Robert Naiman wrote: > Hizbollah has significant influence, as it has had for years, but it > does not "run the country."
I was using the words of a friend of mine (an engineer originally from Iran who sometimes overstates his points). Maybe his viewpoint makes more sense if I'm more concrete: he says that these days Hizbollah has more military strength than the official Lebanese army and is a more unified force. Further, he says that its communication network is more successful and its provision of public services is more influential than those of the Lebanese state. > What is playing out now is the failure of > the U.S. strategy to try to marginalize Hizbollah. It's more than that. It's also that Israel attacked Hizbollah, arousing not only the ire of H's supporters but also that of many Lebanese outside of H, even many hadn't supported it in the past. On top of that, Israel's strategic bombing of a lot of Lebanon made the official state weaker. That of course made H's unofficial state stronger in comparison. The U.S. and Israel may have wanted to make H marginal, but that effort bounced back, making it stronger, at least within the context of Lebanon. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
