In The Days

• Author: Anthony Elghossain
• News Date: 3/22/08
• Source: Daily Star

But local analysts offer different picture of relationship

“Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya with them; all of them with shield and helmet:”
—Ezekiel 38:5

BEIRUT: In a recently published report, entitled “Iranian Influence in the Levant, Iraq, and Afghanistan,” the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a pro-Israeli think tank, seeks to link the growing strategic importance of Iran in the region with the concurrent rise in prominence of groups such as Hamas and Hizbullah.

The emergence of Iran as a regional political force has coincided with the rise in prominence of groups like Hizbullah and the Mehdi Army, leading some commentators to surmise that a “Shiite Crescent” stretching from Iran through the Levant and the Gulf may threaten the existing regional order.

The report argues, in part, that Hizbullah is a terrorist organization with operational capabilities across the Middle East and throughout the Lebanese diaspora elsewhere. Also central to the report’s argument is that Hizbullah is a proxy, stating that the “Party of God” is a puppet of the regime in Tehran.

In support of these claims, the report describes several mechanisms through which Hizbullah has become dependent on Iran, breaking the claimed dependency into financial and military spheres.

Financially, the report claims, Hizbullah receives around $100 million annually from Iran, a number that has gone up since the 2006 war with Israel. Total Iranian funding of Hizbullah is placed in the billions.

Militarily, the report says Hizbullah received around 12,000 missiles and rockets between 1992 and 2005. It is claimed that Iranian support has now offset any loss of weapons during the 2006 war and that weapons aid is becoming more sophisticated in nature. Furthermore, the report attributes Hizbullah’s performance during the war to the technical weapons know-how and tactical advice of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and tunnel construction by “North Korean engineers” in the years preceding the war.

The argument being made is that Hizbullah is dependent on Iran for its financial and military livelihood, and is merely a strategic tool of the Islamic regime.

Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, an expert on Hizbullah, has argued that the party seeks to balance increasingly contradictory identities. In this view, Hizbullah is at once a geopolitical player in the region looking to Iran for support, a resistance movement acting as a bulwark against Israeli encroachment, and an actor seeking to maximize the Shiite communal interest in the Lebanon.

When asked about the relative prominence of each of these overlapping aims during recent stages of the Lebanese political stand-off, Saad-Ghorayeb told The Daily Star that “the first two [geopolitics and resistance], intertwined, represent the main focus now. Any new war will be regional in nature, as the potential links between the [senior Hizbullah commander Imad] Mughniyeh assassination and the Jewish seminary shootings in Jerusalem indicate.”

She also said the resistance function has acquired regional commitments and that Hizbullah may act in Israel if the conflict continues to intensify.

However, “Hizbullah is not dependent in the full sense of the term - the party may be financially dependent but is more than a mere tool. The relationship between Iran and Hizbullah is not one of dependence, but of mutual interest and benefit,” she said.

Conversely, Osama Safa, general director of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, views Hizbullah as “the strongest tool of interest Iran has in Lebanon and the region.”

Safa said “Hizbullah’s various aims are directly related to the regional agenda.”

He stressed the importance of Hizbullah’s geostrategic role in reference to the various interests of the party. “Hizbullah is only quasi-autonomous at the local level and the two subsidiary pillars [resistance and domestic politics] serve to consolidate an internal base while legitimizing and protecting the weapons as a means to a larger end.”