Word: hizballah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...current trajectory risked creating an Iraq in which the "the government is not in control of the state." Iran sheltered most of the leadership of the current Iraqi government, and Shi'ite politicians maintain that relationship. So, some Iranian influence in Iraq is inevitable. But the presence of a Hizballah-style armed group, more powerful in some areas than the national government and receiving weapons, training and guidance from Iran, is a threat of a different order. It creates a more dangerous battle for U.S. troops in the short term, and would greatly strengthen Iran's position in Iraq...
...patron, Michel Aoun, a charismatic and enigmatic former general who heads the country's largest Christian political party, the Free Patriotic Movement. Aoun's popularity confounds any attempt to read Lebanon as a battlefield in a "clash of civilizations," because he and his party are openly allied with Hizballah, the Iran-backed Shi'ite Muslim political party and anti-Israeli militia that leads the opposition...
...What could Lebanese Christians possibly have in common with Hizballah, the Islamist resistance movement? Perhaps it is the fact that Aoun's Christian supporters and Hizballah's rank and file are motivated by a shared animus towards Lebanon's political elite, a handful of families such as the Gemayel, whose progeny resurface in government after government. In fact, many of the supporters of the current government are civil war-era militia leaders, who accommodated themselves rather nicely to the years of Syrian occupation, but who have now emerged wearing business suits and talking U.S.-friendly language about democracy and independence...
...course, neither Aoun nor Hizballah is a poster child for democratic civil society. Aoun, as head of the Lebanese army in the early 1990s, launched a series of disastrous civil conflicts, while Hizballah sparked a pointless war with Israel last summer that resulted in the deaths of almost 2,000 Lebanese, many of them children. Still, both popular movements tap into the general resentment of average people who have watched as a relatively small number of Lebanese - well represented in the anti-Syria ruling coalition - have cashed in on the post civil-war reconstruction of the country...
...rhetoric of resistance in the absence of peace. With outdated Soviet-era equipment, Syria's conventional army is no match Israel's top-of-the-line U.S. military technology. But the Syrians say they are changing their tactics and learning from the kind of asymmetrical guerrilla war that Hizballah waged so effectively against Israel in last summer's Lebanon confrontation...