Western intelligence sources have revealed that in July and August Iran used a civilian airliner to fly arms to Hezbollah directly through Beirut International Airport. That would be right after the United States completed the delivery of light attack aircraft to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) in June, and right before a high-ranking CENTCOM delegation visited Lebanon in mid-August. On both occasions, U.S. officials praised the LAF as the “defender of Lebanon’s borders”—a cringeworthy line that captures the painful silliness of U.S. policy. The LAF will not confront a group with which it enjoys close relations and that effectively controls the Lebanese government, from which it takes its orders.

While the U.S. government justifies its policy in Lebanon with lines about strengthening Lebanese “state institutions,” the basic flaw in this approach undermines every aspect of policy towards the country.

The reason we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the LAF, we’ve been told for the last 12 years, is in order to enable Lebanon’s “state institutions” to “extend government authority” over the entirety of the country. The logic behind this in previous years was the belief that Hezbollah’s ability to bring in weapons shipments was partly due to the LAF not being deployed to Lebanon’s eastern border with Syria. The key to solving the “Hezbollah problem,” according to this line of thinking, was to assist the Lebanese state to exert control over all its territory.

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