Why is the U.S. Helping to Send Arms to Hizballah?

Even as Saudi Arabia has discontinued its massive military aid to Lebanon due to Hizballah’s success in infiltrating and coopting the Lebanese armed forces, America just sent Beirut $50 million worth of armored vehicles, artillery, and grenade launchers. “Something,” notes Max Boot, “doesn’t add up”:

Does Washington believe that the Lebanese armed forces can be [sufficiently] bolstered as an independent military to stand up to various terrorist groups, including Hizballah—and if so, how does it imagine that will happen? Or does the U.S. government simply not care about the Hizballah-Lebanese armed forces connection?

I hesitate to leap to the conclusion that Washington simply doesn’t care, but if so that would be of a piece with the Obama administration’s de-facto tilt toward Iran since the completion of the nuclear deal. . . . President Obama seems to imagine that the Iranian-backed forces can be an American ally against Sunni terrorist groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaeda.

If so, he is making a tragic miscalculation, one that I and others have repeatedly warned against. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, because he is able to marshal the resources of a large, oil-rich state with a nuclear program, is a greater long-term danger to the West than Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who heads a relatively small, ramshackle state that is losing ground. . . .

The U.S. should be helping anti-Hizballah organizers in Lebanon to reduce that organization’s power instead of funneling arms to the politically compromised Lebanese military.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Hizballah, Israeli Security, Lebanon, Politics & Current Affairs, Saudi Arabia, U.S. Foreign policy

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF