Highly acclaimed in international circles, Western to be more precise, as a “unique incisive insight” into the “sinister story” of the Lebanese Shia Muslim organization Hezbollah, the author Matthew Levitt is praised for cataloging Hezbollah's terrorist networks with meticulous forensic detail. I must say from the outset that I am highly critical of Levitt's tongue-in-cheek conclusion that the “unscrupulous” Hezbollah and their Iranian benefactors come up a cropper. The author is utterly unsympathetic to the creed of Hezbollah bent on breaking with outdated paradigm of the Shia underdog, the reviled victim of Christian and Sunni Muslim derision in traditional Lebanese mythology of the Shia as the crass, uncouth country bumpkin. Levitt, a senior fellow and director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy's Stein Program on Counter-terrorism and Intelligence, served previously as an FBI counter-terrorism analyst, and adviser on counter-terrorism to the US State Department. Lebanon is an utterly socially and politically stratified entity based on a sectarian and confessional basis, and the Shia Muslims were at the very bottom of the political spectrum until Hezbollah came into being. Levitt spotlights, instead, the Twelver Shia terrorism with its intricate network of terror with Tehran, and Damascus to boot. He pays no attention to the truism that no one really carried the torch for the Twelver Shia dark horse of Lebanon until Hezbollah stepped into the political arena overshadowing its Shia forerunner Amal. Nevertheless, getting to the heart of Levitt's logic is simple enough: the Twelver Shia and Hezbollah dared to question the status quo and challenge Israel and they got their comeuppance precisely because they asked for it. As far as Levitt is concerned, Hezbollah is a menace not only to other Lebanese and to Israel, but it is a veritable threat to the very interests of the United States, in particular, and to Western powers at large. “Since 1982, Hezbollah has built an extensive global network that relies on operatives and supporters mainly from Lebanese Shia diaspora communities. Throughout the 1980s, Hezbollah targeted Western interests within Lebanon, including bombing embassies and military barracks, kidnapping Westerners, and hijacking aircraft. By the 1990s operatives expanded their reach. Hezbollah operatives were involved in attacks as far afield as South America and Europe. Attacks like those targeting the Israeli embassy and the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994, respectively, highlighted Hezbollah's capability to mobilize operatives far from home,” the author states categorically in the first chapter of his book. The “sinister” nature of Hezbollah and their intolerable terror tactics is the monotonous theme that Levitt constantly returns to. True, I personally learned a great deal from Levitt about the inner workings and dynamics that drive Hezbollah. Time and again, the author reminds the reader of the mortal threat to regional and global stability that Hezbollah poses. “US diplomats and soldiers were still coming to terms with the suicide bombing that struck the US embassy [in Beirut] in April, and US Marines wore their combat uniforms everywhere they went, even to social events and diplomatic functions,” the author extrapolates. Hezbollah thrives on the underclass status of Lebanese Twelver Shia Muslims. The supposed terrorism of Hezbollah accentuated perceptions of the Shia Muslims of Lebanon, and by implication their benefactors, the Iranians as well, as excessively religious, and that their hysterical religiosity endangers and undermines the very democratic credentials of countries such as Lebanon that are making an attempt at mimicking Western-style democracy. “Lebanon's devastating civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990, hardened divisions among the country's various sectarian communities. Against this backdrop, the 1982 Israeli invasion and subsequent occupation of southern Lebanon created the space in which Iranian diplomats and agents could help fashion the unified entity Hezbollah from a motley crew of Shia militias and groups,” Levitt contends. His notion that Hezbollah's terrorism is best left to speak for itself is somewhat misguided, or perhaps deliberately rancorous. The terrorism of Hezbollah was totally inappropriate to bourgeois respectability and Western orientation of the Lebanese state, or more precisely the Christian and Sunni Muslim elite. But, of course, Levitt is not overly flustered by Hezbollah upsetting the delicate multi-religious setting of contemporary Lebanon or its politics dynamics. What is at stake, and what truly perturbs Levitt is Hezbollah's identifying the West as the real enemy of the masses, not only in Lebanon or the Middle East, but of the oppressed peoples everywhere in the world. This seminal study, even if one as I do, ideologically disagrees with its biased premises, nevertheless showcases fresh insights into an extremely prickly topic. “In Lebanon, three spectacular attacks targeting US interests over an eighteen month period defined the groups relationship with the United States for years to come. The US embassy was bombed on 18 April 1983, killing sixty-three, including seventeen Americans,” Levitt expounds. “Then came the nearly simultaneous attacks of 23 October 1983, targeting the US Marines and French army barracks, both under the aegis of the Beirut-based Multinational Force sent to Lebanon as peacekeepers to oversee the evacuation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Beirut. Those attacks left 241 Americans and 58 French dead. Less than a year later, on 20 September 1984, the US embassy annex was bombed, killing 24,” the author narrates the litany of terrorist attacks against Western property and personnel in Lebanon. And, this work is not just the musings of an imperialist agent. Whether this blueprint for how the West views Hezbollah is debatable. “FBI forensic investigators determined that the marine barracks bombing was not only the deadliest terrorist attack then to have targeted Americans, it was also the single largest non-nuclear explosion on earth since World War II,” Levitt extrapolates. The African connection particularly aroused my curiosity. West Africa, in particular, has always had a thriving Lebanese business community. Originally, most were Maronite Christians, but in the 1980s, an increasing number of Shia Lebanese looked to West Africa for business opportunities. “A dramatic expose of the full scope of the African drug problem and Hezbollah's role in it appeared in January 2011 when the US Treasury Department blacklisted Lebanese narcotics trafficker Ayman Joumma along with an additional nine individuals and nineteen businesses involved in his drug trafficking and money laundering enterprise. With criminal associates and front companies in Columbia, Panama, Lebanon, Benin and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Joumma's organization was truly transnational. But while his drug ties to South America and his terrorist ties to Lebanon were unsurprising, the African narco-terrorism link, and its direct connection to the United States, was a wake-up call,” Levitt explains. “People like Ayman Joumma and Oussam Salhab appear to have been in the right place at the right time. As demand for narcotics increased in Europe and the Middle East, South American cartels started looking for new routes to these growing markets. One route went to Europe through West Africa, and another through Syria and Lebanon,” Levitt claims. The author adds that the Middle East narcotics route was boosted by Hezbollah's especially close relationship to Iran and Venezuela. The reader can easily pluck tidbits from Levitt's insights. “With several notable exceptions, Hezbollah has primarily relied on its formal and informal networks of operatives and supporters in Africa for just this kind of financial and logistical support, not as a preferred location for terrorist operations. The decision may seem counter-intuitive given the lax law enforcement and gross corruption that plague so much of the continent. Moreover, the cost of getting caught red-handed engaging in operational activity in Africa, in addition to being unlikely, would be minimal since the continent lacks many political or economic heavyweights to make Hezbollah pay the price for carrying out operations on their soil,” Levitt elaborates. Expanding on the Africa connections of Hezbollah, the author cites countless other examples. I leave it to the reader's conjecture to come up with conclusions. “In December 2003, FBI agents secured a court order for a criminal wiretap of a suspected drug trafficker's cell phone. The suspect was believed to be a Nigerian bearing a Canadian immigration document,” Levitt notes. Both Nigeria and Canada have large Lebanese communities. Levitt's apprehension of certain aspects of Hezbollah's ideology and its practical import and application proved prescient to many Westerners, academicians and literary critics alike, and secular Arabs as well. Yet, the author offers few prescriptions apart from those advocated by Western intelligence services. He has no qualms about being biased against Hezbollah. He unabashedly views the organization from a Western perspective. Ultimately, though, this work is a story of the failure of Western powers to deal effectively with Hezbollah. Charges against suspected Hezbollah activists borne of several years of investigation quickly fall apart, concedes Levitt. The United States and Israel have long pressed other Western nations to follow their example and blacklist Hezbollah. Most Western nations complied with Washington's dictates. The European Union, for instance, added Hezbollah's armed wing to its terrorist blacklist because of the group's alleged involvement in a deadly bus bombing in Bulgaria, an EU member state, and Hezbollah's embroilment in the Syrian civil war. Hezbollah forces are fighting alongside Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad's troops, an indeed, have become instrumental in turning the tide against armed opposition groups in Syria. Hezbollah functions primarily as a Lebanese political party, but then the author focuses on the terrorist activities, as defined by the West, of Hezbollah's militias. Hezbollah's leader Hassan Nasrallah is hardly mentioned in the context of his political activism in Lebanon. And, his origins are obscured and overlooked in Levitt's study. Instead much is made about Al-Manar, The Beacon, Hezbollah's official satellite television station. He dismisses it as a propaganda venture fomenting discord and hatred. “Al-Manar specialies in programming the glorification of terrorism and inciting violence, racial hatred, and anti-Semitism,” ignoring the fact that Lebanese Twelver Shia see themselves as Semites. “The self-declared ‘station of resistance' Al-Manar promises to wage ‘psychological warfare against the Zionist enemy' and has called for violence against Americans in the Middle East. Moreover, it has made the United States a key target of its programming and portrayed it as a global oppressor. In a September 2002 speech broadcast on Al-Manar, Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah declared, ‘Our great hostility to the Great Satan is absolute... Death to America will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan: Death to America'”. Small wonder, then, that in “December 2004, the US State Department added Al-Manar to the Terrorism Exclusion List, effectively effectively preventing the immigration and accelerating the deportation of non-US citizens associated with the station, as well as the removal of Al-Manar from US television provides. Two years late, the Department of the Treasury named Al-Manar a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity, noting that Al-Manar supported fundraising and recruitment efforts by Hezbollah through advertisements and requesting donations on air. According to Treasury Department broadcast an invitation from Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah for all Lebanese citizens to volunteer for Hezbollah military training. The station also provided support to Palestinian terrorist groups,” the author argues. Yet another intriguing Hezbollah hookup is the interconnection with the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez. “A Hezbollah support network has long exited in Venezuela. According to a July 2003 report by Mark Steinitz, then director of the terrorism analysis office in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, ‘by the mid-1990s, Hezbollah had cells in Venezuela. Attention has focused on the the group's presence among Lebanese Shia in the 12,000-strong Arab community on Margarita Island'. A free trade zone ff the coast of Venezuela, Margarita Island is believed to be a location of choice for drug-traffickers and Hezbollah and other Islamist extremists,” the author elucidates. The author identifies certain Venezuelan diplomats of Arab descent by name. One Ghazi Nasr Al-Din, for example, is branded as a Hezbollah activist “who counseled Hezbollah donors on fundraising efforts an has provided donors with specific information on bank accounts where the donors' deposits would go directly to Hezbollah”. Levitt used his position as a top intelligence agent to not only champion the cause of anti-terrorism in a most unapologetic and flagrant fashion, but his book is replete with surprises and his obsession withe Hezbollah's international connections borders on pedantry. Yet, it does reveal many secrets. “One example of the increasingly close Iran-Venezuela relationship is Iran Air flight 744, which travels from Caracas to Tehran with stops in Beirut and Damascus and is referred to by some investigators as ‘Aeroterror'. Most seats on this flight are reportedly not open to the public,” the author contends. Another Hezbollah aspect that is not well covered by the media aroused my interest precisely because it might explain recent Saudi foreign policy. Levitt exposes a little known Saudi Hezbollah link. Saudi Arabia is home to a large and restive Shia Muslim population, about 10 to 15 per cent of the Kingdom's population. They are geographically concentrated in the eastern region of the country that also happens to be the largest oil producing area in the Middle East. He openly notes that the Shia Muslim minority in Saudi Arabia are discriminated against in education, employment , the administration of justice and other aspects of social, political and economic life in the conservative Sunni Muslim-run kingdom where the Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam is the official ideology of the state. However, Levitt is not so much concerned with Shia Muslim disgruntlement in Saudi Arabia, rather with the consequences of such disaffection and frustration with regards to American national interests. He relates an incident , the bombing of Al-Khobar Towers in June 1996. Indeed, he devotes an entire chapter to the contentious subject. “Carrying at least 5,000 pounds of plastic explosives, the tanker truck detonated with the power of about 20,000 pounds of TNT. More than twice as powerful as the 1983 bomb Hezbollah used to US Marines barracks in Beirut, the blast was later determined to have been the largest non-nuclear explosion then on record. The bomb left a crater eighty-five feet wide and thirty-five feet deep, damaged buildings across the Khobar Towers compound, and was felt twenty miles away in Bahrain,” Levitt notes. Bahrain, the tiny island kingdom in the Arabian Gulf has a majority Shia Muslim population, but is governed by a Sunni Muslim ruling dynasty and Sunni Muslims in Bahrain appropriate the plum jobs. Saudi Arabia intervened militarily on 4 March 2011 under the auspices of the Peninsula Shield forces in Bahrain to quell a Shia Muslim rebellion in the island kingdom. But getting back to the Al-Khobar Towers blast, Levitt documents the close security collaboration the US and between Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the bombings. “Nineteen US Air Force personnel were killed” and “another 372 were wounded”. And, “over the next five years the FBI would lead a massive, politically sensitive investigation that would ultimately prompt the indictment in US federal court of thirteen of the Iranian-sponsored Saudi Hezbollah”. By highlighting the global frameworks of Hezbollah Levitt sheds much lights on the dynamics of a movement that is currently being under scrutiny for the paramount role it plays in the Syrian civil war backing Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad. Levitt creatively deploys his deep knowledge coupled with the scrupulous collection, analysis, and exploitation of information and intelligence in support of his arguments against Hezbollah. The author has enjoyed an unusually varied career in intelligence services and as an academician with tremendous knowledge of his pet subject. Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon's Party of God, in an altogether serious scholarly and demanding work. And, the result is a book imbued with invaluable insights into the inner workings, not only of Hezbollah, but also of the tactics, shortcomings and successes of the American intelligence services.
