MY MEETINGS WITH NASRALLAHThe assassinated Hezbollah chief had a vision for his country
I must confess that I liked Hassan Nasrallah. I had a few long meetings with him that began in the winter of 2003. It was a few months after the US invasion of Iraq, a response George W. Bush and Dick Cheney decided on two years earlier, in the aftermath of 9/11, even though Iraq was led by the secular Saddam Hussein who had no connection to Al Qaeda. I was working for the New Yorker, and my beat was the war on terror. It brought me to Berlin that spring for a breakfast about 9/11 with August Hanning, the head of German intelligence. There was no need for a discussion of ground rules: Hanning and I understood we were talking strictly on background. At some point I asked Hanning about a strange connection I’d learned of between former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who during a distinguished army career was a commander of the Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s most secret commando unit, and Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, the Shiite militia based in southern Lebanon. The issue was a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hezbollah that took place after a lot of back and forth between Nasrallah and Barak, who was refusing to return one of the prisoners. Nasrallah’s backchannel talks with Israel via Hanning continued with Ariel Sharon, who replaced Barak as prime minister in 2001. It was stunning news. Sharon had led Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 1982 and had played a key role in the infamous massacre of two Palestinian refugee camps there. He and Nasrallah were the oddest of couples. I didn’t take notes at breakfast, but I came away most interested in Nasrallah. I had friends in Beirut who knew the Hezbollah leadership and arranged a meeting. I don’t remember where the first meeting took place, but it had none of the intense security that came later, after Israel and Hezbollah fought a bitter war in 2006 that had no winners, as I later wrote in the New Yorker. That first meeting involved little more than a casual security check: my jacket was patted down, and my old-fashioned tape recorder was briefly opened and glanced at. Nasrallah was round and plump in his religious garb, and I asked him via an interpreter whether he saw himself as a terrorist or a freedom fighter in his constant border skirmishes with Israel. He said his military had attacked Israeli soldiers along the border and would do so again, if it came to a war. He surprised me by adding that if full rights and a meaningful peace agreement somehow could be worked out between the Israelis and Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, he would of course honor it. Cookies and tea were served, and he insisted that we partake, pushing the cookie platter toward me. The talk was largely a tutorial, from his point of view, about the US war in Iraq. Nasrallah’s prediction was that the quick American victory would be followed by years of bitter warfare as the disbanded Iraqi army would link up with tribal and political opposition. He was pretty much right. I had a second meeting with Nasrallah a few weeks before the January 30, 2005 parliamentary elections in Iraq. It was the first general election since the US overthrow of Saddam and, as I later reported, the Bush administration was doing all it could to fix the vote to insure that the Sunni candidates favored by the White House would win a plurality. I had been told by a friend in the US intelligence community that election ballots, supposedly but not necessarily blank, were being printed in the United States and flown to Iraq. Nasrallah was amused by the idiocy of Washington sending diplomats and other officials to Iraq who knew little about the country and could speak no Arabic. He told me that America had no idea how to fix elections and seemed to believe that the winning party needed a majority of 50 per cent or better. He then told me that the winning party would be Shiite and have 48.1 percent of the vote. “Americans,” he said, “do not know how to fix elections here.” (The verbatim transcript of this and other interviews with Nasrallah are stored among 95 boxes of my papers and were not available to consult on short notice.) The election was won by the Shiite Ibrahim al-Jaafari with 48.19 percent of the vote. The election was essentially boycotted by Sunni Arabs, and in one key Sunni precinct only two percent of those registered cast ballots. The Sunni community obviously got the message that the election would be fixed, as the US diplomatic and military community did not. There were at least forty-four deaths around polling places on election day. I had written a book alleging that Jack Kennedy fixed an election in Chicago, but I never thought to ask Nasrallah how he knew that al-Jaafari would win and could predict his score within one tenth of one parentage point of his vote total. My last visit with Nasrallah came in December 2006, a few months after Hezbollah fought a stunned Israel to a standoff in a brutal war. (I republished the article I wrote about that war a few weeks back.) The failure to carry that day has played a role in preparing Israel for the day when its prime minister would, as he did last week, call for a knockout blow. Nasrallah had been in hiding since the aftermath of the 2006 war. I took a taxi to a meeting point in south Beirut, home to many Shiites, where a Hezbollah aide took me by taxi to a garage. There I was searched with a handheld scammer and placed into the back of a dark sedan, its windows blocked, and driven to two or three more garages, changing cars each time, and finally to a garage in what turned out to be a modern apartment building. It was more interesting than alarming, and I didn’t immediately connect the hyper-security to the war with Israel. Once in the correct garage, I was walked to an elevator that took me directly to the top floor of what seemed to be a 12-story building. I understood that Hezbollah’s success in standing up to Israel had made him a hero to both Shiites and Sunnis. Nasrallah shooed away an aide who wanted to do a full body search of me. I was taken aback by the security and essentially asked him, “What the fuck is going on?”—only in more polite language. He explained the summer war had started when he ordered the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid. It was a mistake. “We just wanted to capture prisoners for exchange purposes,” he told me. “We never wanted to drag the region into war.” As we got into it again, over cookies and tea, a clearly rattled Nasrallah blamed President Bush for what he said was Bush’s goal of “drawing up a new map for the region” by partitioning the Middle East, where many religions had long mingled peacefully, into segregated Sunni and Shiite states. “Within one or two years at the most,” he said, “there will be total Sunni areas, total Shiite areas, and total Kurdish areas. Even in Baghdad, there is a fear that it might be divided into two areas, one Sunni and one Shiite.” A few months later, I wrote a long piece, based on my interview with Nasrallah, little-noted Congressional testimony, and interviews in Washington and the Middle East, about a Bush Administration decision “to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East.” I wrote: “In Lebanon, the administration has cooperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The US has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, one of the architects of the new American foreign policy, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that there was “a new strategic alignment in the Middle East” that would separate “reformers” and “extremists.” Most of the Sunni were at the center of moderation and Shiite Iran and Hezbollah, along with Sunni Syria and Hamas, were on the other side of that divide. Whatever one might think of Rice’s analysis, a policy shift did emerge and eventually did bring Saudi Arabia and Israel to the brink of a new strategic embrace via the Abraham Accords. Both nations viewed Iran and Hezbollah as existential menaces. The Saudis, I wrote then, believed that greater stability in Israel and Palestine would give Iran less leverage in the region. That report was published more than seventeen years ago. It is stunning today to consider how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has destroyed this fragile chance for a political realignment in the Middle East, especially because Iran is now led by a forward looking and moderate president who may soon be on Netanyahu’s hit list. We will never know whether Nasrallah, who was born in Lebanon and told me more than once that he was determined to bring Hezbollah more into the political, economic and social of life of his country—would have been successful in doing so. The way forward now, with mighty Israel on the attack on the ground and in the air, is dark and deadly. |
