From Martin Kramer
As Hezbollah’s official funeral of Imad Mughniyah unfolded today—Hezbollah’s leader eulogizied him over a coffin decked in Hezbollah’s flag—it is useful to recall the party’s denial of his very existence over all these many years. Mention of his name to Hezbollah officials would draw a blank stare or blanket denial. “Hezbollah professes no knowledge of the man,” the New York Times reported in 2002. A journalist who interviewed a top Hezbollah official and parliamentary deputy, Abdullah Kassir, once asked him if he knew Mughniyah. “Kassir flashed a blistering look and responded curtly, ‘I have no answer.'”
Hezbollah’s leader, Hasan Nasrallah, followed a double tack: he would defend “freedom fighter” Mughniyah, but not acknowledge him. “The American accusations against Mughnieh are mere accusations,” he was quoted as saying. “Can they provide evidence to condemn Imad Mughnieh? They launch accusations as if they are given facts.” But when pressed, Nasrallah “refused to reveal whether Mughnieh has a role in Hizbullah.” Of course.
Another American academic wrote this precious paragraph in her book on Hezbollah:
For its part, Hezbollah has consistently denied the existence of any relationship with Mughniyeh, direct or indirect. As a matter of record, from the time of the party’s inception, all Hezbollah officials have emphatically denied ever knowing a person by the name of Imad Mughniyeh. The apparent avoidance of this issue is clear in an answer to a recent question about the party’s relationship with Mughniyeh. The response of a Hezbollah senior official was that Mughniyeh had never held a position in their organization, and was, in Deputy Secretary General Naim al-Qassim’s words, ‘only a name’.
The same author then spends a few embarrassing pages agonizing over this question: “Was Mughniyeh a member of Hezbollah?”
Now that Nasrallah’s eulogy has placed Mughniyah officially in the pantheon of Hezbollah’s greatest martyrs (with Abbas al-Musawi and Raghib Harb), this question looks absurd. That it ever arose is a testament to the discipline of Hezbollah in sticking to lies that serve its interests. One of its paramount interests is concealing from scrutiny that apparatus of terror that Mughniyah spent his life building. Hiding the clandestine branch protects it from Hezbollah’s enemies, and makes it easier to sell the movement to useful idiots in the West, who insist that the movement hasn’t done any terror in years, and maybe never did any at all. They produce statements of such mind-boggling gullibility that one can easily imagine Mughniyah chuckling to himself on reading them. The “literature” is rife with claims that Mughniyah didn’t really belong to Hezbollah, or he answered to Iran, or he had his own agenda—anything to dissociate his terrorist acts from the party.
The truth is (and always has been) a simple one. Hezbollah is many things, but it has always included within it a clandestine terrorist branch, and it probably always will. Indeed, Nasrallah’s threat in his eulogy—to commence an “open war” with Israel outside the Israel-Lebanon theater—alludes to the “global reach” that Mughniyah helped to build.
If Hezbollah were absolutely determined to distance itself from the terror tag, it wouldn’t have accorded an official send-off to a most-wanted terrorist. Nor would its leader have stood over his coffin and threatened “open war.” Assassinations of terrorists can boomerang, and so might this one. But it’s already had the one merit of exposing the core of Hezbollah that lies deep beneath the schools, the hospitals, and all the other gimmicks the party uses to get support and pass in polite company. On page one of the International Herald Tribune today, there are photographs of the aftermath of the Beirut bombing of the U.S. Marines barracks (1983), the hijacked TWA Flight 847 (1985), and the ruins of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia (1996). That’s Hezbollah too, and that was Imad Mughniyah—and they were one.
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Martin Kramer asks some excellent questions of existing Hezbollah scholarship—questions that sent me scrambling to my bookshelf to check how other scholars handled the figure of Imad Mughniyah in their books on Hezbollah. (The answers are mixed.) I wonder if scholars or journalists currently working on Hezbollah will now ask the organization about the apparent contradiction in the way Hezbollah publicly distanced themselves from Mughniyah in recent years yet embraced him in death.
It is worth remembering that very little is definitively known about the life and career of Imad Mughniyah. Perhaps now that he is dead, an interview might surface in Hezbollah media such as al-Manar or al-Intiqad that reveals more. The degree to which Mughniyah has been publicly claimed by Hezbollah gives us hope the organization will be more transparent about the role he once played. In the meantime, Marc Sirois makes a point in today’s edition of the Daily Star worth noting: “…virtually everything that is thought to be known about Mughniyeh—including, now, his death itself—is suspect.”
Andrew Exum is a member of MESH.
Tony Badran also has a good rundown on the gullibility of scholars when it comes to Mughniyah at his Across the Bay blog. What he shows is that few of those writing on Hezbollah bothered to search beyond what the party told them about Mughniyah—and even came to internalize the party line on him.
In recent days, I’ve learned that while Mughniyah was indeed a shadowy figure, there were quite a lot of people who knew him from his early days when he was a member of Fatah, and who sporadically knew what he was up to afterward. That’s not to say that they would have spoken to researchers, or even that they had much to say; but it was not especially difficult for scholars to dig deeper and discover that Mughniyah at least existed and was not the non-entity that some “experts” made him out to be.
This is emblematic of a wider problem. Hezbollah has been very adept at turning contacts with the party into a supposedly valuable favor. Scholars, particularly in the West, who can claim to have a Hezbollah contact are already regarded as “special” for having penetrated a closed society, so that readers are less inclined to judge critically the merits of what the scholars got out of Hezbollah. The same goes for book editors. Since Hezbollah denied knowing Mughniyah, few were willing to say “This is rubbish, I’m going to push further.” The mere fact of getting that denial was regarded as an achievement—one the authors were not about to jeopardize by calling Hezbollah liars.
My friend Mohamad Bazzi, in an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations, seems to have fallen into this trap. On the CFR site, he told Bernard Gwertzman the following about Mughniyah: “The reports that list him as an active senior leader of Hezbollah at the time of his death are mistaken. He might have had some contact with some people in Hezbollah leadership but he wasn’t giving out orders and he wasn’t in the position to do that.”
How does Bazzi know this? These are not details that Hezbollah would share with journalists, unless it is to begin a process of disinformation. And how does this square with Hezbollah’s own statements and behavior to the contrary since the assassination? I can understand the logic of downplaying the importance of someone important who was murdered, as a means of telling the perpetrators that they did less damage than they think. But what’s the logic of affirming the importance of someone like Mughniyah if he is unimportant? Doesn’t it just confirm that Hezbollah suffered a terrible blow?
My feeling is that Bazzi, like others, perhaps internalized the denials he heard from Hezbollah before the assassination, and has yet to adjust his argument to the aftermath. Writers and scholars quite naturally don’t like to admit that they’ve believed lies. But Hezbollah’s response to Mughniyah’s murder surely imposes a reassessment.
But if downplaying Mughniyah’s importance is not a case of scholars wanting to remove egg from their face, then we could be seeing something different: a situation where writers and scholars are consciously or unconsciously perpetuating their initial belief that Mughniyah was always little more than an American, Israeli, or European creation, therefore that he was another excuse to justify further Western hegemony over the Arabs.
Since so much Middle Eastern commentary and scholarship tends to be filtered into that template, it will be worth watching how writers and scholars comment on the further revelations in the Mughniyah case—assuming any are believable.
Michael Young is opinion page editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.
Over the last two decades, I have invested an immense effort in mapping the links among Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Al-Qods Force, Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, and the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. While the “open” evidence on Mughniyah is relatively limited, there’s enough to build a coherent picture.
He was indisputably involved in several terror cases beginning with the 1985 hijacking of TWA 847 (his fingerprints were found on board). Giandomenico Picco, the UN envoy who finally closed the Western hostage file in 1991, affirmed that Mughniyah was principal interlocutor in the negotiations. I assisted the Argentinian Supreme Court investigation into the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires that resulted in the indictment of several Iranians as well as Mughniyah. The evidence left no doubt about Mughniyah’s extensive involvement.
Over the years I’ve also interviewed several intelligence officers and investigators from France, the United States, Germany and other countries where Mughniyah was active, and they unanimously agreed that the threat posed by Mughniyah remained very real, extraordinarily dangerous and complex. Just two weeks ago I conducted such an interview at a European intelligence agency, and they continued to regard Mughniyah as a serious security threat. Martin Kramer is right in affirming that Hezbollah has maintained a clandestine terror capability revolving around Mughniyah, as a node to other terror channels within Iran’s intelligence achitecture.
Hezbollah’s denial of Mughniyah was evidence for its fragile double identity. I perfectly understand why they opted for plausible deniability. Why should they have admitted his existence or role in terrorism? Less understandable are the many academics who allowed themselves to be misled about Hezbollah’s clandestine wing and its use by Iran and, at times, Syria. Some of them were blinded by going “native,” or they never really got close enough to Hezbollah to grasp the centrality of the clandestine wing and the crucial role of Mughniyah, the Hamadi clan and others. They preferred to believe that Hezbollah could not possibly harbor a secret structure involved in terrorism, when its above-the-board operations—social, political and military—were so effective and (according to some) so noble and legitimate. And so Hezbollah was allowed to have its cake and eat it too.
Hezbollah’s present embrace of Mughniyah as a great commander and hero has vindicated experts such as myself, who were right to underscore Mughniyah’s significance. We were not surprised to see Nasrallah standing over Mughniyah’s coffin and vowing vengeance. The same cannot be said for Amal Saad-Ghorayeb and others, who downplayed or altogether ignored the most senior Hezbollah commander.
Magnus Ranstorp is Research Director of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College, and the author of Hizb’allah in Lebanon.