U.S. Arms on Both Sides of War in Lebanon

Not for the first time, a war has broken out in which U.S. arms are present on both sides of the conflict, this time in Lebanon. The billions of dollars in weaponry Washington has supplied the Netanyahu government to sustain its wars in Gaza and Lebanon are widely known about, but many Americans might be surprised to learn that the United States has also supplied significant amounts of arms and training to the Lebanese armed forces. While the Lebanese army is not the primary target of the Israeli invasion, a clash between the IDF and official Lebanese government forces is still a possibility.

Nick Turse, writing in The Intercept, notes that “[s]ince 2006, America has provided more than $5.5 billion in foreign assistance to Lebanon, including $3 billion in military aid.” Items supplied have included “light attack aircraft, helicopters, and Hellfire missiles. The U.S. separately provided Lebanon with 130 armored and tactical ground vehicles.” Seth Binder, director of advocacy at the Middle East Democracy Center, told Turse that the U.S. supplies have not had the intended effect: “Despite the assistance, however, the country remains incredibly unstable and its security forces remain unable to respond to Hezbollah’s domestic or regional operations.”

The U.S. government’s reasons for arming the Lebanese military are not entirely clear. In one notice to Congress of a sale to Lebanon, the Pentagon relied on vague rationales, stating that it would “enhance the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of a strategic partner.” Equally vaguely, the notice went on to say that the sale would “improve Lebanon’s capability to meet current and future threats. Lebanon will use the enhanced capability to strengthen its homeland defense and to replenish existing stock levels.” The “threat” is never named, but the current threat to Lebanon emanates from a U.S. ally, Israel, not from Hezbollah or a designated adversary like Iran.

As noted above, the Lebanese army is not the main focus of Israel’s attacks – that is Hezbollah. The Lebanese army has retreated from the south of the country since the Israeli invasion, concentrating its forces in the north. While they would no doubt like to avoid direct combat with the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), analyst Aram Nerguizian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies has suggested that the Lebanese forces might engage in defensive actions against the IDF. But for the most part it appears that the Lebanese army is standing back as their country is bombarded by its neighbor, leaving it as a fight between Israel and Hezbollah– with the people of Lebanon paying the real price.

Unfortunately, the phenomenon of the U.S. arming both sides of a conflict is nothing new, and in many cases U.S. arms have gone to the direct combatants in the war, not to one direct party like Israel plus a secondary force like the Lebanese army. This history of runaway weapons sales goes back at least to the 1970s, when American arms were used by both Greek and Turkish forces in their war over Cyprus. This reality was one of the things that prompted Congress to pass the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) of 1978.

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More recently, in 2019, Turkey’s U.S.-supplied air force bombarded the U.S.-trained and armed Kurdish opposition forces in Turkey.

The role of U.S. arms in fueling conflict – whether the weapons to both sides or just one – is business-as-usual. In a December 2022 paper I did for the Quincy Institute, I found that the United States had supplied arms to one of both sides of over two-thirds of the world’s active conflicts as of that date.

None of the above accounts for cases where U.S. supplied-arms have fallen into the hands of U.S. adversaries, as happened during the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Most disturbingly of all, some of the U.S. arms supplied to extremist groups in Afghanistan fighting Soviet occupation forces ended up in the hands of Osama Bin Laden’s cohorts in al-Qaida, and ISIS captured large quantities of U.S. arms from the Iraqi armed forces in its 2014 invasion of Iraq.

It’s long past time to take a hard look at claims that U.S. weapons supplies are a “force for stability” around the world. The historical record suggests otherwise. The current war in the Middle East offers an opportunity to change course, and finally acknowledge that trading in weapons of war is not a guarantee of peace and stability, but an enabler of more war, with all the tragic human consequences that entails.