Qifa Nabki
Hezbollah
Aoun and the Future
A couple of years ago, shortly before the end of President Michel Sleiman’s term in office, I wrote an essay asking why Lebanon needed a President, given the relative powerlessness of the position. Here’s the payoff paragraph: Twenty-five years after Ta’if inaugurated Lebanon’s Second Republic and nearly nine years after the Syrian departure gave us a new, mysterious set … Continue reading
The Hezbollah Misconnection
A couple weekends ago, The New York Times Magazine ran a story (“The Hezbollah Connection“) about the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon and the decade-long investigation into the killing of Rafik Hariri. Written by Ronen Bergman, an Israeli journalist and military analyst, it rehearses a narrative that has become familiar to Tribunal watchers and has appeared in various … Continue reading
Fearful Symmetry
Below is a translated excerpt from the most recent speech by Hezbollah Secretary-General Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah. His discussion of the timing and planning of Hezbollah’s retaliation for Israel’s attack in Quneitra a couple weeks ago was absorbed, characteristically, with the question of symbolism. Nasrallah’s postmortem glosses on his party’s operations often assume this pose of the charismatic schoolmaster, drawing the attention of … Continue reading
A Puzzling Escalation in the Golan
The Syrian vortex has made strange bedfellows over the past year. The rise of the Islamic State had the effect of briefly putting everyone else on the same team, a federation of American fighter pilots, Hizbullah commandos, Syrian Army rank-and-file, and Iranian military strategists. Israel contributed the odd play, but mostly communicated its support for Team World in the language … Continue reading
Revisiting the Dystopia
Last year around this time, I spent an afternoon imagining what a worst-case scenario would look like for Lebanon in 2014. Here’s an excerpt to jog your memory: “As the year draws to a close, Lebanon exists in a state of low-intensity civil war. The Army has begun to fracture along sectarian lines. Saudi-bought French weaponry begins … Continue reading
Qifa Nabki 
And the people say…