If the first edition of Hezbollah: A Short History had been published this year, instead of in 2007, Norton might well have avoided most of these mistakes. He isn’t a dishonest writer, after all; he simply got some things wrong. In the new afterword to the paperback edition, he clears up some of his errors and concludes with a far more realistic tone than before. “The threat of a new war cannot be ignored,” he writes on the last page of the afterword, “even if neither Israel nor Hezbollah seem particularly anxious for it to erupt.” Perhaps more important, Norton warns that “Should the United States or Israel, or both, attack Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities with the goal of thwarting Iran’s drive to build nuclear weapons, it is possible that Hezbollah would retaliate with its rocket arsenal against Israel.” Gone, it appears, are his assumptions that Hezbollah is on a path to reasonableness and moderation. For Norton, the last two years have apparently been a reality check.

As they have been for most of the rest of us, too. To give Norton the benefit of the doubt, I must confess that, in the past, I have made some of the same errors in judgment regarding Hezbollah. Although the Lebanese scene is not foreign to me, I also thought Israel’s withdrawal from that country should have ended the problem—though I wasn’t writing professionally about Hezbollah at the time. I also was caught off guard by the 2006 war, but so were most Lebanese and most Israelis. Even Hassan Nasrallah himself said he was surprised by the intensity of the conflagration he ignited. In the end, Norton’s errors are the same errors most of us made.

Why were so many people mistaken about Hezbollah? The truth is that it is easy to underestimate the organization. For a variety of reasons, Hezbollah often looks more reasonable than it actually is. For starters, it really is more disciplined and restrained than al-Qaida, the Taliban, Hamas, and other militant Islamic groups in the Middle East. It really does compete in elections and join in parliamentary coalitions. And while it sometimes uses force to get its way, at other times it protests nonviolently—something that would not even occur to the likes of Osama Bin Laden or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Moreover, its sophisticated media relations department employs spokesmen who know exactly what liberal-minded Westerners want to hear. If you squint hard enough at Hezbollah, it can sometimes look like a somewhat cruder version of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), a group of former Islamists who really have joined the democratic mainstream.

During the time I lived in Beirut and since, I’ve spoken with numerous Hezbollah officials, and I know from experience that they use sanitized, politically correct language when speaking to Westerners, studiously avoiding the hysterical and bigoted rhetoric typical of the party’s Al Manar television network and newspapers. They’re much more adept at this than they used to be, and Norton, after listening to them for years, seems to have taken much of this talk at face value.

But Hezbollah is not just the terrorist group, political party, and social-services organization Norton so ably documents. It is also a de factooverseas branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Nor does the organization make much of an attempt to hide this fact. Its original manifesto states, “We are… the vanguard of which was made victorious by God in Iran.… We obey the orders of one leader, wise and just, that of our tutor and faqih (jurist) who fulfills all the necessary conditions: Ruhollah Musawi Khomeini. God save him!” Posters of Khomeini and Iran’s current Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, are still plastered all over Hezbollah-controlled territory along the border with Israel and the suburbs south of Beirut, territory that is effectively an Iranian satellite state inside Lebanon. This is Hezbollah’s most defining characteristic, and it is the number-one reason the group cannot be adequately compared to other terrorist organizations or political parties.

If Hezbollah actually did resemble Israel or Lebanon’s March 14 coalition, Norton’s predictions would likely have turned out to be accurate. Unfortunately, the only equivalency that actually conforms to reality is between Hezbollah and its patron, the Islamic Republic of Iran. This, in turn, leads to the depressing conclusion that despite the confident analyses of Norton and many others, Hezbollah is not likely to change unless the government in Iran changes first. As long as people who, like Norton, make a living by writing on these issues miss this crucial point, they will continue to underestimate and misunderstand Hezbollah, its intentions, and the calamity it is capable of causing in the future.