Coalitions of the unwilling

Oct 19th 2006 | CAIRO From The Economist print edition

Resistance to the West, and rejection of Israel, are the pillars of a rapidly strengthening alliance in the world's most volatile region

THE Middle East is no stranger to doom and gloom. The most enduring conflict of the past century, between Israelis and Palestinians, drags on drearily today. The first wars of the 21st century have also unfolded there, in Afghanistan, Iraq, western Sudan and Lebanon.

This being so, the West has a long history of espying new spectres in the region. In the 1950s and 1960s it was Nasser, Egypt's passionate pan-Arabist leader. In the 1970s it was Palestinian terrorism; in the 1980s Khomeini's Islamic revolution; since the turn of the century, al-Qaeda-style mayhem; and now again revolutionary Iran, newly expansionary and perhaps, some day, armed with nukes.

Some of these imagined threats to the global order have been leftist and nationalist, some reactionary and religious, some radical and violent. Yet all have drawn their mobilising power from a single source. They have all been, in essence, resistance movements, inspired by a seemingly unquenchable popular urge to challenge the dominant perceived injustice of the day, whether it be European colonialism, Zionism, American hegemonism or the grip of local governments charged with selling out to the West.

The most reliable populist cry today remains “resistance”. Sudan's strongman, Omar al-Bashir, blasts the proposed deployment of UN troops in Darfur as the spearhead of a new Western crusade. The Shias and Sunnis in Iraq may be fighting each other for dominance, but the call to “resist” the American occupiers and the weak (though elected) government they sponsor wins passionate followers to both camps. Hizbullah rouses region-wide cheers for bloodying Israel's nose. Clearly, although times have changed, this dynamic has not.

What has changed is that the call to resist now inspires unprecedented enthusiasm, galvanising many disparate political streams at once, secular and nationalist as well as Islamist. The religious element, boosted by the great revival that has swept Muslim societies across the globe, adds a scriptural drumbeat to the call. And lately the impulse to resist has also been strengthened by the failing prestige of traditional countervailing forces—America, the moderate governments in the region and the liberal-minded minority of their citizens.

The most obvious sign of the renewed attraction of resistance is the strengthening of a rejectionist front built around the alliance between Iran and Syria. The bond between these countries' very different regimes—one ostensibly secular and Arab nationalist, but in fact an insular, sectarian dictatorship, the other a Shia theocracy—goes back a quarter-century. It was forged in opposition to their mutual neighbour, Iraq, then under the belligerent fist of Saddam Hussein. But the scope of this odd couple's shared interests widened over time. It came to include such goals as keeping Lebanon under Syria's thumb, undermining peace moves between Israel and the Palestinians so as to pressure Israel into disgorging the Golan Heights, occupied in 1967, and making sure America burned its fingers so badly in Iraq that the superpower would not think of similar adventures elsewhere. The Syrian-Iranian alliance also embraces smaller clients who share these goals, such as the main Islamist parties championing “resistance” in Lebanon and Palestine, Hizbullah (the Party of God) and Hamas (which means “zeal”, but is, revealingly, an Arabic acronym for Islamic Resistance Movement).

Not so long ago, this ungainly partnership was faring poorly. In 1997 Iranians elected a liberal-leaning president, Muhammad Khatami, who seemed intent on shedding his predecessors' confrontational stance. In early 2000, Syria came close to making peace with Israel. (Very close indeed: the actual area of the Golan Heights that remained disputed was a 150-metre-wide strip.) Though hailed as a victory by Hizbullah, Israel's unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon that spring put into question the need for continued resistance by Lebanese guerrillas. At Camp David that summer the Palestinian issue looked set for a resolution that would have rendered quaint Hamas's stated aim of destroying the Jewish state.

The Iraq factor

The past few years have reversed all these trends. The collapse of the Camp David summit and the eruption of a second, far more violent intifada radicalised the Palestinians, with the result that elections in January of this year produced a landslide for Hamas. Disappointed by the failure of American peace brokerage and America's drift, under the Bush administration, into ever more solid support for Israel, Syria reverted to putting pressure on its Israeli adversary by other means, such as supplying huge numbers of rockets to its Lebanese client, Hizbullah, and offering political sanctuary to Hamas. Radical conservatives in Iran, meanwhile, outmanoeuvred fractious liberals to secure the election, in June 2005, of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a hardliner, as president. The supreme leader of Iran's revolution, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who masterminded this coup, quickly proceeded to accelerate the country's nuclear programme.

But it was, above all, American policy that boosted the rejectionist alliance. Seeking targets to retaliate against after September 11th, the Bush administration chose to focus on what it labelled “state sponsors” of terrorism. It also lumped together groups such as Hizbullah and Hamas, whose chief agenda was local and nationalist and did not threaten America, with the global terrorist network of al-Qaeda, which had not only declared war on the superpower and on “Jews and Crusaders”, but had also launched hostilities in the most dramatic fashion conceivable.

In May 2002 the administration added Syria to its “axis of evil” (originally Iran, Iraq and North Korea). This seemed odd at the time, since Syria was providing America with useful counter-terrorism intelligence, and Iran had played a helpful role in the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan. In 2003 America rebuffed a back-channel Iranian effort to start a dialogue, and later that year slapped sanctions on Syria. “We would have been happy to play the game with them,” sighed a Syrian official at the time. “But they wanted all our cards with nothing in return.”

America's invasion of Iraq, meanwhile, produced a cascade of responses that bolstered the resistance front. The intrusion threatened to drive a physical wedge between Iran and Syria, and so reinforced their mutual need. It emboldened Iraq's Kurdish minority, so raising fears of unrest in Syria's and Iran's own oppressed Kurdish regions. Yet it also empowered the long-disenfranchised Shia majority, a natural bridgehead for Iranian influence. And obviously it removed Saddam Hussein's army, the main military obstacle to the projection of that influence farther afield.

Far more important, the invasion massively buttressed the old rejectionist thesis that America's aim was to divide and rule the Muslim world, to control its oil and to impose Western culture. Here, stirring faded memories, was a Christian army overrunning a Muslim land, in pursuit of what George Bush once carelessly called a “crusade” against terrorism. And here, on the ground, was “resistance” in action, visibly humiliating the intruding warriors.

In this potent narrative of victimhood Israel, of course, has been held up as a prime example of Western malevolence. But Israel's recent war with Hizbullah added rich fuel. Hizbullah may have provoked the war, but that counted little to the Arab world's television audiences. The tenacity of Hizbullah fighters in defence of their villages added to the lustre of resistance. America's foot-dragging diplomacy, and the hypocritical aloofness of the “moderate” Arab leaders of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, who clearly hoped privately for Hizbullah's defeat, seemed to substantiate charges of complicity in the killing.

So entrenched now is the idea of an American-led assault on Muslims that virtually any new development is immediately enlisted as further evidence. The fact that terror attacks on Westerners, carried out in the name of Islam, may have raised some hackles goes without mention. So does the fact that countries such as Syria, under the cloak of resistance to the West, continue to promote agendas in Lebanon and elsewhere that have nothing to do with anti-Americanism, but with cementing their own regional influence.

Even high-minded Western initiatives now arouse suspicion. The effort to deploy a tougher peacekeeping force in Darfur, where some 200,000 people have been killed and perhaps 1m displaced by a government-assisted slaughter of Darfuris, is widely seen as a subterfuge. The head of the Egyptian lawyers' union, a group which might be expected to defend the rights of the weak, recently declared that the true target of UN peacekeepers was Egypt: Sudan was simply “the next stop after Iraq on the road to the heart of Cairo”.

The manner of the ceasefire in Lebanon aroused scepticism, too. To many, the insertion of a UN peacekeeping force was aimed at recouping by diplomacy what Israel had lost by fighting. A recent poll found that 84% of Lebanese believe the war was “a premeditated attempt by the United States and Israel to impose a new regional order in the Middle East”. As for the international siege of the Palestinians until they renounce terrorism and accept the right of Israel to exist (see story), the popular perception is that the West, having claimed to support democracy, is now punishing Palestinians for having elected Hamas in a fair vote.

The shadow of Iran

In the popular mind, attempts to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions also mesh neatly with the narrative of Western powers holding back Muslims, or applying double standards. Why can't Iran have nukes if Israel can? Iranian diplomats ably exploit such doubts. So do a growing number of fellow-travellers in regional politics, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Islamist group whose ideological offshoots include Hamas and the main opposition movements in American-allied Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait and Yemen. “Any country should have the right to obtain nuclear technology or even nuclear arms for deterrence, especially if it is being threatened by another nuclear country,” says the Brotherhood's deputy leader, Muhammad Habib.

Such overt support from the most influential Sunni political grouping is telling. Clearly, Iran's vociferous backing of resistance movements has done wonders—outside Iraq—to heal the age-old rift between the two main branches of Islam. Elsewhere, the example of Hizbullah has—among ordinary citizens, at least—largely dispelled looming fears, first voiced by Jordan's King Abdullah, about the emergence of a “Shia crescent” from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf where Iranian mullahs might call upon millions of minority Arab Shias to rise up against Sunni Muslim dominance. Lebanon's Shia resistance has provided what one senior Western diplomat calls a new political paradigm: “an Arab party that actually means what it says and does what it promises.”

ReutersKhamenei with Kalashnikov

Ayatollah Khamenei, brandishing a Kalashnikov and speaking in his fluent classical Arabic in a Friday sermon on October 13th, put the matter more bluntly. Blasting critics of Hizbullah as “cringing hirelings of the Great Satan”, he said that the Iranian-funded militia's victory had made the group so loved that Muslims everywhere felt they had participated in it. The claim is not far-fetched. In far-off Brunei, by the South China Sea, the sultan issued orders for the obligatory performance of special prayers for Israel's defeat. In Egypt, a solidly Sunni country ostensibly allied to America, the two most popular politicians, according to a recent survey, are the Hizbullah chief, Hassan Nasrallah, and President Ahmadinejad of Iran.

Understandably, such evidence of a powerful mood-swing on the Arab “street” dismays and alarms pro-Western Arab leaders. It is not simply that the governments of countries such as Egypt and Jordan, which long ago settled their own problems with Israel, fear renewed public pressure to resume “resistance” (ie, war), which is what the Muslim Brotherhood promises if it comes to power. These American allies are hostile to Hizbullah because the group provides a dangerous example of a potent non-state actor armed and supported by neighbours. They abhor the Syrian regime, blaming it for meddling (and murdering) in Lebanon and for undermining efforts to persuade Hamas to recognise Israel. They are spooked by Hamas's electoral success and the possibility of Islamist encroachment much closer to home. The Muslim Brotherhood made impressive gains in Egypt's parliamentary elections last year, and is expected to do equally well in Jordanian polls scheduled for 2007. Morocco, another American ally, also faces elections next year, with analysts predicting a shoo-in for the Islamist opposition.

America's shaky friends

As for Iran, Egyptians have never forgiven its revolutionary leaders for naming a Tehran street after one of the assassins of their peacemaking president, Anwar Sadat. Lebanon's shaky governing coalition, now in a stand-off with Hizbullah, sees Iran as the main obstacle to a deal under which Hizbullah might focus on being a political party and give up its arms. Gulf states feel a more direct threat, since many of them host American military bases.

The rulers of archly Sunni and conservative Saudi Arabia, in particular, have long viewed Iran as a dangerous rival. In the 1980s they blamed it for stirring unrest among the kingdom's large Shia minority, and in response helped bankroll Saddam Hussein's war against the Islamic Republic. During the recent Israel-Lebanon war, when some Saudi youths made the mistake of sticking posters of the admired Mr Nasrallah on their windscreens, Saudi police promptly arrested them.

The Bush administration has belatedly tried to rally its allies and to bolster such beleaguered figures as the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the prime ministers of Lebanon and Iraq. But the response has been half-hearted. This loose collection of accommodationist governments is finding it hard to gain traction against the resistance ideal. One problem they face is Israel, whose increasingly harsh operations against Palestinian fighters in the West Bank and Gaza have made it more toxic than ever. Israeli and Arab moderates both want to cool temperatures over Palestine and Lebanon and to contain Iran. But Arabs are uneasy at any hint of an alliance with the Jewish state.

America's own refusal to engage directly with the resistance block has polarised and complicated the situation. Discomfort with America grew particularly acute over the Lebanon war, when countries such as Saudi Arabia were forced, by public outrage at Israel's crushing response, to back away from their criticism of Hizbullah for having started the war.

Yet, although it may lack the rejectionists' unity of purpose and their popular appeal, the accommodationist axis of American friends is not entirely toothless. Gulf countries now have plenty of oil cash with which to win goodwill by, for instance, rebuilding Lebanon and shoring up the Palestinian economy. Such largesse could prove persuasive, too, in trying to coax Syria away from its tight embrace of Iran, since Syria's economy relies on oil reserves that are fast running out.

They might also make progress, with those on the Arab street who are still willing to listen, by posing the question of whether ordinary people really want to sacrifice lives and treasure in an endless fight against Israel. The answer of large numbers of Lebanese during the recent war was a resounding no. Raghida Dergham, a columnist for the Saudi-owned daily Al Hayat, writes sarcastically that if what she calls the axis of extremism is resolved on war, “we hope it is ready to liberate Palestine and not exploit the Palestinians as a tool for the ideology and hegemony of others.”

This comment pricks at both Iran and Syria. Few Muslims elsewhere are aware that Mr Khamenei, aside from being supreme leader of the revolution and running the powerful intelligence services, also styles himself Leader of the Islamic World. This suggests a much wider agenda than simple “resistance”. As for Syria, while it champions Islamist liberation movements abroad, mere membership of the Muslim Brotherhood inside the country remains a capital crime.

Arab moderates may be able to convince the Bush administration that the best way to ease tension would be for America itself to be more flexible. That would be wise, because the rejectionist front may not be as intractable as it appears. Syria's president has repeatedly signalled that he would shift his position if only some reward, such as a chance to recover the Golan Heights, were offered. Recent polling among Palestinians shows a similar openness to persuasion.

It is also clear that a powerful sector of Islamist opinion is so fundamentally rejectionist that it will never change. The best the West can do may be to ensure that it does not push more moderates into that camp. It could start by remembering that people choose to “resist” when they feel threatened.

Inside Hezbollah, Big Miscalculations

Militia Leaders Caught Off Guard By Scope of Israel's Response in War

By Anthony Shadid

Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, October 8, 2006; Page A01

BEIRUT -- The meeting on July 12 was tense, tinged with desperation. A few hours earlier, in a brazen raid, Hezbollah guerrillas had infiltrated across the heavily fortified border and captured two Israeli soldiers. Lebanon's prime minister summoned Hussein Khalil, an aide to Hezbollah's leader, to his office at the Serail, the palatial four-story government headquarters of red tile and colonnades in Beirut's downtown.

"What have you done?" Prime Minister Fouad Siniora asked him.

Khalil reassured him, according to an account by two officials briefed by Siniora, one of whom later confirmed it with the prime minister. "It will calm down in 24 to 48 hours."

More technocrat than politician, Siniora was skeptical. He pointed to the Gaza Strip, which Israeli forces had stormed after Palestinian militants abducted a soldier less than three weeks earlier. Israeli warplanes had blasted bridges and Gaza's main power station.

Calmly, Khalil looked at him. "Lebanon is not Gaza," he answered.

What followed was a 33-day war, the most devastating chapter in Lebanon's history since the civil war ended in 1990, as Hezbollah unleashed hundreds of missiles on Israel and the Israeli military shattered Lebanon's infrastructure and invaded its south. Nearly three months later, parts of the country remain a shambles and tens of thousands are still homeless as winter approaches.

In speeches and iconography, Hezbollah has cast the war as a "divine victory." But a reconstruction of the period before and soon after the seizure of the soldiers reveals a series of miscalculations on the part of the 24-year-old movement that defies its carefully cultivated reputation for planning and caution. Hezbollah's leadership sometimes waited days to evacuate the poor, densely populated neighborhood in southern Beirut that is its stronghold. Only as Israeli warplanes began reducing the headquarters to rubble did they realize the scope of what the Israeli military intended. Hezbollah fighters were still planning to train in Iran the very month that the soldiers were seized; Hezbollah leaders in Beirut had assured Lebanese officials of a relatively uneventful summer.

"They were prisoners of their assumptions," said Nizar Abdel-Kader, a retired Lebanese general.

The outcome of the war, still a matter of perceptions, reveals both the strengths and weaknesses of Hezbollah, perhaps the world's best-organized guerrilla group. The movement, even by the admission of its leaders, misjudged the Israeli response. But by virtue of its complex infrastructure and preparations -- years spent digging tunnels, positioning weapons, upgrading its arsenal and carrying out surveillance along the border -- Hezbollah survived.

"We were always prepared because we always knew that the day would come when we have to fight this war," said Hussein Hajj Hassan, a Hezbollah member of parliament. "We also knew that God was with us. He was with us."

Timur Goksel, a former spokesman and adviser to the U.N. peacekeeping force in Lebanon, put it more bluntly: "Hezbollah did not expect this response, but they were ready for it."

The Militia as Deterrent

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On March 2, to great fanfare, leaders from across Lebanon's fractured political landscape began what was hailed as a National Dialogue. It drew together implacable foes: Walid Jumblatt, the chieftain of the Druze sect, sat across from Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's leader; the two regularly traded thinly veiled insults. Michel Aoun, the most popular Christian leader, sat with Saad Hariri, a political novice who derives clout as the son of a former prime minister slain in a car bombing in 2005. For months, they tackled issues that threatened to tear the country apart: relations with Syria, the presence of armed Palestinians and the future of the isolated, pro-Syrian president.

Last on the agenda were Hezbollah's weapons.

Backed by France and the United States, U.N. Resolution 1559 was passed in September 2004. Under it, all militias in Lebanon -- diplomatic phrasing for Hezbollah -- were supposed to disarm. Five months later, Hariri's father, Rafiq, was assassinated, setting in motion events that forced Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon after a 29-year military presence. Deprived of the cover of one of its two main allies -- Iran is the other --Hezbollah was left relatively isolated, and its weapons became an even more pressing issue in a country whose sectarian tension was as pronounced as at any time since the civil war began.

Virtually no one expected the Lebanese army and its meager, outdated arsenal to disarm Hezbollah, which has cultivated broad support among Shiite Muslims through a variety of social services, political representation and a language of empowerment that resonates with the community's long sense of disenfranchisement. Only consensus could reach a solution short of strife.

On June 8, at the parliament building on place de l'Etoile, amid a security blanket that shut downtown, Nasrallah offered his defense at the National Dialogue. Dressed in clerical robes and a black turban, he spoke for more than an hour, participants recalled. Lebanese often remark on Nasrallah's highly organized speaking style; this speech was no different. Point by point, confident and determined but not arrogant, he explained why the militia -- what Hezbollah calls the Islamic resistance -- should retain its arms, from guns to thousands of missiles.

First, Nasrallah said, it provided a cover to the Lebanese state; in any battle with Israel, Hezbollah would suffer the consequences of Israeli reprisals, not the rest of the country. Second, Hezbollah had created a deterrent -- in the words of one participant, "a balance of fear and terror." Third, he said, the Lebanese army alone was not enough to protect a border that Israeli routinely violates by air and sometimes by sea.

In that session and the next on June 29, Hezbollah's critics at the dialogue questioned, sometimes sharply, the supposed balance of terror.

"I can reach Haifa and beyond Haifa," Nasrallah was quoted as answering them, according to Marwan Hamadeh, the telecommunications minister and a critic of Hezbollah who took part in the dialogue. Israel would not risk a Hezbollah missile attack, Nasrallah added, which could strike its petrochemical industry and the northern third of the country, including some of its most populated regions.

"He considered his potential threat as his deterrent," Hamadeh said, "that Israel would not escalate."

At the time, much of the talk was hypothetical. Participants were put at ease by what they took as Nasrallah's reassurance that nothing would disrupt the crucial tourist season, one of the Mediterranean country's lone patches of economic vitality. "He said this summer would be a quiet summer," Hamadeh recalled. "He said all the actions they would do would be reminders of their presence."

But almost as a footnote in Nasrallah's speech was a reiteration of a promise he had made many times before: the need to capture Israeli soldiers as leverage to win the release of three Lebanese prisoners. Hezbollah had tried before, in November 2005.

"He didn't say it to take approval," said Boutros Harb, a member of parliament, who sat three seats away from Nasrallah. Harb flicked his wrist in a flippant gesture. "He mentioned it like you'd write in the margins of a text."

"It didn't draw the attention of anyone at all."

Goksel, the former spokesman for the U.N. force, has watched Hezbollah's evolution since its incarnation in the wake of Israel's devastating 1982 invasion of Lebanon. He recalled an incident in 2001-02, more than a year after the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon. In two locales near the border, Khiam in the east and on the road to Naqoura on the coast, Hezbollah brought out excavation equipment and trucks, hauling away dirt. Men hung around, looking suspicious. And over as many as six months, in plain sight, tunnels were dug into the limestone of rugged southern Lebanon.

"We were meant to see these things," he said. "They were not making any effort to stop us looking."

At the time, he said he now believes, Hezbollah, farther from view, was digging other tunnels around Labouna, Aita al-Shaab and Maroun al-Ras, all along the Israeli border, that they employed for ambush and cover in combat to sometimes devastating effect during this summer's war.

"Looking back, they really fooled us on that one," Goksel added.

While Hezbollah's missiles were supposed to deter an all-out Israeli assault, the movement, by its own admission, also began preparing for a ground war almost from the day Israeli forces left in May 2000. Most of the militiamen were drawn from their villages and kept their weapons at home. Abdel-Kader said the town or village became the unit of defense, where other arms were stashed. The towns, in turn, were organized into three or four sectors, with a regional command.

"All the weapons were in the right place," he said. "They didn't need to mobilize."

Elias Hanna, another retired general, said the arsenal was updated over the past two years. In addition to rockets, anti-tank weapons were ferried through Syria; their use required at least some degree of training and their sophistication surprised Israeli forces.

As important to Hezbollah was surveillance. Goksel recalled fighters sometimes sitting for three months on the border "and they would write about everything that moves." He added, "They are the most patient watchers in the world."

On July 11, Goksel and seven students from a university class he was teaching stood on the Qasmiya Bridge, which spans the Litani River, the natural border of southern Lebanon. "I said, 'Look at this bridge. If anything happens, this is the first target.' " He wasn't worried, though. It was summer, and towns were filled with vacationing Shiite expatriates, many of them Hezbollah supporters. "I've never been so wrong in my life," he said.

The cross-border raid was carried out at 9:05 a.m. the next day. Soon after, Israeli warplanes struck the Qasmiya Bridge.

Three months later, Hezbollah's timing remains puzzling.

"They don't attempt adventures. They're not adventurous types," Goksel said. In every operation, they would project "what it means for Shiites, what it means for the party, what it means for Lebanon, what it means for Syria."

He paused. "One wonders if that process collapsed somehow," he said.

Hezbollah officials have hewed to the line Nasrallah delivered that night: They had long telegraphed such an operation, and the opportunity arose. Nasrallah has acknowledged that they did not anticipate the Israeli response, though Hezbollah's officials say they believe the Israelis were planning to carry out such a campaign by this October. In statement after statement, Nasrallah has dismissed charges by critics that Iran and Syria, both under international pressure, encouraged or even ordered the ambush.

Others offer a domestic rationale. The last session of the National Dialogue was set for July 25, nearly two weeks after the war began. Hamadeh suggested that Hezbollah could return to the table "with the proof that the deterrence philosophy would work." But even he admits, "The precipitation has something of a mystery around it."

Underrating a Threat

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Two hours after the raid, Hassan, a reticent chemistry professor and one of the longest-serving members of parliament from Hezbollah, was sitting in a meeting for the committee on public works. His cellphone rang. "I smiled, hung up the phone and told the members of parliament in the room, 'Congratulations, our hostages will be coming home soon.' " Some smiled with him; others sat expressionless.

In another room, Nawwar Sahli, a Hezbollah representative who sends his children to an American-affiliated high school, sat in a parliamentary meeting on computerizing Lebanon's ministries. He, too, broke the news to colleagues.

"God help us," he recalled one of them responding.

Sahli went on with his day, getting an MRI exam at 3 p.m. for a pain in his neck. (He picked up the results after the war.) He listened to Nasrallah's speech, then went to his office at night to deal with paperwork in the Hezbollah-controlled southern suburbs known as the Dahiya. He ignored warnings by Hezbollah security not to stay late. From Khalifah, a local fast-food restaurant that was later bombed, he ordered a chicken fajita sandwich and Philly steak sandwich, then went for an interview on a Lebanese television station.

"I said that we shouldn't exaggerate, that Israel will just retaliate a bit, bomb a couple of targets and that would be the end of it," he recalled. "When I stayed in the office, I wasn't trying to be a hero. I seriously didn't think there was a threat."

Near the airport, Amin Sherri, another Hezbollah representative, sat with his wife, four children and three grandchildren.

"My family asked me if we should evacuate the house," he remembered. "I told them, 'Absolutely not.' " On that first day and early into the war, Hezbollah's political arm was relatively lax about security. Officials said they at times slept in other homes and changed their cars, but little else. Sherri kept his cellphone on throughout; Sahli said he was only occasionally advised to shut it off and remove its SIM card. Only by the third day, after Israeli forces had struck the airport road, Nasrallah's offices, Hezbollah's television and radio stations and several bridges, was the Dahiya fully evacuated, military officials said.

It was on that day, Sahli said, that he began getting worried.

But, he added, "I kept telling myself that no war lasts forever."

A Fighter's Call to Duty

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Along the rolling hills of southern Lebanon that face the Israeli border, Shadi Hani Saad was getting ready for breakfast in the village of Aita al-Shaab on July 12. He was the oldest son of Zeinab Hammoud and her favorite. But when he was as young as 8, with southern Lebanon still occupied, she remembered him asking her, "Will Hezbollah still be there when I grow up?"

Tall and broad-shouldered, Saad joined the Hezbollah youth movement in 2000 after the Israeli withdrawal. As a 14-year-old, he bypassed the lower grades of the Mahdi Scouts -- the Blossoms, the Cubs and the Sailors -- and had become Infantry. Within two years, he had achieved the highest rank, a Rover, and then carried out his first operation as a militiaman.

"They didn't tell us where," she said.

He trained once or twice a week. This summer, he was groomed for even more responsibility; his mother said Hezbollah was about to send him for six months of military training in Iran.

The trip never happened. A little after 9 a.m. on July 12, after Saad had gotten out of the shower, another fighter showed up at her door and whispered something to him. Saad grabbed his M-16 rifle, along with ammunition he kept at the house, and walked away in a T-shirt and jeans. "He told me, 'I might return, I might not return,' " his mother recalled.

Years of surveillance had given Hezbollah an idea of where the Israeli forces might cross the border, Goksel said. Of 24 gates, they entered four, and at each, Hezbollah had guessed right with its fortifications and defenses, he said.

Aita al-Shaab was one. "They were waiting for them," he said.

In addition, Lebanese analysts say Israeli hesitation in the early part of the war allowed Hezbollah, caught off guard, time to prepare its defenses. By the time Israeli troops entered in force, more than a week later, Hezbollah's men were in place in villages like Aita al-Shaab. Saad's mother said he called her the first day, then the second, using a land line they deemed more secure. On the third day, he planned to come home to visit and asked her to cook dinner.

That was the last time they spoke. Israeli raids escalated that day, and the Israeli military warned residents of border towns to flee. In a blue 1986 Mercedes, she left with her four other children for Tyre, then north to the Chouf Mountains. After they fled, Saad called an uncle. "Where's my family?" he asked. Nearly three weeks later, on a Thursday night, he was killed in an airstrike.

"What God wants to leave me, he'll leave," his mother said. "What he wants to take, he'll take."

She sat at her home, with a picture of Nasrallah on the wall. A school picture of Saad hung nearby in a black frame. A sprawling poster, with a purple tint, pictured Saad in military uniform and declared him a martyred crusader. Another picture showed all nine of the Hezbollah fighters who died in the village, among the 30 or so who stayed -- by local legend, against Nasrallah's wishes -- to face Israeli troops.

Her blue eyes glimmered with tears, and she recalled a conversation before the war. As they sat at home, Saad had asked that when he died he be buried among martyrs. "What do you mean martyrs?" she shot back, half-joking. "Why do you tell me this kind of stuff?"

She shook her head. "Who knew there would be a war?"

Special correspondent Alia Ibrahim contributed to this report.