More thoughts on Lebanon

By Fester:

I have not written much about Lebanon and Hezbollah's takedown of Beirut and the majority of the militias of their political rivals as I do not know enough about the region to be too intelligent.  However I can free ride off of people who pay much more attention to this region than I do.  Ilan Goldenburg at Attackerman argues that this was a premeditated move by Hezbollah (I agree) that was looking for a causus belli as it was too well planned to be anything spontaneous.  He thinks the Lebanese government misread the situation but Hezbollah had limited and primarily political and credibility objectives rather than a coup on their mind.

He finishes up with three potential future paths; staring at the brink and a step-back from civil war, a pause before a social system disruption event occurs, or a continued stalemate.  He leans towards a stalemate that is similar to the political stalemate that has dominated Lebanon for most of the past year.

The Yorkshire Ranter has another take on this as he sees a significant reshuffling of the political cards past the obvious on the ground gains Hezbollah has seen.  The other winner is the Lebanese Army in this scenario:

all the territory Hezbollah and Amal took was immediately handed over to the official Lebanese military, an increasingly powerful force in politics.

Arguably, this suggests that some of the ideas floated in 2006 about incorporating Hezbollah in the Lebanese military as some sort of reserve/militia/national guard/territorial army/jaegers/greenjackets/cossacks/whatever else you call those crazy bastards on the border, as long as they don't bother you and keep the roads open, are being put in effect de facto....

You could call it the Haganah-isation of Hezbollah; it's changing not just from a guerrilla force to an army, but also from a political party to an unstate with a shadow administration, an economy, and its own infrastructure, just as the Israeli founding generation built a mixed economy, a trade union movement, a shadow civil service, and a highly capable semi-guerrilla army/intelligence service long before the state became a formal reality. I'm only surprised they didn't start a commercial GSM network as cover for their own command-and-control system; perhaps they will.

Meanwhile, again, this is an example of the democratization of technology....

Under this theory the legitimacy of the state is weakened as it does not have a monopoly on force within its capital while the theoretical provider of that monopoly, the Lebanese Army has its de facto legitimacy increased as it divides its sphere of influence with the non-state actor of Hezbollah.  This is hollowing out the state by co-opting a significant pillar of state support if this theory is true... Interesting and worthy of further notice....