BEIRUT, Lebanon — Sitting at a café in Dahieh, the southern suburb and Hezbollah stronghold of the Lebanese capital, is to witness the decline in Hezbollah’s fortunes. Women gossip and children are oblivious, but look around, and some men are missing fingers or eyes, the legacy of holding a sabotaged beeper.
Hezbollah is still a presence, though. The checkpoints that mark the entrance to Dahieh no longer fly Hezbollah flags nor sport posters of the group’s late secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah, but deeper in the labyrinthine neighborhood, the group’s presence is more open. Even in more central neighborhoods, Hezbollah flags remain, dirty and tattered but still flying.
Lebanese intellectuals, intelligence professionals, and retired military leaders agree: Israel defeated Hezbollah’s army, but did not defeat Hezbollah. Since 2000, Hezbollah had grown fat, lazy, and arrogant. By operating openly and moving so publicly into businesses, it enabled Israel to trace and track its leaders. Now, however, Lebanese warn that the lesson Hezbollah internalized is not that it should lay down its arms or cease acting as a proxy for Iran, but rather that it needs to revert to its pre-2000 terrorist cell structure.
This is why disarming Hezbollah now becomes so crucial. Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, the former commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces, appears sincere in his commitment to disarm Hezbollah. Indeed, he has put his reputation on the line by announcing publicly his intention to do so by year’s end.
The problem is twofold: First, even if Aoun is sincere, commanders of armies issue commands and demand compliance, but presidents have no such power of compulsion. Aoun’s situation is complicated by the fact that he is a technocrat rather than a party leader and so enjoys no automatic political backing. Second, Hezbollah propaganda has taken its toll, especially among the Shi’ite community. Many Shi’ites, perhaps even the majority, resent the group, but they are nonetheless susceptible to Hezbollah propaganda depicting itself as a buffer against the community’s humiliation. The fact that decades of Hezbollah terrorism and dictatorship have denied any Shi’ite alternative means Hezbollah’s Shi’ite opponents remain largely unknown and lacking in capacity. To neutralize Hezbollah, therefore, Aoun seeks to thread the needle: Disarm without humiliating.
Here, the past could offer some precedent. Hezbollah is not the first political movement to take up arms independent of the Lebanese state. This was the story of the Lebanese civil war that raged from 1975 to 1990. In 1992, as part of the deal to end the civil war, the Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia, disarmed. With a nod-and-wink from the United States and Europe, the militia sold its weaponry to Croatian and Slovenian rebels seeking to break away from Yugoslavia.
Rather than simply forfeit its weaponry, this provides a precedent to ease Hezbollah’s humiliation. If Hezbollah “sold” its weaponry to the Lebanese Armed Forces, its proceeds might be put in a fund administered by the Lebanese government and outside auditors who can use it to rebuild Shi’ite villages and infrastructure throughout Lebanon, all under the name of the state. If the Lebanese government then wants to sell the weaponry onward, all the better, as Ukraine and others can utilize the Russian weaponry upon which their armed forces were originally trained.
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The Trump administration has a unique opportunity to bring peace to Lebanon after a half-century of sectarian struggle and state erosion. At the same time, the White House has every reason to be cynical about Lebanon’s commitment, Aoun’s sincerity notwithstanding.
To impose a new process is to engender resistance, but to root disarmament in precedent undercuts the efficacy of Hezbollah’s legal resistance, both inside Lebanon and on the world stage. History matters, and while Washington tends to consign anything older than four years ago to the memory hole, sometimes a longer conception can expose precedents capable of untangling policy knots.
Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is the director of analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.