Don’t pop the champagne corks yet. While there is certainly reason to cheer for the termination of the bloody terrorist leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel’s military strikes in and around Beirut only addressed part of the problem. Israel’s approach, using airstrikes, beeper strikes, and walkie-talkie strikes, is nothing short of miraculous. But the disease that spreads from Lebanon is not solely driven by Hezbollah and its paymasters in Tehran.
Certainly Iran’s most recent launch of hundreds of missiles at Israel “in retaliation” for the successful hit on Hassan Nasrallah in his Beirut bunker is an important and highly escalatory move by Iran, but it also is not the whole picture in Lebanon.
Lebanon is driven by corruption that runs throughout the entirety of its elite government structures, military and civilian. For decades, government officials, skilled in the French art of the bon mot, have snookered America. Hezbollah is always the problem, far be it for the downtrodden Lebanese to address the cancer in their midst head on.
Now is the perfect moment to reevaluate US assistance to Lebanon, starting with military aid. The Biden-Harris administration’s move in 2021 to more than double American contributions to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to $236 million. In 2023, the Biden-Harris administration contributed additionally over $70 million to pay the salaries of members of the LAF in the form of direct cash transfers. If Americans knew that their hard-earned tax dollars were going to pay the salaries of a foreign army that is formally still at war with Israel, a treaty ally, they might have some concerns. With good reason.
Let’s start with who runs the Lebanese Army. The head of the LAF is a caretaker minister, retired General Maurice Sleem. No one is expressly accountable to the Prime Minister for the activities and expenditures of the LAF. By all counts, Sleem wields little influence within the government and has been all but absent from the public eye during Israel’s recent strikes on Beirut, including the one that took out Hezbollah’s terror prince Nasrallah. It’s hard to argue that funding the LAF, whose forces are trained by the U.S. is a good idea when they are using that training to target our treaty ally rather than Hezbollah. Indeed, this is possibly the worst use of taxpayer funding imaginable in the Arab world. Where is our return on this investment? What are we getting from Lebanon that warrants this massive expenditure of assistance? Why are American taxpayers paying salaries of the LAF? Why isn’t the LAF doing its job, part of which includes ridding the border area with Israel of Hezbollah terrorists? They were trained by us to do this job. We’re paying the wages to do this job. Yet, at most we’re getting nothing in return. More likely, we’re getting a well-funded and trained army in cahoots with Hezbollah terrorists.
Beyond the military, who runs Lebanon these days? Who makes sure the lights are on? Who makes sure the people are fed? Who makes sure that schools are open? Who makes sure the port is operating? The Prime Minister of Lebanon is a multi-billionaire who is also the richest man in the country, Najib Mikati. Even before Mikati took power as the caretaker Prime Minister, Lebanon has been a failed state, a country run by beggars which threatens that, in order not to spiral further out of control, the international community must continuously bail it out, all while its leaders become even wealthier. The task of looking inward at the root causes of economic devastation never comes up as a requirement. It is a rare donor or UN official who speaks the truth about Lebanese corruption. Caught in an unguarded interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2020, it was clear that Dutch former Foreign Minister Sigrid Kaag was disgusted by her former Lebanese counterpart Gebran Bassil for his and his countrymen’s extraordinary levels of graft, corruption, and lack of transparency. Her description of Lebanon as “a country that has been stymied by top-level corruption across the board” barely scratches the surface of the reality in Lebanon.
In August 2020 when the port in Beirut infamously exploded, Lebanon’s Minister of Public Works was a member of Hezbollah. It’s no surprise, then, that Hezbollah promptly insisted that any investigation of the explosion be severely limited before one even began. This is how deeply infested Hezbollah terrorism was, and still is, into the daily life of Lebanese citizens.
Lebanon, four years after the port explosion, is worse off than it was even amidst the financial ruin and economic collapse in 2020. Yes, Hezbollah is to blame, but only in part. The world needs to recognize the reality in Lebanon and stop funding it. Corruption is endemic. Graft on a massive scale is the norm, not the exception. Lebanon’s population suffers from a government that, for all intents and purposes, does not exist and instead the country is run by a clan system of rival sectarian gangs. The only thing that unites the gangsters is a hatred of Israel.
It is time for Lebanon’s leaders’ white flags to come out. It is time for the Lebanese civilian population to demand accountability from these leaders. It is time for leaders in the U.S., France, the EU, the UK, the World Bank, the IMF, and the UN to stop making excuses for Lebanon and to start demanding a housecleaning. There is simply no reason for Beirut’s kleptocrats to change when they know there are bailouts coming.
The time for bailouts must end. America is the most generous country in the history of the world, but American taxpayers deserve better than having their hard-earned tax dollars squandered on foreign ne'er-do-wells who are best friends with terrorists. We should end all direct budget support to Lebanon and should curtail any further assistance until Lebanon can demonstrate it is worthy of it.
Bonnie Glick is the former Deputy Administrator and Chief Operating Officer of the U.S. Agency for International Development. She is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.