Features > August 15, 2006

Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah

Just how much influence does the Islamic Republic wield over Hezbollah?

By William O. Beeman

Supporters of Hezbollah hold posters of Hassan Nasrallah during a protest in Beirut on July 30.

The conflict in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah had hardly begun when the Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters began blaming Iran for the conflagration. On July 25, Henry Crumpton, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism, told a reporter that Iran is “clearly directing a lot of Hezbollah actions. Hezbollah asks their permission to do things, especially if it has broader international implications.” Meanwhile, in the July 24 Weekly Standard, William Kristol called Hezbollah’s fighting an “act of Iranian aggression” and suggested “we might consider countering [it] … with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.”

However, giving Iran another tongue lashing, or worse, deciding to attack it, will do nothing to stop the violence in the region. Not only is there no evidence that Iran had a role in instigating this round of violence, the possibility itself is unlikely.

Iran’s control over Hezbollah has been steadily declining since approximately 1996, during the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami. Money does continue to come “from Iran” to support Hezbollah, but not the Iranian government. Instead, it’s private religious foundations that direct the bulk of support, primarily to Hezbollah’s charitable activities. Nor are the amounts crucial to Hezbollah’s survival; even the high estimate frequently cited in the press—$200 million per annum—is a fraction of Hezbollah’s operating funds. However, the most important reason for not targeting Iran for the continued fighting in Lebanon is that this conflict is antithetical to Iran’s interests.

Neoconservatives clearly have another agenda in attacking Iran besides stopping Hezbollah. By blaming Iran for this latest flare-up, neoconservatives are following their decade-long program to encourage a military attack against the Islamic Republic.

Iran’s support for Hezbollah

The broad assertion that Iran supports Hezbollah is verifiable, but it is important to understand what the nature of this support is, and the extent to which Iran is able to influence the actions of this Shi’ite Lebanese group.

Since 90 percent of Iran’s population is Shi’ite, its citizens had an undeniable interest in the fate of its co-religionists in Lebanon following the Revolution of 1978-79. Like Iranians, the Lebanese Shi’ite community was under oppression both from Sunnis and Maronites. Moreover, Palestinian refugees, settled in Lebanon without consultation with the Shi’ite community, served as a drain on weak local economic resources and drew fire from Israel. The Shi’ites felt helpless and frustrated. The successful revolution in Iran was enormously inspirational to them. While the Iranian central government was weak and scattered after the Revolution, semi-independent charitable organizations, called bonyad (literally, “foundation”) sponsored by individual Shi’ite clerics began to help the fledgling Hezbollah organization establish itself as a defense force to protect the Shi’ite community. This was simply not state support. Given the semi-independent corporate nature of Shi’ite clerics, especially in the early days of Iran’s revolution, when internal power struggles were endemic, there was little the Khomeini government could do to curtail these operations.

Now, after nearly two decades, this ad hoc export of Iranian revolutionary ideology may have succeeded too well. Whereas today the bulk of the Iranian population has at least some doubts about their government, Hezbollah maintains a stronger commitment to the symbolic legacy of the Iranian Revolution than Iranians, according to Georgetown University professor Daniel Byman. In a 2003 Foreign Affairs article, Byman pointed out that, “[Iran] lacks the means to force a significant change in the [Hezbollah] movement and its goals. It has no real presence on the ground in Lebanon and a call to disarm or cease resistance would likely cause Hezbollah’s leadership, or at least its most militant elements, simply to sever ties with Tehran’s leadership.”

In short, Hezbollah has now taken on a life of its own. Even if all Iranian financial and logistic support were cut off, Hezbollah would not only continue, it would thrive.

Hezbollah has achieved this independence by becoming as much a social welfare and political organization as a militant resistance organization. In a 2004 speech, Dwight J. Simpson, a professor of international relations at San Francisco State University, reported that it had “12 elected parliamentary members…[and] many Hezbollah members hold elected positions within local governments.” At that time, the group had already built five hospitals and was building more. It operated 25 primarily secular schools, and provided subsidies to shopkeepers.

The source for their money, Simpson reported, is zakat—the charitable “tithe” required of all Muslims. The Shi’ites, having seen their co-religionists in Iraq succeed in initial elections there in 2005, had hopes that they too would assume the power in Lebanon that accorded with their status as the nation’s largest community, approximately 40 percent of the population. The growth of Hezbollah’s charitable operations increased non-state-level financial support for the organization not only from Iran, but from the rest of the Shi’ite world, since formalized charity is a religious duty. As this charitable activity increased, Hezbollah was on the road to ceasing its activities as a terrorist group and gradually assuming the role of a political organization. Even in its current engagement with Israel, its “terrorist” activities have been reframed as national defense, especially as Hezbollah began to use conventional military forces and weapons.

Many of these weapons, it is claimed, have been acquired from Iran over the years, but even this is not fully verified. The rockets used by Hezbollah have been tentatively identified as Katushya rockets, of the form manufactured by Iran, and known as Fajr-3 and Fajr-5. But the United States has not been able to identify that these rockets are absolutely Iranian.

Moreover, although it is certainly possible that branches of Iran’s Islamic guard may be operating in Lebanon without the full knowledge of the central government of Iran, no country has yet been able to verify their presence in the current conflict, and rumors that they have aided in the firing of the rockets have been vehemently denied by Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah. Given the loose and ambiguous nature of the Iranian government’s control over support for Hezbollah, claims by U.S. officials that Iran has an organized state-level support system for such activities are clearly exaggerated.

Added to all of this is the fact that the Lebanese violence does not serve Iran’s political purposes. The verbal attacks of its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, against Israel would cause it to be targeted if Israel were ever involved in a wider conflict with the Islamic world. Although Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has claimed that Iran instigated this attack to draw attention away from criticism of its nuclear development program, this scenario seems far-fetched. Indeed, Iran’s strategic situation has certainly been worsened by this fighting. Kenneth Katzman, senior Middle East analyst at the Congressional Research Service, recently told Voice of America: “Iran is viewed, widely viewed, as at least complicit in what is going on, supporting Hezbollah. And that is likely to make some of the fence-sitters, I guess Russia and China perhaps, take a dimmer view of Iranian intentions and perhaps be more amenable to U.S. and other arguments that Iran is playing a destabilizing role in the region and needs to be confronted by the [U.N. Security] Council.”

Beyond state support

Why would the United States repeat such unfounded assertions with such incessant regularity as if they were established fact? Aside from their continuity with 27 years of ongoing attacks against Iran, such assertions accord with a longstanding U.S. foreign policy myth that believes terrorism cannot exist without state support. If a state is needed to explain the continued existence of groups like Hezbollah, then Iran is an ideal candidate. Ergo, the connection must exist. Such claims serve to bolster the central, but fallacious, political doctrine for the Bush administration that the Global War on Terrorism really exists.

The alternative is to understand that terrorism is fundamentally community-based. Sub-state groups with grievances that they feel cannot be addressed in any other way resort to terrorism as a way of increasing attention to their plight and pressuring those whom they perceive to be oppressing them. Though they may welcome external financial support, the impetus and motivation for terrorist groups’ actions is not dependent on it. Indeed, the more pressure they are subjected to, the stronger their collective will to resist increases.

When this dynamic is understood, the problems of addressing terrorism also come into focus. Rather than looking for global fantasy structures such as al-Qaeda and their state supporters, the international community needs to employ methods to address the needs of sub-state groups, while simultaneously working to curtail their activities as conditions improve. For the Shi’ites in Lebanon, it may be far too late to employ such a strategy.

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• Reader Comments

  I cannot see how the author’s idea that Hizbollah’s money comes from one specific source (say, zakat) and not the other (say, Iran) might be verified. I would think that the true money sources are very well concealed/disguised. Consider the multitude of financing schemes described on www.fatf-gafi.org. Apart from citing a certain Prof. Simpson on this subject, no arguments are provided. Author’s boast of knowing the exact method only shows his incompetence.
  But let’s assume that money has legal, non-Iran sources. The problem of purchasing the weapons remains. Who exactly sells the weapons to Hizbollah for their “clean” money? Author tells us that we cannot be absolutely sure that Iran does. Well, who does, then? Certainly there is a source. So here’s no argument either.
  It follows from the above that the idea “Even if all Iranian financial and logistic support were cut off, Hezbollah would not only continue, it would thrive” looks rather as a desired motto, not a supported conclusion.
  And there’s more mottos to come. For example, “Given the loose and ambiguous nature of the Iranian government’s control over support for Hezbollah” - why exactly we treat this assertion as a given?
  To round it up, I’d like to remind the author that in the middle of the current conflict Nasralla went abroad. Check http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2242709 If Iran’s influence over Hizballa is as described by the author, why exactly did Nasralla chose to meet its envoys in the middle of a war?

  Posted by dizz on Aug 15, 2006 at 7:12 AM

  This administration built up to a preemptive strike on Iraq and coupled that with rhetoric that is duplicated with Iran.  The bomb test “Divine Strake” was designed to test penetration of Iranian nuclear worksites.

  We no longer have the force structure to send troops into Iran, but all signs point to painting Iran as a notch on the Axis of Evil that must be destroyed regardless of factual support for their complicity.

  The administration no longer has Colin Powell to proceed to the UN, but the groundwork has been laid and Iran will be in some technical violation and GW will keep repeating that “no option is off the table.” Somebody will carry his water to the UN and we will repeat history.

  Kristol was one of the original signatores of the letter by neocons in 1996 to then President Clinton demanding an invasion of Iraq.  The current VP and Feith and others may actually believe that this approach still has merit, even after the fiasco in Iraq and the failure in Afghanistan.

  Posted by geocopy on Aug 15, 2006 at 3:17 PM

  The media is replete with reports about Iran financing Hezbolla, providing high tech weapons and tactical support to the tune of some $5-6 billion.  Hezbolla’s fighters have been decimated and large portions of its weapons stores have been expended, rendering it pretty much unfit to press any fight until and unless Iran rearms it. Something Iran is furious about. Professor Beeman’s thrust at neocons (I am NOT a necon, as a long time active liberal I’m the farthest thing from it), begs the question. Iran’s finger prints are all over this nasty war. Saying otherwise is like fatuously claiming that I.G. Farben just manufactured children’s toys.

  Read an excerpt of the Debkafile article: (or use the link here for the whole piece) http://www.debka.com/article.php?aid=1201

  Tehran Takes Gloomy View of the Lebanon War and Truce

  August 14, 2006, 3:35 PM (GMT+02:00)

  While the damage caused Israel’s military reputation tops Western assessments of the Lebanon war, DEBKAfile’s Iranian sources report an entirely different perception taking hold in ruling circles in Tehran.

  After UN Security Council resolution 1701 calling for a truce was carried Friday, Aug. 11, the heads of the regime received two separate evaluations of the situation in Lebanon – one from Iran’s foreign ministry and one from its supreme national security council. Both were bleak: their compilers were concerned that Iran had been manipulatively robbed of its primary deterrent asset ahead of a probable nuclear confrontation with the United States and Israel.

  While the foreign ministry report highlighted the negative aspects of the UN resolution, the council’s document complained that Hizballah squandered thousands of rockets – either by firing them into Israel or having them destroyed by the Israeli air force.

  The writer of this report is furious over the waste of Iran’s most important military investment in Lebanon merely for the sake of a conflict with Israeli over two kidnapped soldiers.

  Posted by decampe on Aug 15, 2006 at 3:45 PM

  Suppose I have a land conflict with you.  You buy your gun at Kmart, and I buy mine at Walmart.  Am I now just a proxy for Walmart when I fight you for my land?  (And you KNOW how evil Walmart is). 

  Just goes to show how far this administration will go to ignore and obscure legitimate local grievances.  The sad part is how many people actually buy into their crap.

  Posted by Imran on Aug 15, 2006 at 4:08 PM

  When Hezbollah decided to participate in Lebanese politics in 1992, their leadership wrote up a report and sent it to Iran.  Khamenei said, “Sure, participate in your region’s secular government” because as their theocratic supreme leader, Khamenei has the final say in what Hezbollah does.

  But the point the author makes about “terrorism” being “community-based” is important and cannot be stressed enough.  Ahmadinejad, Khamenei, and other Iranian powerholders support Hezbollah in the sense that they don’t like Isreal’s intentions, but the US is not justified in saying that therefore taking out Iran is the next step of a “new Mid-East process”.  In some ways China, Russia, Venusuala, South Africa, Brazil, Cuba, parts of France (every place that is vehemently not in favor of continued US world dominance) supports Iranian intentions and ambitions.  Money and arms move between hundreds of different parties.  People need to step back and think unless they’re willing to enter another World War, because that’s exactly where this insanity is headed.

  Posted by ninelegyak on Aug 15, 2006 at 4:54 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

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Also by William O. Beeman

• Examining Irans ties to Hezbollah
  Just how much influence does the Islamic Republic wield over Hezbollah?