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Email this citationCIAO DATE: 07/04
Hizbollah: Rebel Without A Cause?
July 30, 2003
Abstract
Few political actors in the Middle East have seen their environment as thoroughly affected by recent events in the region as Hizbollah, the Lebanese political-military organisation that first came on the scene in the mid-1980s. In U.S. political circles, calls for action against Hizbollah, which is accused of global terrorist activity, are heard increasingly. With the ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime, the U.S. has upped its pressure on Syria and Iran - Hizbollah's two most powerful patrons. Meanwhile, Israel has made clear it will not tolerate indefinitely the organisation's armed presence on its northern border. Within Lebanon itself, weariness with Hizbollah and questions about its future role are being raised with surprising candour.
One after another, its local and regional cards appear to have been lost: Israel's May 2000 withdrawal from southern Lebanon deprived Hizbollah of its principal raison d'être; America's swift military success reduced the immediate prospect of it being drawn into a costly confrontation in Iraq; and renewed international efforts to restore calm in the Israeli-Palestinian theatre combined with intense pressure on radical Palestinian Islamist groups have diminished its ability to invoke the Palestinian struggle as a justification for armed action. Today perhaps more than ever since its establishment in 1984, the organisation's purpose and fate hang in the balance.
