{"id":176,"date":"2008-02-13T07:56:00","date_gmt":"2008-02-13T11:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/mesh\/2008\/02\/imad_mughniyah_is_dead\/"},"modified":"2008-02-26T15:02:09","modified_gmt":"2008-02-26T19:02:09","slug":"imad_mughniyah_is_dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/2008\/02\/imad_mughniyah_is_dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Imad Mughniyah is dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Andrew Exum<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Imad Mughniyah<\/a> is dead, killed<\/a> in Damascus by a car bomb at the age of 45. Mughniyah was believed to have been Hezbollah\u2019s chief of military operations, and his assassination marks the first time a major figure in the movement has been killed since secretary-general Abbas Musawi in 1992\u2014an assassination which brought the current secretary-general, Hasan Nasrallah, to power.<\/p>\n

For many, Mughniyah was a reviled figure, wanted by both Israel and the United States for his alleged role in numerous attacks on American and Israeli targets\u2014including the truck-bombing of the U.S. Marine Corps barracks in Beirut in 1983 and the attack on the Israeli embassy in Argentina in 1992. (Formally, the FBI most-wanted<\/a> him for his role in the 1985 hijacking of an American airliner to Beirut and the murder of a U.S. Navy diver on board.) For researchers such as myself, Mughniyah was of great interest because he represented a constant figure in Hezbollah throughout its evolution from an Iranian-backed Lebanese militia in the 1980s to a nationalist insurgent group in the 1990s and finally to its current incarnation as the most powerful political party in Lebanon\u2014both in terms of weapons and popular support.<\/p>\n

The timing of the assassination, from the perspective of Lebanese of all political stripes, could not have been worse. Tomorrow, after all, is the anniversary<\/a> of the assassination of a great figure on the other side of Lebanon’s current political divide, former prime minister Rafik Hariri. One hopes that calm heads will prevail and that any ostentatious rallies in Hariri\u2019s honor are postponed. At last year\u2019s mass rally, ugly sectarian chants broke out, and surely given Beirut\u2019s current tension, such chants could easily devolve into open violence.<\/p>\n

This past week, Lebanon\u2019s leaders once again irresponsibly postponed the election of a new president. So the assassination of Imad Mughniyah has taken place within a political environment that is, still, on a razor\u2019s edge. If this year\u2019s assassination and the memory of another lead Lebanon down a short path to civil war, Lebanon\u2019s sectarian leaders will have only themselves to blame.<\/p>\n

Comments limited to MESH members and invitees.<\/em><\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Andrew Exum Imad Mughniyah is dead, killed in Damascus by a car bomb at the age of 45. Mughniyah was believed to have been Hezbollah\u2019s chief of military operations, and his assassination marks the first time a major figure in the movement has been killed since secretary-general Abbas Musawi in 1992\u2014an assassination which brought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1620,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2259,2306,2290,2256,2239,2250,2257,2418,2386,2219],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-andrew-exum","category-barry-rubin","category-david-schenker","category-hezbollah","category-israel","category-jon-alterman","category-lebanon","category-michael-young","category-syria","category-terrorism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1620"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/mesh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}