Archive for Hezbollah

An Indispensable Heap

Posted by: Ion | July 10th, 2007 · 2:54 PM

(image: SnappedShot)

Remember those 34 days of Israel’s “disproportionate response” to Hezbollah in Lebanon last year? Well, it seems Hez still hasn’t gotten round to cleaning the place up in their areas of the country. Perhaps their lavish Syrian and Iranian funding is earmarked “for demolition purposes only.”

Indeed, they’ve been so neglectful of reconstruction that SnappedShot suspects they’re keeping the place in disrepair as a media propaganda tool. Seeming to confirm the thought, the press sure does like to tour the ferro-concrete pile frequently enough. For the cameras, the heap has become a monument of sorts, that Hezbollah uses as a press parade for the alleged sadism of the IDF.

But while I can see the utility of the heap, I’m skeptical. That’s because even if they did rebuild the place to exacting Levant construction standards *cough*, I’m not sure I’d be able to tell the difference.

For instance, here is Dahieh in April 2006, two months before the Israeli bombing campaign (not that you’d know):

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Checkmate: Hezbollah Positioned in South America

Posted by: Jason | May 9th, 2007 · 10:48 AM

(image: uta)

What do you get when you take Islamic radicalism, an organization sworn to the West’s destruction, a nearby base in South America, a lack of will in America to fight, and a southern border without walls or troops? Answer: Checkmate.

According to militia members, U.S. officials, and police agencies across the South American continent, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militia has taken root in South America, boasting a well-financed force of Islamic radicals ready to prove their hatred for the west.

From the divided borders of Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina, known as the Tri-border, Hezbollah is recruiting Muslims who immigrated during the 1948 and 1985 Lebanese civil wars with Israel. The operation funnels large sums of money to militia leaders in the Middle East, financing training camps, propaganda operations, and bomb attacks, according to U.S. and South American officials.

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The Empty Battlefield is Full

Posted by: Ion | April 19th, 2007 · 5:32 PM

Lebbeus Woods’ redesigned ROK watchtower on the Korean DMZ.

In 1599, the whole of the Spanish army invaded Westphalia merely for dry winter quarters. Already acutely conscious of the erosion and diminution of her power, the Holy Roman Empire –propped up now more by foreign interests than her constituent estates loyalty– mounted an massive attack to drive out the foreigners. The move failed spectacularly, in mass mutinies and small action defeats.

It was this demonstrative weakness of central government, rather than the Spanish invasion itself, which induced the creation of the territorial militias beneath petty crowns in the Empire. The same militias which would turn Germany in an anarchic, depopulating corpse in the Thirty Years War. The sudden visibility of the hollowness of the Empire, not its possible or even desired collapse, served the princes who came to find interests in self-justifying perpetual war, than in the expanded governance of their realms.

John Robb, writing with characteristic lucidity about more contemporary expressions of this dynamic, observed this week that the objective of modern insurgencies is not to replace states, but to eviscerate them. To delegitimize and weaken them to such an extent that as a “hollow state,” they are simultaneously incapable of suppressing the insurgency, yet remaining sufficiently consolidated that they exist to oppose. By such trials, the insurgent can further delegitimize and indebt the government to worried foreign powers, thus creating self-sustaining rationales for militias, internal independence and perpetual war.

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