Why does the United Kingdom refuse to label the Lebanese Hezbollah as a unitary terrorist group?
Put simply, because it fears that doing so would reduce the U.K.’s influence in the Middle East, antagonize Iran, and invite a possible terrorist attack.
This issue is newly relevant in that on Thursday, the business committee of the British Parliament will debate whether to proscribe Hezbollah’s political wing as a terrorist organization. At present, only the group’s military wing is regarded by the British government as a terrorist structure. But as Matthew Levitt of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy aptly notes, Parliament’s considerations shouldn’t be complicated: There is abundant evidence proving that Hezbollah – political and military divisions united – is a unitary organization.
So, what’s really going on here? Why is the U.K. so reluctant to recognize these terrorists for what they are?
Well, for a few reasons.
First off, the British like to maintain flexible relationships in the Middle East. Seeking to balance their longstanding relations with the Sunni monarchies alongside a desire to maintain stable relations with actors in unstable states like Lebanon (Hezbollah’s home base), the U.K. wants to have its political cake and eat it too. While the U.K. believes that this gives them influence to earn influence in favor of British security and economic interests, it comes with costs.
Specifically, the U.K.’s toleration of Hezbollah’s terrorist plotting against close U.K. allies Israel and the U.S., and the group’s supporting role in killing British soldiers in southern Iraq during the 2003-2009 British ground deployment there.
Yet, there’s also a broader strategic context to Britain’s judgement on Hezbollah.
Unlike the U.S. government, with the major exception of its significant support for the invasion of Afghanistan and the post-war effort to secure that nation, the British government has been traditionally reluctant to militarily challenge state-sponsors of terrorism. Their concern has been that to do so would be to introduce an escalatory struggle that would eventually pose excessive costs for British interests. In this case, that to take a hard line on Hezbollah would be to incur the wrath of Hezbollah’s chief sponsor and orchestrator, Iran.
In the context of the Iran nuclear deal and Britain’s belief that the deal offers the best means of balancing security and economic interests with economic stability, the preference for not upsetting Hezbollah has become even stronger.
Finally, there’s the terrorist angle. While Britain is well-prepared and well-resourced to deal with a terrorist attack, the current situation in which Hezbollah avoids priority targeting of U.K. interests is one that Downing Street and the Foreign Office would like to maintain. When it comes to Hezbollah, this dynamic is further enabled by the quiet but very longstanding sympathy of many Foreign Office officials to regard Israel as an unjust state somewhat deserving of the violence it incurs.
Regardless, Britain’s current security assessment on Hezbollah is defined by short-term delusion.
Ultimately, foreign policy realism demands the assessment of inputs and risks balanced with interests and stability. And in the case of Hezbollah, any realist assessment of British strategic and moral interests would surely demand that the group be proscribed a terror group.
At the margin, Britain can retain its influence and security and also identify Hezbollah for what it is. It can do so because Iran and Hezbollah need Britain on the sidelines more than they need it cooperating with the U.S. and Israel at the harder edges of counterterrorism. Hezbollah desperately wants to retain its access to lucrative smuggling and influencing networks in Europe, but if the SIS (Britain’s CIA) starts actively obstructing those efforts, the group has much to lose.
There’s a little more context to consider here.
After all, Britain’s approach would be bad enough if Hezbollah was solely focused on its own Lebanese and regional actions. Unfortunately, the group is also a purveyor of other tentacle groups such as Kata’ib Hezbollah, which work to undercut democratic stability. Correspondingly, by enabling Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Middle East, Britain enables Hezbollah’s violent sectarian agenda across the region. This threatens multi-sectarian stability in Iraq, Yemen, and Syria and fuels terrorist groups as mechanisms for sectarian protection.
Parliament should wake up and do what’s right.
Label the Lebanese Hezbollah for what it is, a terrorist group through and through.
