The United States has funded, trained, and equipped the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) to ensure “they serve as an institutional counterweight to Hezbollah,” a senior State Department official testified last August.1 Since 2006, American taxpayers have paid more than $2.5 billion in security assistance to Lebanon in pursuit of four goals, according to the State Department: “to strengthen Lebanon’s sovereignty, secure its borders, counter internal threats, and disrupt terrorist facilitation.”2 The primary (though not the only) source of these internal threats is, of course, Hezbollah.
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