Two unconfirmed news items say a great deal about where the party finds itself today. The first is a report that Hezbollah may be contemplating a suspension of military operations in the Shebaa Farms area owing to international pressure, though it has no intention of declaring this openly. The second is that Imad Mughnieh, the alleged ex-Hezbollah official on everybody's most wanted list, currently resides in Beirut. Though some US commentators have suggested that Mughnieh was given a senior post in Hezbollah, this seems doubtful. More interesting is the explanation of his reported return to Lebanon: after September 11th the Iranians asked him to leave Iran.
Even if the Mughnieh story is untrue, its implications are not. Hezbollah is now lower on the list of Iran's regional priorities. Tehran's relationship with the US is going through a fertile patch, with parallel interests in Afghanistan and, perhaps, Iraq. For the Khatami faction in Iran, Hezbollah's appetite for escalating its attacks on Israel is potentially disruptive, especially while the intifada makes it redundant.
When the Iranians hesitate, so too do the Syrians. The last two Hezbollah attacks in the Shebaa Farms saw it employing excessive firepower to conceal intentional ineffectiveness. The wretched spectacle had Syrian sanction, since only Damascus benefited from what was a compromise between a sudden and unilateral moratorium on attacks and a too lethal operation that might have invited massive Israeli retaliation.
As Hezbollah's backers reassess their interests, its Secretary-General, Hassan Nasrallah, has upped the rhetorical ante. Nasrallah wants Hezbollah to become the region's vanguard in the conflict with Israel. However, neither the Iranians nor the Syrians want the party to play such a role, and even some voices within Hezbollah consider Nasrallah's vanity risky.
So what next for Hezbollah? Nasrallah remains firmly in control and those in the party advocating a more decisive switching of priorities to political matters have been silenced. Yet Hezbollah's future is solely political — and not only because the US and Europe are pushing in this direction. The party has simply no other domestic option. Its officials have concluded that their appeal is the fruit of their militancy. In fact, in the context of traditional Lebanese politics, neither Hezbollah's stern ideology and rhetoric nor its tight organizational structure seem natural. Only its patronage network has allowed the party to purchase collaboration.
Nasrallah would do best to accept that Hezbollah's only comparative advantage is inside Lebanon. In the war against Israel, it has been marginalized by Palestinian organizations for which Hezbollah is still a model. Hamas seems to be developing a Katyusha-based strategy. Yet winning brought Hezbollah no rewards. Instead, it needs to continue fighting to ward off the decline of its military. Rarely has Hezbollah seemed so uneasy with its environment, so at odds with the interests of its patrons and so irrelevant.
