Once the ceasefire took hold in southern Lebanon, Western reporters entered the town of Khiam, perched on a hilltop less than a mile from the Israeli frontier. As Hezbollah fighters emerged from the rubble, one succinctly summed up the situation: “We’re still here.”
After a month of fighting and hundreds of casualties on both sides, those words reflect an enduring truth about life along the border. Hezbollah might be diminished by the ferocious Israeli assault but they have not been destroyed. Their fighters are still entrenched, village by village, house by house. One guerilla casually showed journalists what he had stashed in his car trunk: five AK-47 assault rifles.
President Bush refuses to recognize this reality. He claims that Hezbollah “suffered a defeat in this crisis” because the United Nations passed a resolution creating a “new power in the south of Lebanon.” That combination of homegrown Lebanese troops and a “robust international force” is supposed to move into the border region and eliminate the “root cause of the problem,” the guerillas’ unchecked military power.
We fervently hope he’s correct. Hezbollah is indeed an evil element that cynically uses civilians as shields in Lebanon and targets in Israel. But it’s hard to take the president seriously. The scene in Khiam tells a very different story. The “root cause of the problem” is not going anywhere.
In fact, the president’s over-heated rhetoric about Lebanon – see his repeated references to the “advance of liberty” – sounds disturbingly like the misstatements and miscalculations he’s made for years about Iraq. This is the man, after all, who declared “mission accomplished” thousands of bodies ago in a country that even his own generals now fear is headed for civil war.
How can he have any credibility left when he boasts about a “new power” in Lebanon? Why should anyone believe his Secretary of State when she proclaims the “birth pangs” of a “new Middle East”?
Hezbollah has many enemies, and for good reason. Arab capitals from Cairo to Riyadh fear their fanatical brand of Islam, their refusal to disarm, their links to devious leaders in Iran and Syria. Many ordinary Lebanese – in private, anyway – surely resent Hezbollah’s reckless seizure of two Israeli soldiers and the widespread devastation that ensued.
But those voices of doubt have fallen silent. Hezbollah’s surprisingly tenacious resistance to Israeli military power has turned the guerillas into heroes. This mood was captured by Anthony Shadid, a correspondent for the Washington Post, who speaks Arabic: “There was a word repeated time and again ... in Khiam, by both fighters and the residents who chose to stay through the war. It was karama, or dignity.”
In the past, that word has been badly abused by feckless Arab leaders. “But in Khiam,” Shadid reported, “it was uttered so often, so fervently, that it felt different. ‘This is our land,’ said Bilal Ali Saleh, a 42-year-old beekeeper. ‘Can we leave our land? Would you leave your land?’”
