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Sharon’s most enduring legacy? Hezbollah

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As the world remembers former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who died today at age 85, I write this morning for The New Republic that his most enduring legacy is the emergence of Hezbollah, the Shiite Lebanese militia: LebanonISrel Flag Icon

By occupying southern Lebanon, a region that even today remains less economically developed than the rest of the country, Israel inadvertently pushed Lebanon’s Shiite population toward the radical leadership that Hezbollah embodied. Had Israel not done so, Nabih Berri, a relative moderate who’s served as the speaker of Lebanon’s parliament since 1992, might today be the dominant spokesman for the Shiite Lebanese population instead of Nasrallah, and Berri’s Amal Movement might be the dominant Shiite Lebanese political force, not Hezbollah. As Labor Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin succinctly put it in the years before his own assassination, Israel’s 1982 occupation “let the genie out of the bottle.” Israel’s invasion spawned an 18-year occupation that allowed Hezbollah to transcend its role representing the Shiite Lebanese community into a force fighting for the sovereignty of the Lebanese state, cheered by Israel’s enemies from Damascus to Tehran.

It’s not an argument that is necessarily pro-Sharon or anti-Sharon, though he was a polarizing figure in life and promises to continue to be so in death.  But I argue that Sharon, even in a coma, outlived most of the accomplishments of his premiership, and his military exploits (or crimes) will fade, leaving his decision in 1982 as Israel’s defense minister to invade Lebanon — and its direct influence on empowering Hezbollah — as the most significant, if unintentional, ‘accomplishment’ of his career.  After all, Hezbollah today remains a key player in regional politics — it is a vital actor in internal Lebanese affairs and the Syrian civil war, and it significantly affects  Palestinian relations with Israel and Iran-Israeli relations.

Photo credit to AP/Hussein Malla.

Venezuela

Venezuela’s economy is tumbling despite oil prices over $100/barrel

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I wrote a piece for The New Republic earlier today about the state of the Venezuelan economy and the difficult issues that await the next president, which for now looks like it will be Nicolás Maduro following Sunday’s landmark presidential election.Venezuela Flag Icon

I argued that although some of the economic reforms that Maduro could implement are relatively simple, he may well lack the charisma, the political capital (both within and outside the chavista camp) and the funds to pull Venezuela back from the brink of two devaluations in 2013, the threat of even higher double-digit inflation, increasing reliance on imports for basic staples, a crumbling oil infrastructure, an atrophied private sector and difficulty accessing international — and even Chinese — finance:

It’s now up to Maduro to sort all of this out in the background of a legitimacy crisis. Economically speaking, there are several options that could help. Venezuela could claw back some of its oil revenues by reducing subsidies to Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean basin. He could reverse the trend of ad hoc expropriations under Chávez that left the public sector bloated with bureaucrats, the private sector fearful, and the non-oil industry atrophied. He could direct more capital to be re-invested into PDVSA, the state-owned oil company, to boost oil production that’s fallen by up to a third in the past 15 years, and to develop refining capacity, especially in light of the ultra heavy crude oil that’s increasingly being drilled from the interior’s Orinoco Belt. Venezuelans believe cheap gas is virtually a constitutionally protected right, and an attempt to eliminate it pursuant to an IMF loan package in 1989 is widely seen as the catalyst for the deadly Caracazo riots later that year, but Maduro could gingerly begin to reduce the domestic subsidy that keeps Venezuela’s gasoline the cheapest in the world at about six cents per gallon.