Relief Agencies Find Hezbollah Hard to Avoid
By ROBERT F. WORTH and HASSAN M. FATTAH
KHIAM, Lebanon, Aug. 22 — When Mercy Corps and other Western aid agencies reached this devastated village on the front line of the battle between Israel and Hezbollah with food and medicine, they quickly discovered they had a big problem: the United States.
Like all other international relief agencies here that receive financing from the American government, Mercy Corps is barred from giving out money or aid through Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group that is considered a terrorist organization by the United States. But as with all the most demolished areas in southern Lebanon, where whole villages have been flattened by Israeli bombs and there is no food, water or electricity, this village is the domain of Hezbollah — and little seems to bypass the group.
That fact is nettlesome for the United States, not merely because it does not want Hezbollah to be strengthened even further after its war with Israel, but because it is eager to find and support a viable alternative to the militant group.
That will not be easy. Hezbollah has been the fastest and, without a doubt, most effective organization doling out aid to the shattered towns and villages of southern Lebanon. Aid groups like Mercy Corps — which generally work through local intermediaries — have sometimes struggled to find other ways of helping, and even then, they cannot be sure their aid is not going through Hezbollah.
“You can make a separation between what we do and Hezbollah,” said Khiam’s deputy mayor, Muhammed Abdullah, 45, who is organizing the local efforts, including donations of food and water from Mercy. “But of course there is coordination.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/23/world/middleeast/23lebanon.html?ei=5088&en=6fb918d7a8600de9&ex=1313985600&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=printWhat a bind the Bushists have put the US in! If we're serious about helping to rebuild Lebanon, we have no choice but to work with Hezbollah. But of course, the Bushists are not serious about rebuilding Lebanon. They're only serious about trying to cram their influence into a place where they're less and less wanted. And that is only going to make it harder for the next administration to make any headway in building relationships and momentum toward peace in the region.
It's funny how the Bushists try to paint the Democrats as isolationists. In fact, isolationism is a refusal to cooperate with other nations and a stubborn insistence on playing by one's own rules, whether or not they work for the rest of the world. Bushist foreign policy is a peculiar animal indeed, a passive-aggressive isolationism-in-the-world. If it were a person, it would need serious psychiatric help, but as mere foreign policy, it will just continue destructively dysfunctioning, until the voters put a stop to it. If we're lucky...
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