Winning Hearts and Minds: What We Need to Learn from Hezbollah

In the wake of the most recent Israeli invasion, bombings and blockade of Lebanon some 18,000 homes were destroyed or damaged. Hezbollah has come forward in response to this destruction (and the resulting dislocation of families) and, ahead of the Lebanese government, begun reconstruction. They have provided as much as $12,000 (U.S. Dollars) to each family whose home was damaged and brought in their own workers and equipment to begin clearing rubble and rebuilding homes. In many areas Hezbollah stepped up to the plate well ahead of the local authorities, and in others they simply (and quietly, but not so quietly as to be unrecognized) provided money to local authorities for clean-up and reconstruction projects to begin.
Israel had one success in this war - They made Hezbollah stronger by giving them the opportunity to develop even solider foundations within Lebanon and with the Lebanese people. Hezbollah, in an obvious show of un-diminished strength after Israel’s attempt to defeat them, has stepped up as being not only better able to take care of the people than the government, but more willing to do so. 18,000 homes, 18,000 families the members of which may have been completely politically uninvolved previously, and in one fell swoop Hezbollah can win them over.
This is a fantastic success at winning hearts and minds.
(Source 1, Source 2 )

This is where the bar has been set – and set by, effectively, our enemy. This is the challenge that the United States and pro-Western governments, have to meet in the Middle East to be successful. We have to be better for the people of the countries we are operating in than those we are trying to defeat.
Military might only goes so far. It destroys our enemies alright, but it also destroys portions of the lives of those to whom we are trying to bring stability and democracy and we will never have stability or democracy anyplace where there are blast holes in walls, over-crowded hospitals with poor levels of care, burnt out grocery stores and destroyed schools.
People may lament what little they have, but when that little bit they have is destroyed during military actions, and then never rebuilt by those there to make things better whose side looks more appealing? The "oppressor" or the "free’er"? When what little you have is threatened by civil war because your entire country is destabilized by these failures enough for radical elements of opposing religions to become entrenched in a newly disenfranchised portion of the populace? How would you feel? And how would your children, as they grow and come of age during these events, feel?
Create a generation in Iraq (and in Afghanistan) that has been provided with the very best (to Western standards) in secular education, while their parents are working steady jobs (no matter their religious affiliation) and always able to put food on the table, and Iraq (and Afghanistan) will be new nations.

The greatest ally the forces of Radical Wahabiist Islam have is Ignorance. Their greatest strength is that from a position of ignorance the people of the nations afflicted with their blight see the forces of Radical Islam as being positive forces, a better alternative than Western forces and ideals.
We must erase ignorance. We must replace it with education and a living standard of affluence. If we cannot do that, the current generation will follow in the footsteps of their fathers, and their younger brothers will follow them, and these children’s own children will then follow them and we will continue to fight these wars we have been fighting for the last thousand years.

It is well and good to meet the enemy on the field of battle, and to slay him. But we have an enemy that is not an army, not an element of a nation state, but an element of the people among whom he lives. You cannot win over a people, you cannot stabilize a region of people, by killing their neighbor and telling them it was good for them. You have to make it good for them.
When you kill their neighbor, you give them schools, and food, and clothes, and the necessary talismans of affluence. Use his crops to feed their children. Build a school or a hospital upon his lands. Employ them in the construction of the schools and hospitals.
When another of their neighbors then tries to destroy these things that you have not only given them, but involved them in creating for themselves? They will welcome you to destroy him – and they will want to join you in it.
It is not good enough to kill the enemy – Every acre of land we soak with blood, must be tilled into crops, or used to build schools and hospitals for the people of the area. And every threat to those efforts should be met and dealt with the utmost cruelty and brutality.

If we are right (and in the face of Radical Islam I truly believe we are) then we must act it, and not be afraid to wage war without equivocation, to deliver violence swiftly, rapidly, and unmercifully to those who stand against us.
But we must also be unafraid (and willing to spend the money) to give the children of our enemy, and the children of his neighbors, an education we would give our own children with the courage to provide it ourselves if necessary to keep it secular and free of the ills and evils of the regions past. If we are right, we must employ the men and women who do not stand against us, and we must help them to rebuild their homes, lives and families.
Our goal should not only be to defeat our enemy in the conventional sense, but to replace him in his own house and do far better than he ever did at keeping it. Give his neighbors something to lose, and let him show himself for being the one who wants to take all that away from them. Our primary goal, our focus, should not be the wholesale slaughter of their warriors, but the fulfilling of the basic needs of the people we desire to save in order to make our enemy and their ideology irrelevant. The force necessary to do that, to protect the good works we establish in the wake of our first-line offensives, the violence and the extent of that violence, should be enough to slake anyone’s desire for retribution or war, if for no other reason than not leaving alive any of the enemy who would wish to continue.

I fear however that we do not have the constitution, the resolve, or the power within our own government to stand together, free of partisanship political jockeying and games playing for increased revenues, to do that. The current state of our government, our nation and our military, is so poor that our hope of success seems quite dim. I truly (and regretfully) believe we wasted our opportunity for this kind of massive action, and now several years down the line are too spent, too worn, too divided amongst ourselves (and those divisions too set into their own trenches) to ever achieve this kind of success.
We’re going to be at this a very, very, long time.