May 09, 2008
Hezbollah Takes West Beirut
A violent storm pounded Beirut late last night, with flashes of lightning, peals of thunder, and torrential rain. I woke up this morning to continued, if light, rain on my balcony, and for a brief bleary moment entertained the idea that the militia men running around West Beirut had all dissolved and washed away in the rain.
Not quite. My friends are still largely pinned down in Hamra, the college town neighborhood just south of the American University of Beirut. (update: it sounds like most of them have gotten out now during the lull.) Fighting appears to have died down for now - until just recently there was still heavy fire, both machine gun and RPGs, around Walid Jumblatt's and Saad Hariri's compounds in the area, but everything is pretty quiet now. No word on what Hariri's status is, but Jumblatt has declared he's staying put. But it's quiet.
That's because Hezbollah and its allies have basically won. Hezbollah outguns and by most accounts outnumbers the Lebanese Army, and it demonstrably dominates the other partisan militias as well. There's likely going to be a period of reassessment, some more declarations from all sides, and then we'll see. The government has pretty much two options. Give in and resign, or fight back.
So far, there really hasn't been that much fighting. The last statistic I saw was eleven dead. As a colleague in my office said, "If I unleashed the amount of firepower we've seen in the past couple days I would kill more people than that by accident."
That indicates that all the sides are still not quite ready to declare open war. The Lebanese Army has not engaged the militias - they're glorified hall monitors at the moment. Jumblatt's PSP (the Druze militia/party, and rumored to be one of the most heavily armed pro-government groups, along with the Christian Lebanese Forces) has fought an orderly retreat and evacuation, rather than standing and fighting. Tariq Jedideh, the Sunni stronghold right near the Hezbollah controlled southern suburbs, is still under Sunni militia control and basically untouched. And the Christian areas are also untouched, despite long standing deep divisions between pro- and anti-government parties.
Hezbollah has played this very wisely. They've spent the last two years laying the groundwork for this - establishing communication networks, expanding into new areas, growing their forces. In December 2006 they began a sit-in around downtown, and from there they've been able to cut many of the major roads linking the East and West over the past couple days. Even in their recent moves, they've positioned themselves and then dared the government to move them. If the government sends in the army against them, they can then say they're defending themselves.
Of course, that's a thin argument now, but it's becoming increasingly irrelevant.
So now, we see what the government will do. Does Hezbollah and its allies control Lebanon? Or do we have a civil war?
Posted by ben at May 9, 2008 07:40 AM