Defending Lebanon Or Israel?

In December, the Lebanese Web site Qifa Nabki featured a satirical "news story" discussing U.S. arms transfers to Lebanon. According to the article, the U.S. gifted "cutting edge" military material to the Lebanese Armed Forces that included camouflage-print bandages and, more menacingly, the USS Tadpole, a decommissioned World War II vessel that "until recently had been used for target practice by U.S. Navy gunners in Norfolk."

Humor aside, the article highlights a serious and increasingly prevalent critique of U.S. military assistance. Since the 2005 Cedar Revolution and the balloting that brought to power the only pro-West democratically elected government in the Arab world, Lebanon received nearly $500 million worth of military material from Washington. Yet many in Lebanon are concerned that U.S. weaponry enables the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to defend the state neither from Israel nor from local al-Qaida affiliates.



This line of thinking has some prominent and diverse proponents. In 2008, leader of the Shiite militia Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah complained that U.S. support for Israel prevented the transfer of sophisticated weapons to the LAF; in 2009, Minister of Defense Elias Murr implicitly criticized Washington for not providing fighter jets. "If we had aircraft," during the 2007 fighting against Islamist militants, "we would not have lost one martyr from the army," he said. This past December, from the White House podium, Lebanese President Michel Suleiman asked for increases in U.S. military assistance to finally enable the LAF to "defend Lebanon from enemy attacks and confront terrorism."

U.S. officials deny Lebanon is being given short shrift, but the perception articulated by Nasrallah and Sulieman is partly correct and stems from a fundamental Lebanese misreading of U.S. policy priorities: While U.S. taxpayer generosity, currently slated at over $100 million this year, will enhance LAF domestic counterterrorism capabilities, it is not meant--and will never be meant--to help Lebanon deter or defend against Israeli strikes.

For Washington, Hezbollah--which controls south Lebanon--not Israel's violations of Lebanese sovereignty, is the problem. Because Hezbollah receives virtually all of its armaments via Syria, Washington has also been far more concerned about the lack of security on the Lebanese-Syrian frontier than about the Israeli-Lebanese border.

BATS Real-Time Market Data by XigniteToday, both Israel and Lebanon are violating U.N. Security Council Resolutions. Israel's ubiquitous over-flights violate Lebanese sovereignty, while the Government of Lebanon fails to take sufficient steps to prevent the movement of arms to Hezbollah. More problematically, the new, if deeply divided, pro-West/pro-Iran government seemed to repudiate the core element of UNSCRs 1559 and 1701 when it explicitly legitimized Hezbollah's weapons in its Ministerial Statement. Given these violations, Washington may see Israel's ability to surveil Lebanon as the best way to prevent another war.