The Biden administration has quietly waived sanctions to allow Lebanon to import oil from Iran, both by sea and overland through Syria. Hezbollah already claims victory with its banners.
The influx of cash and prestige comes not a moment too soon for Hezbollah. In just over a year, Hezbollah had suffered three blows in Lebanon that had crippled its standing.
First, most Lebanese blame the group’s negligence for the Beirut port explosion last summer, not only for the immediate carnage but also for the subsequent financial damage: Insurance companies refuse to pay out for damage for which they blame Hezbollah. The group’s denial of responsibility and its refusal to allow a real investigation leaves Lebanese victims in limbo.
Second, the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign had drained Hezbollah’s coffers. It could no longer pay its members in dollars but instead had to use Lebanese pounds, which speaks to the last issue. The Lebanese pound’s collapse meant that what Hezbollah was paying its members became almost worthless. The group soon discovered that most of its rank and file cared more for the cash and privileges membership once brought than for its ideology.
Allowing Iranian oil to flow into Lebanon snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. It enables Hezbollah to regroup and expand its influence.
The problem is broader, however.
Too many, not only in the White House and State Department but also in Congress, continue to believe the fiction that the Lebanese Armed Forces stands apart from Hezbollah. Here the issue is not simply the fact that Hezbollah diverts equipment from Lebanon’s military. The problem is politics: In Lebanon’s confessional system, both the army’s commander and the president are Christian. Most of the Lebanese Armed Forces’s commanders aspire to the presidency, and many have achieved that goal. While commanders maintain the fiction that they do not tolerate Hezbollah, most also recognize the political reality that support of Hezbollah is now necessary to attain the presidency. Joseph Aoun, the Lebanese Armed Forces commander, might talk a good game, but ambition puts him in Hezbollah’s pocket.
Nor is Hezbollah the only problem. Last December, I traveled around the country from Shebaa in the south to Akkar in the north. Lebanese complaints about their leaders’ corruption differed little among Hezbollah’s Nabatieh stronghold, the Sunni-dominated northern city of Tripoli, and the Christian-populated Zahle in the Beqaa Valley. In each place, the Lebanese complained that the established elites divvy up contracts among themselves, overcharge, and underdeliver.
In August 2021, as hardship increased in Lebanon, President Joe Biden announced an additional $100 million for the beleaguered country. His intentions were good, but the international community, be it the United States, France, or Russia on one hand or the World Bank and International Monetary Fund on the other, makes matters worse when it works through the same Beirut elites who monopolize development bodies and bleed the country dry. In effect, it encourages a dynamic in which the Nabih Berris, Hassan Nasrallahs, Samir Geageas, Walid Jumblatts, Saad Hariris, Najib Mikatis, and other Lebanese elites hold a gun to the heads of their citizenry and threaten to shoot unless outsiders provide ransom.
There is a way to break the dynamic.
Across Lebanon’s religious mosaic, municipal workers and leaders complain they see little impact from foreign assistance. What foreigners deposit in Beirut is more likely to end up in Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, Dubai, or Panama than in Tyre, Sidon, Tripoli, or Baalbek. The only way to help Lebanon and reduce the stranglehold of Lebanese kleptocrats is to bypass Beirut completely. A $1 million grant given directly to a municipal council can do more than $100 million transferred into the coffers of Lebanon’s Council for Development and Reconstruction. Diversion will still occur, but it will be harder for a municipal worker to hide corruption on a local project than it is for Lebanon’s political elites to embezzle at the source.
The problem then becomes the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development. America’s diplomats remain isolated in the embassy’s mountain compound. Not only do they face self-imposed and unwieldy security restrictions, but they also find it easier to engage with a few Lebanese elites than cover each municipality. USAID, likewise, is set in its ways and resists demands to calibrate aid to the capacity of town councils if it reduces the budget of its own bureaucratic empire.
The net result is both Hezbollah’s empowerment and Lebanon’s failure. It is time for Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, USAID Administrator Samantha Power, and Congress to realize that with Lebanon, they now do more harm than good.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
