Are you telling us that they didn’t know this beforehand?
Tarek Mitri, who represented Lebanon at the United Nations in New York during the conflict… [said that ] the government realized it needed to integrate Hizbullah forces into the Lebanese army in order to be a sovereign state with a monopoly of arms… But he warned only political means would achieve that end, and the alternative – coercion – would lead the country back into civil war.
Actually he’s kind of mistaken. A sovereign state classically enforces a monopoly on legitimate force, not a monopoly on arms. A monopoly on arms is generally a sign that what you’re dealing with is a sovereign totalitarian state (which would make this a suggestive slip, given the context of post-WWII Arab nation-states… maybe they just haven’t heard the news that there are other kinds of sovereign states too). Actually, that’s an unfair cheap shot in the context of Lebanon, which actually has had a democracy. We take it back. And besides, we can’t even be sure that this was Mitri’s mistake, since YNet’s English articles seem to be translated using an old Yiddish-English dictionary, a set of six-sided dice, and dried tea leaves. So we’ll assume that he knew what he was talking about, and move on to the next step. Having made this stunning realization, Mr. Culture Minister, how do you intend to achieve Lebanon’s dream of being a sovereign state yielding a monopoly on legitimate force?
Even so, the scope for Beirut to put pressure on Hizbullah was limited, said Mitri, because “Hizbullah is not fully under the control of Lebanese legal authorities.” Asked whether the government would seek to disarm Hizbullah, as Israel has demanded, he said there would “Not be a coercive disarmament” of the group. Instead, the government would seek to engage Hizbullah in a “Political process.”
You mean a political process like giving them 14 seats in the parliament and 2 seats in the cabinet? Seriously, integration into and legitimacy through the Lebanese government is a great incentive to prove to people that their contributions to “restoring honor” have not been appreciated.
