering tensions with Israel boiled over in 2006, resulting in Israel’s biggest war since the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. On July 12, Hezbollah operatives infiltrated northern Israel and ambushed two IDF Humvees, killing three soldiers and kidnapping two more. Two hours later, Israeli troops went in pursuit, but Hezbollah knocked out a Merkava tank with a mine and killed five more soldiers. Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, responded with aerial and artillery strikes targeting Hezbollah infrastructure in southern Lebanon and on the outskirts of Beirut. Over a hundred high-rise buildings in the capital’s suburbs were demolished, but most were unoccupied because of Israeli warnings. To increase the pressure on Lebanon to bring Hezbollah to heel (something that its government was too weak to do), the Israeli navy blockaded the Lebanese coastline while the Israeli air force bombed the Beirut airport. During the next month Israeli aircraft would drop more than 12,000 bombs and missiles while Israeli ground and naval forces would fire more than 150,000 rockets and artillery shells. Yet even all this firepower could not prevent Hezbollah from firing an unceasing barrage of 122-millimeter Katyusha rockets into northern Israel. These short-range, unguided missiles could be set up in minutes almost anywhere, making them impossible to knock out from the air.
In frustration the Israeli cabinet authorized a limited ground incursion, eventually amounting to 15,000 troops, but the IDF found Hezbollah a tougher-than-expected foe—quite a change from the Palestinian rock throwers and ineffectual Arab conscripts it had gotten used to fighting. Before the conflict Hezbollah had constructed an elaborate system of bunkers, tunnels, and safe houses linked together by a private communications system and stocked with ample food, water, and ammunition. Once the battle started, its fighters were able to resupply themselves and to maneuver effectively under fire: always the crucial tests of any fighting force. With no front to defend, they were able to attack Israeli troops from unexpected directions, knocking out tanks and troop concentrations with missiles ranging from the older Sagger to the more modern Kornet. Hezbollah even fired a C-802 antiship missile, Chinese-designed and Iranian-supplied, which inflicted significant damage on an Israeli missile boat ten miles offshore.
Hezbollah’s ability to wage such sophisticated warfare led some analysts to suggest that it was at the forefront of a new trend—“hybrid warfare,” which combines conventional and unconventional tactics.42 There is something to this analysis, although one may doubt how new “hybrid warfare” actually is. Most successful insurgents of the past, whether the American colonists or Chinese Communists, combined guerrilla and conventional tactics. Many others, such as the FLN, IRA, and Vietminh/Vietcong, combined terrorism with guerrilla warfare as Hezbollah did.43 Where Hezbollah really excelled, however, was not in ground combat but in manipulation of the news media.
The turning point of the war was the July 30 Israeli air strike on suspected Hezbollah positions in the town of Qana. An apartment building was flattened, leading to the death of seventeen children and eleven adults. (Initial casualty estimates were much higher.) The resulting footage of mangled bodies being pulled out of the wreckage, which Hezbollah made sure received widespread distribution, increased pressure on Israel to halt its offensive, which was said to be “disproportionate.” Israelis could complain with some justification that there was no similar level of media scrutiny of counterinsurgency campaigns waged by nondemocratic powers such as Russia against Chechen separatists, Peru against the Shining Path, or Algeria against Muslim fundamentalists. But there was not much Israel could do about the existence of this double standard—or about the fact that, as a small, isolated state dependent on American support, it was especially vulnerable to international pressure. This was a weapon against which Israel’s Merkava tanks and F-16 fighters were powerless. Like the Greeks in the 1820s, the Cubans in the 1890s, the Algerians in the 1950s, and the Palestinians in the 1980s, Hezbollah had mastered jujitsu information operations, turning its enemy’s strength into a disadvantage in the battle for global sympathy. The efficacy of such efforts was all the greater because of the spread of the Internet and satellite television.
On August 14, 2006, a cease-fire went into effect. Israeli troops pulled back to their own border and Hezbollah filtered back into southern Lebanon. Thirty-four days of war had resulted in the death of 119 Israeli soldiers and 42 Israeli civilians. A total of 1,100 Lebanese civilians were killed; estimates of Hezbollah fatalities ranged from 250 (its own figure) to 650 (the Israeli figure), in either case only a small portion of Hezbollah’s total force of at least 15,000.44
IN SOME WAYS Hezbollah emerged chastened from this conflict. In December 2008–January 2009, when Hamas, a Sunni movement inspired by Hezbollah’s example, fought its own war against Israel in the Gaza Strip, Hezbollah prudently refrained from establishing a second front in the north, suggesting that it had no desire for a repeat of 2006. By most measures, however, Hezbollah emerged stronger from the second Lebanon war. By 2010, having rearmed with Syrian and Iranian help, Nasrallah claimed to have 40,000 missiles, compared with just 13,000 at the start of the 2006 campaign.45 Hezbollah also spent hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild war-damaged areas, thus strengthening its hold on the Shiite population. In 2011 Hezbollah and its allies toppled Lebanon’s Sunni, pro-Western prime minister, Saad Hariri, and replaced him with a politician more to their liking.
Hezbollah’s ascendance was symptomatic of Israel’s inability over numerous campaigns since the 1960s to decisively defeat guerrilla foes, who could not be vanquished as swiftly or completely as regular Arab armies had been. In many ways Israel’s problems were analogous to those of the United States in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, France in Algeria and Indochina, and Britain in Cyprus and Aden. The difference, of course, was that Israel could not simply bring its forces home without worrying about the consequences of leaving unrepentant enemies only a few miles from its population centers.
To defend itself, Israel regularly launched punitive strikes that too often only strengthened the relationship between terrorist organizations and the civilians among whom they operated. Air strikes could damage movements such as Hezbollah or Hamas but could not prevent their regeneration. That would have required reoccupation, which Israel hesitated to do because it had no desire for another long and costly occupation of Arab territory; imperialism was no longer an acceptable option in the modern West of which Israel considers itself a part. Israel had some success in ending the terrorist threat from the West Bank, because it did undertake a partial reoccupation during the Second Intifada and because of the serendipitous emergence after Arafat’s death in 2004 of a more moderate Palestinian Authority leadership under Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad. But no such regime appeared in Lebanon, where an increasingly radicalized Shiite community was on the ascent. Thus the best Israel could hope for was an uneasy truce that could be broken at any moment.
DURING ITS FIRST quarter century of existence, Hezbollah had amply lived up to the description of a former American official who suggested in 2003, “Hezbollah may be the ‘A-Team of Terrorists’ and maybe al-Qaeda is actually the ‘B’ team.”46 Certainly Al Qaeda could not match Hezbollah’s quasi-conventional military capabilities, its wholly owned radio and television networks, and its ability to dominate and administer a substantial geographic region. Nor could most other Islamist groups. The vast majority of Islamic insurgents, like the vast majority of non-Islamic insurgents, failed miserably. They were repressed with considerable bloodshed in Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle Eastern lands by unelected rulers who, unlike their Israeli or American counterparts, were largely impervious to public opinion. The war in Algeria was particularly ugly, leading to the death of at least 100,000 people in the 1990s.47 Of course, as we have seen, even the most illiberal counterinsurgents could still lose if they aroused the ire of the entire population, as the Nazis did in Yugoslavia or the Soviets in Afghanistan. But the most extreme Islamist groups never came close to claiming majority support, and their proclivity for targeting civilians, many of them Muslims, cost them in the court of public opinion. Thus Arab dictators were able to maintain enough legitimacy to crush armed Islamist uprisings, if not the more broad-based popular insurrections that broke out during the 2011 “Arab Spring.”
Islamists, predictably, fared no better in areas where Muslims were in the minority. From East Asia to Western Europe, from North America to South Asia, radicals plotted against the state with little success. Even Russia managed to defeat an insurgency in Chechnya, which declared independence in 1991. The Russians invaded in 1994 and pulled out in 1996, stymied by Chechen guerrillas who, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, resisted to the death. But the Russian army returned in 1999 to subdue the breakaway province using scorched-earth tactics. An estimated 100,000 Chechens were killed out of a prewar population of just a million—a death rate considerably greater than that suffered by Yugoslavia in World War II, if still less than that of Haiti during its War of Independence. Perhaps 20,000 Russian soldiers also perished.
Russia’s success in Chechnya, along with Sri Lanka’s success a few years later against the Tamil Tigers, showed that even in the twenty-first century a brutal approach could work as long as the counterinsurgents did not care about world opinion and were operating on their home soil, where they enjoyed a de facto level of legitimacy that Israel could never acquire in Lebanon or France in Algeria. Such a strategy could be stymied only if outside powers came to the rebels’ aid—as occurred not only in Afghanistan in the 1980s but also in Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999, Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991, and Libya in 2011, but not in Chechnya or Sri Lanka.48
Failing to overthrow their own regimes, Islamic revolutionaries from all over the world had to seek refuge in the 1990s in a handful of sympathetic, virtually ungoverned places, notably Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Pakistan’s tribal territories, and Afghanistan. Out of such unpromising conditions arose a terrorist group that would soon eclipse Hezbollah in notoriety, if not in effectiveness.