08/04/15 – Walead Farwana – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
Next up is Waleed Farwana.
He writes at this great blog, lateempire.com, lateempire.com, and you might remember I talked to him, I think, right about a year ago, maybe almost a year ago, about the rise of the Islamic State and this great long think piece that he had done for antiwar.com about it.
This one is called God's Revolution in three parts, and it's about the rise of Hezbollah.
People are always telling me I pronounce it wrong.
Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Waleed?
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me back on, Scott.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here, and appreciate you doing this work, and I guess I'm a little bit hesitant to talk too much about this, just because everybody's piling on against Iran and all their allies in order to try to ruin the Iran deal, and I'm sure not for that, but whatever.
The truth is the truth, and I'm interested in it, and it's something that, as we talked about in the emails, I think as you put it, we hardly ever hear anyone talk about Hezbollah that doesn't have a dog in the fight and a propaganda war to wage to make one point or another, and so it's really nice to see a kind of objective look at just what is Hezbollah, what is their, or however the hell you say it, what exactly is their relationship with the Iranians, and what does it all mean, and all of that.
So, cool.
I appreciate that you wrote it, and I appreciate you joining us on the show.
So I guess, do we need to start with the 79 Revolution in Iran?
Is that it?
I mean, yeah.
You could start there if you really want to get a grasp for what Hezbollah is all about, really with the 79 Revolution and really what the 1983 founding of Hezbollah were kind of the two different geographical locations where the same ideology sprang up, and just to add to what you had just said about people having a dog in this fight with regards to Hezbollah and that really coloring their perceptions of the organization.
I mean, yeah, that's true, and there's always going to be hypocrisy by people with an agenda who will look at Hezbollah, call it an Iranian proxy, call it a terrorist organization, and then just assume that that's all you need to know about the organization itself, but that's really just not true.
I mean, there are a number of pretexts that led up to the foundation of Hezbollah, a lot of injustices on the part of the Lebanese government, which marginalized the people who eventually became Hezbollah, and as well as the Iranians who underwent years of suffering by colonial powers, by their own leaders who were backed by colonial powers, particularly the Shah of Iran.
But yeah, if you really wanted to, and sorry to switch topics so fast, but if you really do want to get back to the 1979 revolution, which you saw there was a rise to power essentially of a new kind of government on the world stage, which really hadn't even been seen since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which was the, it's called, it's pronounced the Valaet al-Faqih, and it's a kind of religious, it's just a kind of theocracy where a cleric essentially runs the show.
He is the ultimate authority, and he is the person from which law descends, and he is seen as the sole arbiter and greatest judge that people are to follow, and obviously there are a ring of courts around him and whatnot, and a lot of other institutions and apparatuses, and it's much more complex than simply looking at the spiritual leader and saying that's the guy who runs everything.
But it was kind of unique in that it was really the first purely Islamic government that had been seen in quite a long time, and it sent a lot of shockwaves throughout the region, particularly because the people who were allied and the people who were followers of the spiritual leader who brought the Islamic revolution to Iran, which was Ayatollah Khomeini, and I'm sure his name is pretty familiar to many of your listeners, his following was so ideological and so radical and really so willing to sacrifice on the battlefield for the sake of this ideology that they really sent shockwaves throughout the region.
These are the people who, you might have heard of this before, these are the people who were willing to send human waves into minefields, and who were willing to run into a machine gun fire on the enemy's side just to overwhelm a position.
And so really this kind of revolutionary fervor coupled with extremely anti-Western rhetoric really scared a lot of people, particularly in the West, and it really led to this whole set of circumstances where you see sanctions and isolation and invasions occurring all around Iran that persist to this day.
All right, now, meanwhile, the Shia of southern Lebanon are just living in poverty but minding their own business, huh?
To a significant extent, and I hate to say that they're just minding their own business because I don't think anybody ever really does mind their own business, but they are essentially a marginalized group and they are just marginalized by successive regimes from the Ottomans to the French, and even with regards to the Lebanese government itself, they kind of occupied like this second-class position within the Lebanese society.
And this kind of started to change around the late 1970s where you had a cleric, an Iranian cleric, Iranian-born cleric named Musa al-Sadr, and I don't really know if he's related to Muqtada al-Sadr over in Iraq, but probably the same family line.
But he kind of rallied this Lebanese Shia base into political action, and then this was kind of like the genesis of Lebanese Shia political action, which started in the 70s.
So yeah, just to answer your question, they were pretty marginalized.
So minding their own business in a de facto sense, they didn't have a choice because they didn't have any power over anyone else at that point.
But now, so this guy Sadr, you're saying, am I right, this was the foundation of the Amal movement then?
Right.
So he started a movement called the Amal movement, which was a secular socialist movement which was mostly for the Shia, and it was mostly about kind of trying to get Shia to participate in politics, really just to end their marginalization.
They were kind of like this very agrarian, viewed as backwards type of people.
And what Sadr's mission essentially was to bring to them a greater sense of civility, more power.
And really his activity ensued up until about 1978, 1979, when he was kidnapped on a trip to Libya and he just simply disappeared.
Nobody ever heard from him again, which was one of the more odd conspiracies of the 1970s, which nobody knows what happened to this extremely charismatic world leader.
Obviously he was probably captured or imprisoned or something like that.
But his departure, to put it mildly, was really one of the power vacuums which the Iranians would eventually fill with Hezbollah.
All right.
So now you got to explain about the PLO in Lebanon.
What was the PLO doing in Lebanon?
So the PLO was in Lebanon after the PLO was established essentially as the name sounds.
It's called the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and it was this collection of militias which were dedicated to the goal of defeating the Israeli military and reclaiming Palestine for the Palestinians.
And they're really their odyssey, which took them out of Palestine to Jordan.
And these militias essentially established a state within a state in Jordan.
This obviously led to extreme conflict with the ruling Jordanian regime, who were then expelled with the PLO, and the PLO went to Lebanon.
And the reason why they went to Lebanon was because Lebanon was traditionally had this very weak state, and it was easy to get the Lebanese government to acquiesce towards allowing this PLO and this really, you know, I think it was upwards of 100,000 militiamen to essentially enter this small Lebanese country of 3 million.
And this really tipped the balance of sectarian power in Lebanon, which is a country, Lebanon is a country which is extremely sensitive towards sectarianism, because it's 30% Catholic, about 30% Shia Muslim, 20% Sunni Muslim, and the rest are, you know, separated factions of other religious sects.
So when you put in 100,000 armed Sunni Muslims, for the most part, in the form of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, in a very sensitive sectarian climate, you're going to get a challenge from some of the other sects.
And the main sect that challenged the PLO were the Catholics, and they were the Lebanese Falange.
And for all intents and purposes, they were this sort of created in the same vein as the European fascists, drew a lot of inspiration from the Spanish fascists.
And they really started having extremely violent episodes with the PLO around 1975.
And in the meantime, the PLO was also attacking Israel from the southern part of Lebanon into northern Israel, which was understandably on the Israelis end, I suppose, something that had to be stopped in order for them to carry on with a sort of civilized life in Israel.
And this led to a couple of invasions, which I'll let you ask a few questions before I get to that.
Yeah.
Well, so yeah, that's the thing.
Now, I guess the invasion comes in 1982.
The Israelis make their alliance with the Falange, and I don't know exactly at what point they do.
They come in and invade.
But so what do the Shia care?
It's not really their fight.
Why wouldn't they or did they just stand back or why wouldn't they just kind of stand back, let the Israelis kick the PLO out of there?
Because, you know, obviously, as you said, 100,000 Sunni fighters.
Why would the Shia population, you know, be on their side?
So sort of like when America invaded Iraq, at least at first, all the Shia stood back and said, yeah, thanks.
Go ahead and get rid of Saddam for us kind of thing.
So did that happen to any degree in this case, or if not, why not?
Well, so it's a very complicated answer, because, yes, for the most part, Shia Muslims were extremely happy about the Israeli invasion, because many of them, they hated the PLO.
The PLO was corrupt in many ways, just as these militia organizations tend to be.
And they were really, you know, they were guilty of exploiting Shia to a considerable extent in southern Lebanon.
So there was a great deal of jubilation in southern Lebanon when Israel invaded.
But the Israelis, they kind of messed up with regards to their positioning towards the Shia population, because they simply, they were, because there's also a significant number of Catholics who live in south Lebanon.
The Israelis really just prioritized the Catholic, the Catholic allies over the Shia, completely ignored the Shia's wishes and whims and whatever.
And this led to a conflict between the Israelis and the Shia.
There's also an ideological element to the adversarial nature of the Shia towards the Israelis, because the Shia are still Muslims.
And really, Israel is viewed in much of the Middle East as this grand enemy of Islam in general, particularly because of their occupation or their control or their domination, whatever you want to call it, of Jerusalem.
And this is seen as a, you know, this is seen as a very, a blight upon the fabric of Islamic society, really, that they're, one of their holiest sites is dominated by a completely different religion.
And so, there was a mix of, yes, we're happy that you removed the PLO, but we're not happy with who did it.
And so, I mean, you can kind of compare it to Muqtada al-Sadr in Iraq.
Now, I'm sure he was happy that the United States removed Saddam, because Saddam killed his dad and his family, but at the same time, he wasn't really happy with the United States presence in Iraq either.
So yeah, just answer your question.
That's the long answer.
Yeah.
No, I got you.
I mean, it makes perfect sense.
It's a simple matter of nationalism, Arab nationalism or Lebanese or neighborhood nationalism anyway.
This is our town, and what the hell are you doing here?
Exactly.
And yeah, I don't think I've ever heard rumors that the Israelis treated the Shia with the slightest bit of respect.
You know, if they happened to be in the way of what they were doing against the PLO, etc.
So then, is it just as simple as that, thus was born the party of God?
Not just as simple as that.
So around the 1982 invasion, now we're going back to Iran here.
Now, Iran, obviously, very ideological government.
And as soon as the Israelis invaded, Ayatollah Khomeini was already calling for the dispatch of thousands of Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Lebanon.
Now, at this time, they had created an alliance with Syria, and Syria is really the gatekeeper to Lebanon.
You can't really go, you can't really control Lebanon.
You can't really operate in Lebanon without Syria's permission, or you couldn't at that point in time.
And so the Iranians and the Syrians had an alliance, and the alliance was basically based on the fact that they were both isolated states, and they both hated Saddam Hussein.
So their deal, essentially, was the Iranians would provide the Syrians with very cheap oil, and in return, the Syrians would give the Iranians a pretty, pretty sizable influence in Lebanon.
So at the outset of this invasion, the IRGC, which is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, for people who are unfamiliar, they dispatched about 2,000 guys to eastern Lebanon in a place called the Beqaa Valley.
And in this valley, they started to train these favored Lebanese clans in that region.
They started to give them military training, kind of religious education or indoctrination, whatever you want to call it.
And from this activity, this is where Hezbollah was essentially born, was from this IRGC activity.
So that's what led to the creation of Hezbollah.
It was like this clandestine network at first, started by the IRGC, which later grew much more popular as time went on.
And now, so how long did the PLO last?
The Israelis came in, kicked them out.
They fled to Libya at some point, but the Israelis stayed anyway?
Right.
So the Israelis stayed in southern Lebanon up to, and they occupied a pretty significant portion of Lebanon.
The thing is, though, the Israelis are, at that point in time, at least, I don't know if they are now, but they simply were not good at occupying cities.
They couldn't, they didn't have the constitution for it.
Their population could not handle the casualties.
And so really what you saw was they would withdraw from all the cities, and then they would give them to militias, whether they were Christian militias or Shia militias or whatever.
Because they had some Shia who were actually allied with the Israelis, and they would work with those Shias in order to occupy towns.
So really what you had was the Israelis would ring around the countryside with their armor and their air cavalry or whatever, and militias would occupy the towns.
Now what happened was, around 1983, 1984, 1985, Hezbollah at this time was mounting an offensive against Israel.
And they managed to push them back to a five-mile strip around the Israeli-Lebanese border.
So a series of events ensued, which led to a partial Israeli pullout to this five-mile strip.
And then from 1985 until the year 2000, really, the Israelis and Hezbollah were fighting over this five-mile wide strip for the better part of 15 years.
And now, man, that's interesting, I guess I never really realized, at least back then, that it was that much of a Germany and France, Western Front, World War II, or World War I, I mean to say, kind of thing, fighting over that little territory.
And then, so, at what point then was the Hezbollah suicide bomber invented as a tactic for use against the Israeli occupation?
Right.
So, yeah, as you just said, Hezbollah were really one of the pioneers, if not the pioneer of strategic suicide bombing.
And they had one episode, which was essentially an Israeli catastrophe, where they placed a suicide bomber outside of an Israeli military headquarters in this Lebanese town called Tyre, which is spelled T-Y-R-E.
And Hezbollah bomber detonated himself, and he killed well over 100 Israelis.
And this was a, you know, for a country which is extremely sensitive towards its military casualties, this was a complete catastrophe for them.
I mean, just to give you the comparison, in a three-week war with Hezbollah in 2006, the Israelis lost 136 men, and this was enough for them to get them to sue for peace in a ceasefire.
Losing over 100 troops in a single bombing really motivated them to go to this five-mile strip where they weren't really open or vulnerable to this type of activity.
And Hezbollah really did employ really the strategy of suicide bombing throughout even that war, between 1985 and 2000, to a significant effect.
Now Hezbollah no longer really uses suicide bombers.
I haven't even heard of a single instance of them using a suicide bomber since the year 2000.
I think it's kind of fallen out of style, essentially.
Well, since the occupation ended, yeah.
Yeah, and you didn't even really see them use it in 2006.
You haven't seen them use this tactic in the Syrian war.
So but they were really known for this tactic of suicide bombing, and it really extends from the Iranian revolution that we talked about, where you had IRGC members who were willing to run into minefields, who were willing to run at enemy machine gunfire, and really this kind of ideological fervor spread from Iran to Lebanon, where you saw these grand acts of self-sacrifice against the enemy.
All right, now, well, jeez, there's so many different things to go over here.
I'm not sure exactly where to start.
I guess, can you tell us about the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and not just because of the sensational nature of what happened, that kind of thing, but to kind of explain the role or the relationships and the different groups fighting here, because it seems like this whole thing really is the perfect example of blowback, where Israel sort of kind of at least created Hamas deliberately, but their creation of Hezbollah just seems to be, from the moment that they start fighting or start picking on the Shia of southern Lebanon, they at least, as you said, had some help from the IRGC on the other side, but they basically create this group born just to resist them, and then they fight this low-level war against them for 15 years, or what, 20 years or something, and they seem to only just make this group stronger and stronger the whole time.
Yes, I mean, there's a couple of issues there.
I mean, we can talk about the Sabra and Shatila massacre, and that kind of goes back to the whole idea where Israelis don't want to occupy cities, again, because it exposes their troops to simply too much enemy gunfire.
I mean, I can give you a quick anecdote, and I mean, this is just an urban legend.
I don't know if it ever actually happened, but really what really made the Israelis pull out of Beirut and cede control to these allied militias, particularly the Falange, was there was an Israeli officer who was in a Lebanese restaurant, and they had just essentially conquered Beirut, and they're extremely arrogant, and this Israeli officer was, he was trying to buy a shawarma sandwich in a restaurant with his Israeli shekels, and just a man standing right next to him in line just pulled out a gun and shot him in the head, and this essentially made the Israelis realize that there is simply no way that we can hold down this city, and so that began a general pullout.
I'm not saying that there's that general, that specific instance which motivated an Israeli pullout, but it goes to show you that, you know, there's really no way that you can occupy such a huge city with a relatively small force, and the Saber Shatila massacre was kind of like this betrayal of UN terms, so the PLO said, okay, we'll pull out of these refugee camps in southern Beirut, but don't harm the population.
We'll have UNIFIL move in, and they will take control of the camp, but obviously this didn't happen.
The Israelis allowed Christian militias, the phalangists, to flood into this vacated, well, not vacated, but vacated military force area, and then those militias proceeded to begin this slaughter, really, of thousands of refugees inside of this camp.
The purpose, or the political purpose, of this massacre was essentially to trigger an exodus of Palestinians from Lebanon.
They were hoping that if we are savage enough, we can get the rest of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees to leave the country to Syria or something like that.
This didn't happen, and it did end up with some blowback to the Christian militias and to the Israelis as well, in that it really just strengthened the fervor with which their enemies were willing to fight them.
So that's what happened with the Saber and Shatila massacre.
Now, the other issue you brought up was how, yeah, essentially Israel's activity creates enemies, and that's kind of like the problem with these power vacuums that you see springing up all over the place.
You can see them in Iraq, you saw it in Lebanon, even in the Iranian revolution there was a power vacuum.
And the issue with the power vacuum is that you simply don't know what you're going to get out of such circumstances.
Yeah, it seems like they're so ham-handed about it too.
Like in 05, they said, the Syrian army must get out of southern Lebanon.
Well, come on, forget calculus, I mean, it's simple math, that Hezbollah is going to become more powerful then, if that's really what you want.
Yeah, and I mean, the Syrians, they wanted, they were actually kind of happy for Hezbollah to be there, because it placed between the Syrians and the Israelis, I'll just start over with talking about why Syria was happy for having Hezbollah there.
Sure.
Yeah, so Syria was, they were pretty happy that Hezbollah was there.
Now it provided, I mean, I'm not saying that it was all great for the Syrians, I mean, the Hezbollah was a sort of a challenge to their authority, and they did come to blows a couple of times, but never in a very serious fashion.
But for the most part, Syria was happy to have Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, because it placed between the Syrians and the Israelis a bulwark of sorts, which would prevent a direct military confrontation between the Syrian regime and Israel.
So there's this, I mean, there's obviously a huge power disparity, and it was especially even more pronounced at that time between the Syrians and the Israelis, Syrians did not want a direct confrontation with Israel, and so they kind of used Hezbollah as this guerrilla force to keep them at bay.
Yep.
All right, now, so, there's way too much to go over here, I mean, we're going to basically just have to skip the war of July and August of 2006 here, just because we're already over time.
But let me ask you two last things here real quick.
If you could address the Latani River and its importance to Israel, and how much you think it has to do with their occupation of Lebanon all that time, and their future plans for Lebanon, is it, you know, how much does that play into it, I guess, first of all, and then I'll save my next one for a minute.
Sure, so, I mean, any water source in the Middle East is extremely valuable.
So Lebanon is really known, well, Lebanon is really the only country in the Middle East that doesn't even have a desert, and it's essentially like this very fertile and lush area part of the Middle East.
So the Latani River is awesome for whoever controls it for two reasons.
One, it's a natural geographic defense, and two, it's a water source, freshwater source, which can be bottled up and distributed and used for irrigation and crops and the population and all that.
So that's the strategic importance of the Latani River, I mean, in a very water-starved and thirsty region, it's extremely important that you have a water source.
And then, you know, number two, it's the, just a, you know, general military and strategic defense.
Now, you also say in here a couple of things that, well, on the surface sound like maybe they're a bit contradictory, where you say, you kind of warn against underestimating, I guess, the relationship between Iran and Hezbollah.
You basically equate southern Lebanon to a province in the Iranian Revolutionary Islamic Republic here.
But at the same time, you say they have a lot of autonomy, and it wouldn't be a correct characterization to say that they're just a proxy of Iran.
So on one hand, you're saying the relationship between Hezbollah and Iran is a lot stronger than you think, but don't overstate it.
So help parse that for me.
Yeah, so really with that, kind of that argument, it's kind of like I'm looking at an Aristotelian mean almost.
So it's, yes, they are essentially, and this is, I guess you could say this is my opinion, and I think many people would agree, honestly, that Hezbollah is, Hezbollah, south Lebanon, an area it controls, is for all intents and purposes a province of Iran.
And given the fact that they have such a close alliance, that Iran is willing to make this foreign territory a province of Iran, it also tells you that they have a great deal of trust in the organization itself.
Compare it, for example, compare a more adversarial alliance, you could say, between the United States and the Iraqi Shia, for example.
I don't think that in a million years that the United States would make southern Iraq, for example, a province almost in the same vein as the way that the United States and the Israeli relationship is.
Although thanks to the United States, the Iranians might.
Yeah, exactly, yes, that is completely true.
And they're working on it.
They are definitely working on it.
So that's kind of what I mean, like, if you look at the Israeli and American relationship, America is willing to go as far as to share, you know, the F-35 with the Israelis.
That's how much they trust them.
But you would never see such a thing with the United States and maybe the Saudis or the United States and the Iraqis, for example.
And that's kind of what I meant by there is this high level of trust, which gives them a considerable degree of autonomy.
They trust Hezbollah not to engage in petty conflicts, not to drag Iran into a war that it can't win, not to do anything too stupid, essentially.
So yeah, that's kind of what I meant by that, or that's what I meant by that, yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I really appreciate you writing this up and your time on the show talking about it.
I learned a lot.
Awesome.
Thanks.
I really hope your listeners learned something from this.
And yeah, I mean, if you want to check out more of my work, you can check it out at LateEmpire.com.
L-A-T-E-E-M-P-I-R-E dot com.
And thanks.
Thank you so much for having me on, Scott.
Yeah, sure.
I appreciate it very much, Waleed.
That's Waleed Farwana, everybody.
Again, LateEmpire.com for this three-part series, God's Revolution, about the creation and rise of Hezbollah.
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