A Dialogue with Lebanon's Ayatollah

Robert Pollock in the WSJ, here

"...I ask if he thinks Iraq is better off now than it was under Saddam. Iraq had a problem with "dictatorship," he concedes. But this "dictatorship had a relationship with the former American administration," he says, pointing to Saddam's invasion of Iran and other actions that allegedly "serv[ed] the American strategy . . . Saddam Hussein was an employee of the CIA but his job was finished by the end." He accuses the Bush administration of pursuing a policy of "constructive chaos" during the occupation....

"We hope that that the elections will be as free as in civilized nations. Our problem in the Arab world is that people fear their rulers and therefore fall short of changing them, whereas the natural course of things is that rulers should fear their peoples. . . . We appreciate the way elections are run in America or the West; the Americans or the Europeans are not frozen over one personality. They study the success or failure of this president or this administration, and therefore they change it from time to time."

That seems as good an opening as any to broach the subject of Hezbollah. Does he think it's healthy that Lebanon's Shiites are increasingly associated with such a party?

His answer, in effect, is that Hezbollah is a force for modernization: "Hezbollah is a group of Shiites who are university educated. We know that you will find at universities, whether here in Lebanon or in the West, many who agree with the thought of Hezbollah." True enough, at least as concerns attitudes toward Israel.

Then the answer gets more interesting: "We do not reject the West. But we disagree with some Western administrations. We believe that America is not the administration ruling America. America is rather the universities, the research centers and the American people. That is why we want to be friends with the American people with all their variation....

.....I don't think that the Lebanese Hezbollah has a project beyond Lebanon. Because it does not have the capacity to do so . . . . Hezbollah emerged in Lebanon as a reaction to the recurrent Israeli aggression over decades. The Lebanese army is weak with regard to its power of deterrence. Therefore it cannot face any Israeli aggression. Hezbollah is supplementary to the Lebanese Army defending the country....

Imad Mugniyeh didn't just fight Israel, he killed a lot of Americans. Does he think the children of the neighborhood should look at the posters and think Mugniyeh is a hero?

"I think that the stage Lebanon lived [when the Americans were killed] was one without clear limitations. It is very natural that the American policy was interconnected with the Israeli policy. The stage when this took place was one of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the West. Therefore the issue was not setting out from a person, but from the conflict between the East and the West, and through the political and security anarchy in Lebanon. In my own belief, this stage is no longer existent, but the problem remains that the American policy is 100% identical to the Israeli policy. We have not found an American position condemning the massacres in Palestine and particularly in Gaza. The missiles launched by the resistance were a reaction to the Israeli aggressors, who own American fighter jets that are never used but in massive warfare . ..."