Going the Distance

A longtime CIA official says Hezbollah wins the battle with Israel simply by surviving.

Editor's Note: Hot Zone Senior Producer Robert Padavick spoke with Yahoo! News consultant Milt Bearden about the shifting developments in

Has Hezbollah emerged as a victor of sorts after three weeks of fighting with Israel?

Milt Bearden says yes. And he's in a good position to address the question. Now retired, he serves on the board of directors of Conflicts Forum, a U.K.-based nongovernmental organization that works to foster dialogue between Islamist groups and the West. In that role he says he has been in talks with Hezbollah officials about the group's transition to a more politically-focused party, both before and after the 2005 Lebanese elections in which Hezbollah won 14 parliament seats nationwide.

Milt Bearden

Hezbollah, Bearden says, has begun to look a bit like an overmatched boxer who has stood up to 15 rounds of pounding and made it to the closing bell without being knocked out — like the movie character Rocky.

"In the movie," Bearden says, "Rocky lost. But nobody believes that. All you have to do is go the distance. And the reality here is that, I think you're going to see Hezbollah has gone the distance."

Bearden dismisses the idea of knocking out Hezbollah through military activity. "The concept of dismantling or eliminating Hezbollah is fatally flawed from the very start. Hezbollah is an organic part of that 40 percent of the Lebanese population that is Shia."

And with Hezbollah still standing, he says, a new power dynamic has emerged. "There's nothing to compare with the Israeli Defense Force in the Mideast," he says, but Hezbollah's persistence through weeks of air strikes has shown the limits of Israel's strength. "We talk about 20 Hezbollah fighters killed today, or whatever the new numbers are. That's nothing. There are 500 that will pick up the weapons behind them now."

"In the Middle East," Bearden says, "the winners and losers are never who you might think they are."

I asked Bearden about Hezbollah's possible role at the bargaining table.

"They've got a lot of very smart people. These are not a bunch of wild-eyed fanatics," he says.

"But they've always been willing to try to broaden the dialogue quietly. In the last year I've been in many hours of meetings with some of them, to where I can guarantee you that they would have welcomed a quiet dialogue with the United States, and they have repeatedly said they have no great quarrel with the United States."

But in the West, Hezbollah is widely labeled a terrorist organization. It has been responsible for numerous attacks against Israel, including the incident that sparked the latest conflict, as well as the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, which left 241 servicemen dead.

As Israel ramps up its ground offensive against Hezbollah amid faltering diplomatic efforts for a resolution to the crisis, I also discussed with Bearden the implications of a rapidly evolving landscape in the Mideast. Below are excerpts of our conversation.

PADAVICK: Why do you think the Bush administration is so resistant to joining the international chorus here, and calling for an immediate cease-fire as a first step, and then working from there?

Fierce ground fighting and Israeli
air strikes destroyed Bint Jbail

BEARDEN: Well I think they're going to have to get closer to that. But I think they still believe what (Israeli Prime Minister) Olmert is telling them, "Just give us two more days, five more days, 10 more days ... and we'll have this thing cleared up and we'll be okay."

PADAVICK: To push that point, to what extent do you think that is backfiring, or at least creating a unity on the Arab street that we haven't seen before? You have even al-Qaida seemingly joining the cause here and uniting behind Hezbollah.

BEARDEN: The costs will get down into the grass with this, on cooperation with everything, from counterterrorism to energy. The U.S. used to have the red flag. In every other conflict, it would go for a while, and if we waved the red flag, I guarantee you, the thing stopped.

But now we're the ones that are in lockstep [with Israel] ... and this is not even good for Israel. It must come as a shock to the cooler heads in Israel that we weren't there as some sort of restraint. And giving that up can't be good for Israel, because now they have exposed one thing that they never wanted to expose, and that is that invincible military prowess is a myth, no matter whether it's Israel or the U.S.

PADAVICK: A very important issue obviously is how

BEARDEN: They haven't been hurt at all. First off, Hezbollah is the current darling of everybody in the Middle East, and even the Sunni-Shia thing is put aside from that, mainly because of what they've accomplished by not being destroyed. And if you step back and look at a larger piece of the Middle East, the Iranians must wake up every morning and say, "What's the catch?"

Think about it. They've got a Shia south of

PADAVICK: How do you see this affecting the broad swath of U.S. Middle East policy?

BEARDEN: I think we've probably given up any possible role as honest broker, even though there's no one to replace us ... The concept of a tsunami of democracy (in the Middle East) is done for. I think that's ended, particularly when the world realizes that the first two democratically elected entities — Hamas and Hezbollah — that we have been providing the weaponry to take them down.

The push for democracy in countries like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia is off the table now. They can say, "look, we have our own problems just like you see in Lebanon, and we can't let [Islamic parties] win an election because we'd have the same thing that's happened there, or happened in Gaza, and you know how bad that is, so give us a little slack here."

Email Story IM Story

RECOMMEND THIS STORY

Recommend It:

Not at All Somewhat Moderately Highly Very Highly

Average (Not Rated)

ALSO ON YAHOO!