Like others who had the privilege of serving as U.S. ambassador in Beirut, I often took the downhill walk from the official residence to a modest memorial nearby. There, like my predecessors and successors, I presided over anniversary remembrances to honor those who lost their lives serving the U.S. government in Lebanon: 63 people slaughtered in the April 1983 embassy bombing; 241 Marines and other U.S. service personnel murdered in the October 1983 Marine Barracks bombing; 23 (including Lebanese visa applicants) killed in the October 1984 bombing of the temporary embassy in Awkar, East Beirut; individuals held hostage, tortured, and killed for their service to the United States; a Navy Seabee murdered and dumped on the tarmac during a 1985 plane hijacking.
Author
Jeffrey Feltman
John C. Whitehead Visiting Fellow in International Diplomacy - Foreign Policy
The emotional reunions of the embassy’s Lebanese employees, many retired, who survived the bombings, along with the relatives of their colleagues who did not, made these remembrances particularly poignant. The story of an Armenian-Lebanese always touched me: She still toiled for the embassy during my 2004 to 2008 tenure, more than 20 years after she had been left for dead in April 1983 and sent for medical care only when a morgue worker glimpsed a slight twitch. And what did the embassy’s Lebanese commercial specialist tell his mother, when he accepted a job at the very compound where his father had worked and then been killed in 1984? While we did not in those days have many Marines visiting Beirut, whenever we did, it was a special but somber honor for me to accompany the visitor to pay respects at the memorial.
The remembrance commemorations also prompted reflections on the history and power of Hezbollah, the presumed (and in some cases indicted) author of the murders of all of the hundreds of victims—American and Lebanese—whose names were inscribed on the embassy’s memorial. Most were killed by the suicide bombings that Hezbollah did more than any other group to popularize in the modern era. Hezbollah’s methods have evolved as its military and political powers and sophistication have expanded since the mid-1980s, with Lebanon itself rather than American citizens now held hostage. But then as now, Hezbollah serves as the most successful, and the most deadly, export of the 1979 Iranian revolution.
Hezbollah’s origins: Iran seizes the opportunity
Hezbollah emerged during the chaos of Lebanon’s civil war. As Lebanese factions, Palestinians, Israelis, Syrians, and various proxy powers destroyed the country, the ground was fertile for Iran’s post-1979 revolutionary leaders to demonstrate that their example could be replicated in the Arab world, by exploiting long-standing grievances of Lebanon’s Shiite Muslim underclass.
In the complicated balance of the so-called confessional system adopted in 1943 upon Lebanon’s independence, government positions are allocated according to religious sect. These are apportioned by the demographic weight of each group as reflected in a now wildly outdated 1932 census that, given the political implications for Lebanon’s shrinking Christian population, has never been updated. Thus, the president of the republic is held by a Maronite Christian, the prime minister comes from the Sunni Muslims, the speaker of the parliament must be Shiite Muslim, and so forth. Originally, government positions and parliamentary seats were divided in a 6-5 ratio favoring Christians over Muslims; the 1989 Taif Agreement ending Lebanon’s civil war amended this to 50-50. Further divisions allow for representation of Lebanon’s 18 recognized religious sects or confessions (e.g., the Muslim 50 percent share is divided between Sunnis, Shiites, Druze, and Alawites, and the Christian half, while dominated by the Maronites, has reserved slots for the other Christian denominations).
Confessional allocations aside, Lebanon’s Maronite-Sunni elite (and even some traditional Shiite feudal families) tended to treat the Shiites with disdain and neglect. Enmeshed in poverty and high rates of illiteracy, Shiite peasants concentrated in the south also suffered disproportionately from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) attacked Israel from southern Lebanon, and the Israelis retaliated in kind. Given years of PLO abuses, Shiite residents of the south briefly welcomed the 1982 Israeli invasion, although Israeli tactics quickly alienated them, driving thousands from ancestral villages to the slums of Beirut’s impoverished southern suburbs.
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Meanwhile, the Multinational Force in Lebanon (consisting of military personnel from the United States, France, Italy, and the United Kingdom) established in 1982 to oversee the evacuation of the PLO from Lebanon was increasingly viewed as a partisan belligerent rather than a neutral player, especially after the September 1982 assassination of President-elect Bashir Gemayel.
The Iranian mullahs…had a perfect stage on which to export their revolutionary drama.
The Iranian mullahs thus had a perfect stage on which to export their revolutionary drama: an increasingly disliked Western coalition on the ground; a brutal Israeli occupation and victimized Palestinians in squalid camps; the distracting chaos of an on-going civil war; and—most importantly—an alienated and despised Shiite population desperate for political and economic salvation and security. An earlier attempt at awakening Shiite political activism by the charismatic Shiite cleric Iman Musa Sadr lost its unique momentum with Sadr’s disappearance during a 1978 Libya visit. Albeit with more dangerous intent, Iran picked up what Sadr started and transformed Shiites from underclass to what today is Lebanon’s most powerful political force, one willing to impose its will on the country—including, if needed, by assassinations and militia force.
Conveniently for the newly minted Islamic Republic of Iran, fighting the “Imperialists” and “Zionists” could bolster the Shiite fortunes in Lebanon simultaneously with enhancing the revolutionary reputation of Iran’s government at a time when it was enmeshed in war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Initially hardly noticed in the “noise” of the Lebanese civil war, Iranian Revolutionary Guards (as many as 1,000) established training camps in the Biqa’ Valley in the early 1980s. Iran committed to Shiites tens of millions of dollars (some estimates exceed $200 million) annually to cover salaries and services that the Lebanese state neglected to extend. As opposed to the corruption and cronyism of traditional Lebanese leaders, Hezbollah cultivated an image of crisp efficiency and honesty. But by 1985, when Hezbollah’s initial manifesto (calling, among other things, for the establishment of an Iran-style Islamic republic in Lebanon) was issued, the group was already notorious internationally for its methods of simultaneous suicide attacks, later copied by other terrorist groups, and for its hostage-taking.
For Iran, Hezbollah was already a success story by this point. Hezbollah claimed credit for the departure of U.S and French military personnel in 1984 and the 1985 retreat of the Israelis from Beirut to a security zone in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah’s seizure of hostages gave Iran leverage, with the Reagan administration’s attempts to explain away the Iran Contra scandal by claiming the arms sales to Iran were intended to secure the release of Americans from Hezbollah. While Hezbollah leaders today downplay this bloody legacy of suicide bombing, hijacking, hostage-snatching, torture, and murder, this history foreshadows Hezbollah’s subsequent success in using Israeli hostages and remains to secure the release of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners from Israeli custody. Similar to 1985, Hezbollah also declared victory for “the resistance” in forcing the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000 and for having survived the Israeli ground and air attacks in the devastating summer 2006 war that Hezbollah provoked.
Hezbollah as Iran’s multi-purpose tool
For Iran, Hezbollah is a strategic asset that extends Iranian influence to the Mediterranean. Hezbollah’s rockets and missiles are tangible demonstration of the Islamic Republic’s anti-Israel credentials. But Hezbollah’s value to Tehran transcends the Lebanese theater. Hezbollah, like a “Beltway bandit” government subcontractor, has provided technical assistance and training to Iraqi militias supported by Iran and, more recently, Yemen. Hezbollah, when tasked by Tehran or Damascus, provides assassination services, with Hezbollah operatives indicted by the Special Tribunal for Lebanon for the February 2005 murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and under suspicion for the elimination of many other anti-Syrian and anti-Hezbollah Lebanese politicians in the 2005 to 2008 period.
For Iran, Hezbollah is a malevolent version of the Swiss Army knife, with special capabilities always at the ready for distinct tasks.
As the 1992 and 1994 suicide attacks against, respectively, the Israeli embassy and a Jewish center in Buenos Aires illustrate, Hezbollah’s terrorism does not stop at the Mediterranean water’s edge. More recently, Hezbollah stands accused of perpetrating the 2012 assault in Bulgaria against a bus of Israeli tourists and planning attacks, subsequently foiled, in Azerbaijan and Cyprus. Argentina announced the arrest of Hezbollah operatives in advance of the recent G-20 Summit. Hezbollah also developed the capability of helping Iran evade sanctions: Drawing on an extensive expatriate Lebanese Shiite population in Latin America and Africa, Hezbollah has mastered the criminal links of smuggling, money-laundering, and drug trafficking. Most importantly for Iran, Hezbollah fighters, backed by Russian air power, have been an essential part of Bashar al-Assad’s survival in Syria. Put simply, for Iran, Hezbollah is a malevolent version of the Swiss Army knife, with special capabilities always at the ready for distinct tasks.
Hezbollah as a Lebanese actor
When people would describe Hezbollah as a “state within a state,” Fred Hof, until recently at the Atlantic Council, would gently correct them, describing Hezbollah as “a state within a non-state.” Unlike other Lebanese militias that battled each other, Hezbollah evaded the disarmament requirements of the 1989 Taif Agreement by citing the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon (and, sometimes, the very existence of Israel). Especially since the 2006 war, Iran has facilitated an exponential increase in the size, sophistication, and lethality of Hezbollah’s arsenal—a reality not lost upon other Lebanese political leaders and one-time warlords who willingly dismantled their militias in accordance with Taif.
Under Hassan Nasrallah, the new secretary-general who replaced Abbas Musawi (assassinated by Israel) in 1992, Hezbollah decided to participate in that year’s parliamentary elections for the first time, and Hezbollah has shifted more recently from having loyal allies in the cabinet to insisting its own members also take ministerial portfolios. Hopeful speculation that Hezbollah’s growing role in politics and governing would diminish the importance of its arms and transform Hezbollah into a “normal” party proved naive.
Today, Hezbollah uses the combination of its genuine popularity among the majority of Lebanon’s Shiites, its positions in Lebanon’s parliament and cabinet, and its militia power to exercise effective veto over any Lebanese government policy it opposes—while at the same time constructing an impenetrable wall against any public or parliamentary accountability over Hezbollah’s decisions. The recent Israeli discovery of Hezbollah tunnels from southern Lebanon into Israel is just the latest example of dangerous Hezbollah decisions, similar to its directive to kidnap Israeli soldiers from Israeli sovereign territory in July 2006, which could lead Lebanon to a devastating war—without any public debate, transparency, or governmental oversight.
Should any Lebanese question Hezbollah’s autonomous decisions, Hezbollah will deploy fighters and supporters to stifle physically the scrutiny (and, if needed, to eliminate the critic). When the Lebanese government in 2008 tried to dismantle an illegal Hezbollah telecommunications system, Hezbollah fighters physically seized control of West Beirut. Characteristic of its intolerance to others’ views, Hezbollah’s ability to mobilize intimidating mobs quickly has repeatedly thwarted any serious discussion of its arms or the special treatment it insists on assuming (but never bestowing).
A brief aside: Hezbollah, my mother, and me
A friend in Beirut enjoys amusing me by sending links to speeches by Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah in which he invokes my name—as he did at least twice in 2018, a decade after I concluded my tenure as U.S. ambassador to Lebanon and six years after my last trip to Beirut, in May 2012 as assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs. My wife Mary teases me that, for Nasrallah, I serve the same function as Hillary Clinton does for President Trump: a way to excite the base.
Like other U.S. ambassadors in Lebanon and elsewhere, I was seen to personify the “Great Satan.” Until he feared alienating the embassy’s Christian neighbors he hoped his seduction of Michel Aoun would woo, Nasrallah deployed rent-a-mobs to weekly demonstrations outside the embassy gates. A fun byproduct was the vivid confirmation of how diplomatic service alters perspectives. Alarmed by the news coverage, my mother in small-town Ohio sent an e-mail to announce that she was flying to Beirut to join the Hezbollah protests, because, yes, Feltman did need to go home. Mary, a Foreign Service Officer then at Stanford, reacted to the same reports by asking where the protestors had found the image of me for the giant posters they were enthusiastically striking with their shoes—it’s a really good photograph, she noted. Live footage of me waving farewell to a ship evacuating U.S. citizens during the summer 2006 war also caught my mother’s attention: “Don’t wave to the ship; get on it!” her message advised.
Nasrallah’s use of me as a convenient stage prop peaked during the 2006-08 Hezbollah sit-in that paralyzed the government and crippled Beirut’s downtown over ministerial demands. Even inside the grand offices of the prime minister, the rhythmic Hezbollah chants attempting to discredit the cabinet of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora were audible: “Feltman government! Feltman government!” In one of my calls on him, Siniora reacted to a crescendo of chants by wearily joking: “Jeff, they say it’s your government: So take it!” A few years later, when as a U.N. official I joined U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s meeting with Iranian Supreme Leader Khamanei in Tehran, my Lebanese friends laughed: Was Nasrallah’s favorite object of scorn now discussing possible “Feltman governments” for Iran?
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Michel Aoun provides Christian cover to Hezbollah
What gives Hezbollah particular potency in the current Lebanese environment is Hassan Nasrallah’s ability to assert that Hezbollah represents national Lebanese interests rather than narrow parochial Shiite goals or the positions of Tehran and Damascus. With political venality astonishing even by Lebanese standards, President Michel Aoun, a Maronite Christian whose followers once idolized him as the symbol of courageous resistance against Damascus, has embraced his role as Hezbollah’s enabler in this regard. His son-in-law, current Foreign Minister Gebrane Bassile, midwifed a 2006 memorandum of understanding between Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) and Hezbollah, and the two groups have maintained a close Shiite-Christian alliance ever since.