No American who keeps the score can mourn the demise of Hassan Nasrallah – or lament the disarray into which the Israelis have thrown Hezbollah. But it’s one thing to bid good riddance to Nasrallah and to cheer the weakening of his Iranian-backed Lebanese militia. It’s quite another to welcome this as a prelude to a full-on war with Iran, as Jared Kushner, one of the architects of Trumpian foreign policy, did on Saturday.
“This is significant because Iran is now fully exposed,” tweeted Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a key mover behind the Abraham Accords that normalised relations between Israel and several Arab states. “The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defence systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel.” The implication is that the loaded gun has now been removed, and that a military intervention against the Tehran-backed regime can be launched more safely.
This way lies violence and instability that would make the post-9/11 wars look like child’s play. This rhetoric vitiates one of the last remaining appeals of the old, populist Trump: the one who called George W Bush’s long wars in the Middle East “a disaster” and declined to get dragged into large-scale confrontations in the region (even as he increased drone attacks and launched risky one-off operations such as the killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani).
First, the score with Nasrallah. Americans rightly revile Hezbollah as the group responsible for the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, which killed 220 US marines and wounded more than 100, making it the single deadliest attack on the marines since the Second World War. Far from a “local resistance group”, as apologists like to describe it, Hezbollah has also been found guilty of the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires by the Argentinian court. The attack killed 85 innocents and maimed scores more.
No less tragic was its hostage-taking of Lebanese politics. In 1990, when a decade and a half of sectarian bloodletting came to a close, Hezbollah was the only armed group that retained its weapons. The result was that Nasrallah’s group effectively emerged as a state within a state. As Samir Geagea, the leader of the Lebanese Forces, a once-powerful Christian militia-turned-political party, told me a decade ago, “everything that Hezbollah wants to veto is vetoed.”
In March 2005, more than a million protesters, Christians and Muslims alike, poured into the streets of Beirut to demand the ouster of a Syrian occupation force. The uprising, which became known as the Cedar Revolution, achieved its immediate objective: Bashar al-Assad’s troops decamped for Damascus a month later. Yet within a few years, the Iranian-Syrian axis would violently reassert hegemony over Lebanon – via the force of Hezbollah’s arms.
All this proved bedevilling for Western policymakers. The US and its allies have an interest in upholding Lebanon’s stability, yet supporting the country meant propping up Hezbollah, too, given the commingling of the two “states”: the formal one, with its rickety institutions and nominal tri-sectarian division of power (between Shias, Sunnis and Christians) – and the powerful Hezbollah state, with its tens of thousands of missiles.
The devastating blows struck against Hezbollah by the Israel Defence Forces might alter the balance between the militia-cum-state and the rest of Lebanese society. The Shia community must be encouraged to choose a “normal” Lebanese political order over the sectarian hegemony that has brought the country to the brink of ruin. But that will take serious investment and careful diplomacy involving other Arab governments. It would be a fragile project under an ideal scenario, let alone with an Israeli ground invasion potentially afoot.
But all that is an entirely different game than direct war with Iran, the prospect of which seems to make Kushner giddy. It is true that the Jewish state, with stunning initiative, has now quenched part of the Iranian “ring of fire”, a protective buffer dominated by the Islamic Republic’s proxies. But, for one thing, that ring extends beyond Hamas and Hezbollah to include Syria, Yemen’s Houthis, and sundry militant and quasi-governmental groups in nominally US-allied Iraq.
Israel’s capabilities are formidable, as its recent achievements demonstrate. But an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, which will have to include key state and military assets, is still beyond the Jewish state’s reach. That means Washington will almost certainly have to get involved – and prepare for all that it might entail: from the closing of the Strait of Hormuz to mass suicide attacks; and from the collapse of a multi-ethnic state the size of Texas to the possibility that the mullahs might turn the screw on their (likely) threshold nuclear capability.
A war with Iran would throw a spanner into the gears of America’s Asia policy. For years now, leaders of both parties have insisted that America’s most important challenges and opportunities of the 21st century lie not in Europe and the Middle East, but in the Pacific region. Washington simply can’t afford to secure that region, even as it fights yet another war in the Middle East (while prosecuting a proxy war against Russia on the side).
In the wake of Nasrallah’s killing, Kushner wrote, “I started thinking about a Middle East without Iran’s fully loaded arsenal aimed at Israel. So many more positive outcomes are possible.” True enough. But prudence requires weighing the nightmare scenarios, as well.
[See also: The complicated legacy of Hassan Nasrallah in the Middle East]
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