The morning after arriving in Beirut, Totten and I headed for the large section of downtown that had been taken over by anti-government agitators. Beirut’s neighborhoods are decorated with poster-size portraits of Lebanese political figures, which are routinely defaced and refreshed according to political events. On this day, and in this Christian area, almost every picture of Michel Aoun, the Free Patriotic Movement leader, had its eyes either scratched out or spray-painted. New posters of Gemayel were everywhere. The scene downtown was like a carnival, with vendors selling Hezbollah flags, key chains, scarves, and food to the thousands who had pitched tents and set up their occupation of downtown. The ostentatious display of the Lebanese flag—the one that represents a sovereign country—was hard to find outside the moments of mass rallying that attracted so much international media attention. Instead, cars were decorated with Hassan Nasrallah posters taped to the inside of their windows, the imported protestors ambled about draped in various types of Hezbollah apparel, and flags from a half-dozen fractious Lebanese groups, some with only a few hundred followers nationwide, were displayed from clusters of tents. Just about every atavistic platoon of the Lebanese political spectrum was putting in an appearance. Nervous Lebanese soldiers were stationed throughout the city, usually in close proximity to their armored personnel carriers, while hedgerows of concertina wire blocked off certain streets and sensitive areas from colonization by the visitors from the south. A sound system worthy of an arena heavy-metal concert sent an oppressively loud Wagnerian Islamist cacophony thundering across the encampment. The state-within-a-state reality of Hezbollah was conspicuous here: Once past the Lebanese army checkpoints at the outermost perimeter of downtown, to reach the main event one had to pass through another set of checkpoints, these guarded by humorless Hezbollah agents wearing black baseball caps and earpieces, trying very self-consciously to look as gravely serious as possible. At one point I asked a member of the Party of God, shouting to be heard over the echoing death music, if I had finally found the Rolling Stones concert, but he refused to answer, probably unable to grasp my post-modern irony.

 

It became clear to both my companion and me that Hezbollah, strategically speaking, was cornering itself. It was tied down, if temporarily, in the South; the non-Shia (and even many Shia) detested it for instigating a month of Israeli bombardment, and now, a few months after the war, it was attempting to bring maximum pressure to bear on the government, albeit non-violently. If the government refused to budge, what card did Nasrallah have left to play other than violence? This was also the view of Toni Nissi, the coordinator of the Lebanese Committee for UNSCR 1559, an NGO that advises and lobbies both the Lebanese government and the international community for the disarmament of militias in Lebanon, as required by United Nations Resolution 1559. Nissi is a canny, pro-Western observer of Lebanese politics—Nasrallah once denounced him as “the Beirut branch of the Mossad”—and one evening Totten and I interviewed him in his Beirut office. Nissi, like many in his camp, had pushed hard last summer for a war-ending UN resolution that would fall under Chapter 7 authority. A Chapter 7 resolution would have brought soldiers into southern Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah under the command of the United Nations. The significantly weaker resolution that initiated the cease-fire—Resolution 1701—was under Chapter 6 authority, which meant that, in Nissi’s words, “If the international community wants to act against Hezbollah they have to have the permission of the Lebanese government. They have to wait for the Lebanese government to order them. Under Chapter 7 the international community acts alone, like what happened in Kosovo.”

Nissi and his allies know that the Lebanese army is in no position to disarm Hezbollah, making Resolution 1701, to no small degree, a dead letter. And so the Lebanese government’s best strategy was to react to the increasingly feverish downtown by remaining serene and unprovoked. If Hezbollah’s role in Lebanon was in part to exert pressure that would help push the United States and other liberalizers out of the Middle East, an unprovoked act of war by Hezbollah against the Lebanese government risked inviting more, not less, Western intervention. And if Nasrallah wasn’t willing to stage a riot in downtown Beirut, how would he climb down from his apogee of confrontation without looking weak and ridiculous? Nissi’s answer: “Nasrallah doesn’t know what to do tomorrow.”

With downtown Beirut percolating aimlessly, Totten and I ventured south, with the aim of reaching Bint Jbeil, the Hezbollah stronghold on the Israeli border that during the summer war was the scene of several intense ground battles and a great deal of bombardment. Two Lebanese Christians, veterans of the Lebanese Forces army, accompanied us through the villages of the Shia south. There is no border separating this region from the rest of the country, but crossing the threshold is unmistakable; the first Shia towns are only an hour’s drive away but are as similar to Beirut as Jenin is to Tel Aviv. As we descended from Beirut into a landscape whose terrain is almost indistinguishable from northern Israel’s, the destruction from the summer war became increasingly apparent. But this was not the kind of demolition that sensationalistic media images convinced people had happened. To the contrary, in evidence was what could be called surgical obliteration, a result of precision munitions put at the service of detailed intelligence. “What shocked Hezbollah the most,” one Lebanese source told me, “was that within the opening hours of the war, Israel destroyed every one of its mid- and long-range missiles. Those were Hezbollah’s most prized weapons, and they were stunned that Israel knew where every one of them had been hidden.” Individual bridges and buildings were effectively plucked from the landscape, as if construction crews had arrived one day and quickly dismantled the offending structures. What remained was, in all but a very few instances, Shia villages that were largely untouched by the war, although the same cannot be said for southern Lebanon’s roads, bridges, and highways, which were bombed quite thoroughly.

Our car passed into another Shia town, this time under a banner emblazoned with a dramatic Arabic script, and I asked our driver what it said. “It’s a quote from the Koran celebrating martyrdom.” I made a trite remark about the Shia obsession with victimhood, and he replied, “The best way is to change them into real victims. This way they won’t be liars.” He laughed. The sad and self-reinforcing aspect of the Iranian-sponsored Shia cult of victimhood is the manner in which the religious politburo promotes martyrdom to its followers, and then uses the predictable result of dead martyrs as more evidence of the world’s injustice toward the Shia, and of the need for more martyrs. This is a gruesomely tautological theology.

 

Our final southern destination was Bint Jbeil, which before the war served as a hub of Hezbollah activity and today is more like a parking lot. In the other parts of southern Lebanon, there was curiously little rubble on display. As one of our Lebanese sources explained to us, in its southern stronghold Hezbollah had set about quickly cleaning up the post-war wreckage, leaving smooth foundations in place of wrecked buildings in an attempt to save face among the populace and downplay the destruction that Hezbollah had brought upon them. But in Bint Jbeil, there had not been much cleanup, and the devastation was stunning; the outer ring of the city had been less thoroughly bombed, but in the center there were only a handful of structures that even remained standing, much less intact. It had become a moonscape of pulverized rock. Arriving in the center, we parked the car atop a field of plowed-smooth debris and set out on foot to take in the scene. A Hezbollah watcher hurried over to ask what we were doing, and our Lebanese escorts explained that Totten and I were “international journalists documenting the Zionist destruction of our country.” The Hezbollah man credulously nodded his approval.