Who’s the Real Appeaser?

This administration's few successes have come when it's agreed to engage with adversaries.
Fareed Zakaria
NEWSWEEK
Updated: May 17, 2008

President Bush chose an odd place and time to claim that talking to "terrorists and radicals" in the Middle East is like appeasing Hitler in the 1930s. As Bush was speaking in Israel, his preferred strategy against such adversaries was collapsing next door in Lebanon. Over the past two weeks the Lebanese government, which is strongly backed by Washington, decided to confront the Shiite group Hizbullah by firing a loyalist who was head of security at Beirut airport and suspending the group's dedicated phone network. The Iranian-backed Hizbullah retaliated, taking over large parts of Beirut and paralyzing the country. Last week the Lebanese cabinet humiliatingly reversed itself on both fronts. Iran 1, USA 0.

The Bush administration's strategy against Hizbullah has consisted of a mix of isolation, belligerence and military pressure. It refuses to talk to the group or its supporters in Tehran and Damascus. Two years ago, Washington unquestioningly supported Israeli Prime Minister's Ehud Olmert's decision to attack southern Lebanon, Hizbullah's stronghold. The United States provides the Lebanese government and Army with aid and has responded to the current crisis by promising to speed up delivery of weapons. Yet today Hizbullah is stronger in Lebanon, Iran is more influential in the region, and the United States and its ally, Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, have been marginalized.

Why is this? Hizbullah is not like Al Qaeda, a rootless organization that engages solely in existential terrorism. It's a homegrown group with deep roots in Lebanon's Shia community. The organization was formed to oppose Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and still derives some of its appeal from that history of resistance. It's since become the voice of the Shia community, which is institutionally discriminated against in the country's power structures. (Shiites make up between 30 and 40 percent of the Lebanese population, yet are accorded only 18 percent of parliamentary seats.) Finally, Hizbullah runs an impressive network of social services, which provide health care, small loans and family support. "There is no light between the Shia community of Lebanon and Hizbullah," says Vali Nasr, author of "The Shia Revival."

The foundation of Hizbullah's strength is not just its rockets but the support it can command from 1 million Lebanese Shiites. That's why dealing with the group as a military problem is counterproductive. Augustus Richard Norton, author of the best recent study of Hizbullah, argues that the 2006 war strengthened the group. "I was in Lebanon in late 2007," he told me. "And Shia families that had been neutral for 20 years now accepted Hizbullah's argument that the Shia needed the protection it provided."

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