CRESCENT ROLLING:

Shi'ite revival roiling Mideast (David R. Sands, 8/20/06, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Even before the Lebanon clash, events across the Muslim world had inspired debate over a new "Shi'ite Crescent."

Following U.S.-backed elections, Iraq's Shi'ite majority dominates the government in Baghdad for the first time in a millennium, while Shi'ite militias battle largely Sunni insurgents for control of the country. Iran's Shi'ite Islamic Republic has seen two regional rivals -- the Sunni fundamentalist Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam's Sunni-dominated secular dictatorship in Iraq -- crushed by U.S.-led military campaigns, while its Hezbollah ally is the strongest and best-armed force in Lebanon.

"Freed from the menace of the Taliban in Afghanistan and of Saddam in Iraq, Iran is riding the crest of the wave of Shi'ite revival," according to Mr. Nasr, "aggressively pursuing nuclear power and demanding international recognition of its interests."

Shi'ite Muslim communities in Sunni-dominated Arab states such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain -- which has a Shi'ite-majority population -- have recently begun to demand greater rights and economic opportunity.

The world's 120 million Shi'ites represent about 10 percent of Muslims worldwide, and are a majority of the population in just a handful of countries, including Iran (90 percent), Iraq (60 percent), Azerbaijan (75 percent) and Bahrain (75 percent).

Shi'ites make up an estimated 45 percent of Lebanon's population, and are smaller but still significant minorities in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the Persian Gulf states.

Shi'ite Muslims, with a religious tradition that did not focus on state power, have long complained of marginalization at the hands of Sunnis, even in countries such as Iraq, where Sunni Muslims were a minority.

Some of the most open fears of rising Shi'ite power, often linked to fears of a rising Iran, have come from the Arab world's Sunni leaders.

Who did you think we were liberating?

MORE:
THIRD FOUNDATION (Brothers Judd, 8/08/06)
With Iran's help, Hezbollah is a force to be reckoned with (Carol Rosenberg, 8/20/06, McClatchy Newspapers)

"This was a real army, a command army, well-trained and well-equipped," said political scientist Gerald Steinberg, the director of the Conflict Management and Negotiation program at Israel's Bar Ilan University. The Palestinian Hamas movement, he said, "will want it more than they ever wanted it before, and they'll have to work harder than ever to get it. Everybody is going to be much more aware and much more willing to let Israel take action precisely to prevent a situation where Gaza turns into south Lebanon."

To be sure, Israel knew much about Hezbollah's military capabilities. Israeli intelligence had detected a 2003 shipment of long-range, Iranian-made Zelzal-2 missiles, which arrived at the Damascus airport in flights returning to Syria after delivering blankets and other emergency relief supplies to earthquake victims in Iran. Israeli officials said they didn't reveal the shipment at the time because they were afraid of tipping off Hezbollah and its allies to their sources.

Israeli military officers also were aware that Hezbollah was constructing a network of bunkers and tunnels on Israel's northern border. They knew as well that Hezbollah fighters were regularly shuttling between Lebanon's Bekaa Valley and Iran for advanced training.

But the depth of Hezbollah's development only became clear once Israel attacked its installations in Lebanon in what some initially envisioned as a one- or two-week campaign. After slightly more than four weeks, Israel agreed to a cease-fire that left Hezbollah intact as the strongest political and military force in Lebanon.

The Israeli invasion showed that Hezbollah, with Iran's help, had taken hundreds of small steps to create a powerhouse. Among them:

• It acquired thousands of Russian-made anti-tank missiles from Syria and Iran, then trained its forces to use them. The missiles were startlingly effective not just against Israeli tanks but also against houses and other buildings where Israeli troops sought shelter.

• It set up a top-down, stealthy military structure that tightly controls operations and is led by a covert chief of staff whose name isn't known to the Israelis or at least isn't made public.

• It established a combat-ready organization: a logistics branch to handle the delivery of food, fuel and munitions; a black-clad special-forces unit to conduct daring combat missions and abduct Israeli soldiers; navy commandos; and an infantry that trains for complex operations and supports the other units.

• It set up a reserve system that consists of former full-time fighters who can be called back to service.

It also created an intelligence unit that recruited a Bedouin spy inside the Israeli army and an air wing that sent drones on test runs over Israel in 2004 and 2005 on flight paths similar to those that its Katyusha rockets followed this summer.

It has Shiite fighters who speak Hebrew. This makes some Israeli soldiers suspect that they were being overheard.

"It's a well-organized army, unified, well-equipped — a big Shiite army," said Iftach Shapira, an analyst for The Middle East Military Balance, a publication of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv. "It happened slowly. We knew this army was being built, but I think we didn't appreciate just how strong it was."

Israelis think that Iran is intimately involved in training Hezbollah, which was founded largely at the behest of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Muslim cleric who toppled the shah of Iran in 1978 and died in 1989.

At the time of Hezbollah's beginnings, Israel occupied southern Lebanon and the United States had sent peacekeeping forces in an effort to separate warring Lebanese sides in a civil war.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 20, 2006 8:46 AM