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Alliances of Convenience: What Mughniyah’s Death Reminds Us

Nicholas M. Guariglia - 4/1/2008

You could almost picture the scene: an eloquent but exclusive reception in downtown Damascus to mark the anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution. The lounge is full of intelligentsia and dignitaries, as one Imad Mughniyah shares stories and cocktails with the man of the hour, the host of the evening, Mr. Musavi –– the new Iranian ambassador to Syria. After a few drinks, and perhaps a few laughs, Mughniyah decides to call it an early night and leaves. At around 10:35p.m. he enters his silver Mitsubishi Pajero, where, hours prior during the dinner party, someone had replaced his driver’s headrest with another containing a tiny high-explosive charge. The detonation goes off, and with it Mughniyah’s head.

For those uncertain, Mughniayh, a Lebanese national, had been one of the world’s most wanted individuals for nearly three decades. Mughniayh, not Hassan Nasrallah, was the principal leader of Hezbollah, and he is today credited by his subordinates for architecting the capture of two Israeli soldiers (and orchestrating the subsequent war against Israel in 2006).

He was a man of multiple faces and many aliases, and the atrocities for which he had been indicted –– the Khobar Towers, the AMIA building in Argentina, the Marine barracks, the torture and slaying of U.S. bureaucrats abroad, etc. –– were as extensive and diverse as the employers for which he provided his services. His chieftains ranged from Arafat to Assad, from Khomeini to bin Laden himself. In terms of international butchery, he out-performed and out-carnaged the other infamous killers of the ‘80s, Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas. Mughniayh was, in short, the prototype mercenary… a cut-throat’s cut-throat.

So his assassination is significant in and of itself. But it should also remind our intelligence and diplomatic agencies a valuable lesson, one in which both seem to have neglected for some time. The lesson is this: their Mideast counterparts are far more cunning than they.

The State Department bureaucracy is orientated to help construct a world where the United States has less adversaries –– and understandably so. (That seems to be the jist of things, at least.) Yet in order to concoct this world, our spooks and jaw-boning envoys often fall prey to cognitive dissonance, overlooking the triangulations and collaborations of those they shake hands with and those that plot our demolition. In such a world, otherwise good men like Michael Scheuer or Richard Clarke allow themselves to be awed by the English accents and knotted ties of their sheikh equivalents –– some of whom are knee-deep in violent and sadistic activity.

Take, for example, Ambassador Hojatoleslam Musavi and his festivities with Mughniayh. Uncanny, isn’t it? “No, no,” we lie to ourselves, “just how can Messr. Musavi exchange pleasantries with our attaché in passing on weekdays, and conspire with neck-slicing, building-toppling Mughniayh on weekends? It just doesn’t add up.”

At the core of the problem is a kind of contemptible arrogance where our intelligence agencies affirm their own infallibility, and where our diplomatic bureaus fail to concede that some things, alas, fall outside their own purview. Imagine any other profession, say anesthesiology, making that same bold claim about itself.

Here’s a test case for this self-indulgent diplomatic vanity: How often have you heard it said that we must distinguish the “nuances” and differentiate between the hooligans of Hezbollah from more sinister opponents like al Qaida? It needn’t matter if we would prefer fewer antagonists. Ms. Rice has little say whether or not someone considers us to be their enemy.

For with every perceived extended olive branch by the Iranian and Syrian despots, unwelcome empiricism smacks us right in the face. Captured documents tell much (whatever measly percentage we’ve actually translated), and testimony from people like Moayad Ahmed Yasseen shed much light. Yasseen, a former high-ranking colonel in Saddam’s army, explains to us that a fleeing Hussein ordered him and ex-Ba’athist insurgents to cooperate with Iranian Revolutionary Guard insurrectionists and to seek assistance from the Syrians.

All of this seemingly defies conventional wisdom. Haven’t we been told that a Ba’athist Iraq or Syria would never parlay with Islamists; that Shi’a Iran would never collude with Sunni jihadists; that theocrats and autocrats would not conspire together; that Wahhabis would not cooperate with more secular nihilists, and on, and on? This refrain is drum-beated into the skulls of our intel. guys all day, every day. The natural aversion to stereotyping somehow transmogrifies into an imprudent hesitancy to avoid “lumping” all of the “those people” together.

Nonsense. The life and history of the Middle East’s social butterfly, Imad Mughniayh, teaches us many things about the region. We may have a foe –– and one up to the challenge –– when and where we do not want one; our “religious” enemies often transcend theology or sect in order to gain grandeur from irreligious “apostate” sponsors; remaining ideologically pure does not trump the cold desire to kill heretics; there are shady alliances of convenience not only between ideological rivals, but between states and organizations even where there is current animosity amongst them.

These are unpleasant things to be taught. But some continue to consider it a point against those who draw conclusions which are not such as to make one feel happy. Until there is a counterculture across our intelligence and diplomatic communities, our friends at the CIA and State Department will not be able to ease their collective minds of the illusions they may possess, the false hopes they may hold, and the duress they visibly labor under.