The Price of Victory: How Israel Is Squandering the Political Fruits in Lebanon |
Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah is strategically necessary. It is also being politically self-sabotaged in real time in Christian villages six kilometers from the Lebanese border.
The case for destroying Hezbollah as a military force is not complicated. The organization is, as Augustus Norton’s definitive study concludes, fundamentally “Janus-faced,” a political party, social services provider, and heavily armed militia whose dimensions are mutually reinforcing rather than distinct. Its military wing exists not to protect Lebanon but to serve Iranian strategic interests. An estimated $700 million annually to sustain Hezbollah’s operations, and IRGC officers, over 150 of whom have now fled Lebanon, as Prime Minister Nawaf Salam confirmed publicly, functioned as its operational command layer. This is not a militant organization in the conventional sense. It is a forward-deployed instrument of Iranian state power embedded inside a nominally sovereign country.
The consequences for Lebanon have been catastrophic. The country’s 2019–2020 financial collapse, among the worst in modern history, was substantially enabled by Hezbollah’s blocking of the political reforms required to unlock international assistance. UN Resolution 1701, which mandated Hezbollah’s disarmament south of the Litani after the 2006 war, was never enforced.
The lesson Israel has drawn, that it cannot rely on international guarantees, is not unreasonable given the evidence.
Lebanon’s current government knows all of this. President Joseph Aoun has pursued........