The British government has reversed its policy of shunning the militant Lebanese group Hezbollah. This has some observers wondering how the decision will effect US policy. The World's Aaron Schachter reports.
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LISA MULLINS: In other news today, Britain says it's willing to talk to Hezbollah. That's a reversal of recent policy. Hezbollah is a militant Islamic group in Lebanon. It's backed by Syria and Iran, and its on Britain's list of banned organizations. Nevertheless, the British government has authorized what it terms “carefully selected contacts†with Hezbollah's political wing. And Hezbollah has welcomed the move. From Beirut, The World's Aaron Schachter reports that there may be implications for Washington.
AARON SCHACHTER: Before Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, before Hamas, there was Hezbollah. The US says Hezbollah militants carried out the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983. 241 US servicemen died in the attack. In addition, Hezbollah has been blamed for kidnapping westerners throughout the 1980s and for launching hundreds of strikes across the border into Israel. Washington still considers Hezbollah a terrorist group. And that's why State Department Spokesman Gordon Duguid says the US does not intend to follow Britain's lead.
GORDON DUGUID: Our stated position on Hezbollah has been consistent. Our position on Hezbollah is not going to change until we see changes on the part of Hezbollah.
SCHACHTER: But Hezbollah's position within Lebanon has changed. It's now an integral part of Lebanese politics. Hezbollah controls the minority block in parliament, and its coalition could win elections outright this June. Rami Khoury heads the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut. He says the official statements aside, American policy makers and pundits view the British gesture as a test case.
KHOURY: The lesson of the last 8 years is enormous threats, pressures and sanctions by the Americans and Israelis and Europeans against Syria and Iran and Hezbollah and Hamas have failed – absolutely and totally failed, which is why the Americans and the British sensibly, I think, are trying a different approach.
SCHACHTER: Khoury says most diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic understand that you need to talk with people you don't like, whether it's countries like Syria and Iran or non-state actors like Hamas and Hezbollah. The only holdout, he says, is Israel. But he expects it too will eventually come around. The question now is whether the American public would agree that there's a distinction between the military and political wings of an organization. The British public did when it accepted Sinn Fein as a negotiating partner in Northern Ireland, despite the group's ties to the Irish Republican Army. Clay Ramsey of WorldPublicOpinion.org says the American public can most likely be swayed as well, despite the hardline stance of the previous US administration.
RAMSEY: Two things are different here: one is Hezbollah is a coalition member of a standing, recognized national government. The other is simply that the British government has made a decision. And those two factors are going to influence public opinion at least into more of a wait-and-see mode, I suspect, than might be initially assumed.
SCHACHTER: But American conservatives are going to be a tough sell. Oliver North is with the Fox News Channel. North, best known for his role in the Iran Contra affair, denounced the idea that the US might speak with either Hamas or Hezbollah.
NORTH: The new White House is the White House of “make nice.†And so we want everybody to go out there and love us. And what we're going to do is see if somehow just by being new and different, offering hope and change, we're going to change the mindsets of people who have vowed to die trying to kill us. That hasn't changed anything in the Iranian talk, or what they're doing to build nuclear weapons. It hasn't changed Hezbollah and it hasn't changed Hamas.
SCHACHTER: But shunning the people America doesn't like over the past eight years hasn't done much either. That's the argument Britain's Foreign Secretary has made for engaging Hezbollah, and it's an argument Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seems to be making in many of her foreign visits – though she hasn't gone quite so far as to suggest opening diplomatic ties with Hamas or Hezbollah. For The World, I'm Aaron Schachter, in Beirut.
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