5,000 Hezbollah soldiers held off what was widely considered one of the best militaries in the world. Understanding how they did that is important (and, actually, I’ve written that article elsewhere).

States within states, governments outside governments arise where there are voids, yes. That’s something I’ve pointed out in other articles, to the point where regular readers at the Agonist probably get nauseated when I bring it up.

But there are a lot of places where governments are weak, as you point out. In those places these sorts of organizations can take root. And once they do, they become resilient enough to survive years of occupation or assault by a first world army.

That’s interesting. What’s especially interesting is that what happened between Israel and Hezbollah wasn’t classic guerilla warfare. Hezbollah held them off on the ground. They held Israeli advances down to a crawl and made them pay for them. If they had lost that essentially conventional war, then they would have gone to guerilla warfare and rejoined the population.

And government is withdrawing in many places. It isn’t just Middle Eastern governments that aren’t doing their jobs.

If you won’t do the jobs of government, then eventually someone else will step in to do them. And the people who fill those voids generally wind up with a fair bit of power. The bigger the void and the better they fill it, the more power.

I’ve got me a feeling that the US is going to recognize some of these in the future. There are some that already more or less exist in a proto-state. Can you name one of them?

Thanks for this Ian. I wish you’d do some more Middle Eastern history. I know it’s all over the place on-line, but accounts and lessons, history is slanted. I like your style of writing, and you’re really interesting enough to cruise through the material. You’d be a great one to teach that stuff.

ooops,
i hope you get back to read this.
hehe
Thanks!

Iran funds Hezbollah. This is partly a proxy war. I’m not exactly sure what the point of the post is, but if the point is that resisters are ingenious in their resistance, that is often true. I’m not sure exactly what the point is in giving Hezbollah ‘credit’ for their ingenuity. But if you think of Hezbollah as some kind of ragtag group of MacGuyvers, that’s pretty naive.

Is this some kind of lefty romanticizing of the violent because we don’t like who they are violent against thing? Or what? Guerilla chic? This is a proxy war and unfortunately, Iran is not all that chic. Although they do wear a lot of black.

Anyway, widespread generalizations cannot be made about states vs. shadow armies from the case of Lebanon. Lebanon is a very weak government. But of course, many of these countries are. I’d put down the successful rise of extremist groups to the weakness of the state, not to some sort of new innovation in these groups. They are not dissimilar to the mafia in weak or corrupt countries. It’s not that hard to subvert the state in those cases. Or maybe that’s your point?

The conclusion Vietnam taught is “let’s not fight these types of wars”.

But that’s not the military’s decision to make.

For example, Palestinians who have lived on family lands for generations have been kicked off because they could not produce a proper “deed” for their property- and this in a country that changed administrative hands and governing “laws” a number of times in the past 200 years (Turks, British, Israel, among others).

Bob in HI