Following a recent lecture I gave to a group of extremely bright, young U.S. Navy and Marine Corps officer candidates, I was asked why the Shia terrorist group Hizballah—being the global threat it is—rarely headlines any major daily newspaper in the mainstream media.
It was an excellent question, one I am often asked, and one which I am unable to adequately answer: After all, Hizballah is perhaps the most dangerous terrorist army in the world. Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff once said, Hizballah “makes Al Qaeda look like a minor league team.”
So why isn’t wartime America being adequately informed and educated in this regard?
I won’t begin to guess beyond the insanity of political correctness or who knows what. But I will say that this lack of information has served as an enabler of Hizballah and its Iranian-Syrian overlords. It has bought time for the Iranian-Syrian-Hizballah axis. It has seriously undermined the majority pro-democracy movement in Lebanon (including the brave resistance against Hizballah), and it has utterly failed the American taxpayer.
Case in point, the recent granting of tens-of-millions of dollars (on top of hundreds-of-millions over several years) worth of U.S. military aid to Lebanese Pres. Michel Sleiman’s army: an army that Sleiman has refused to commit to action against Iranian-Syrian-supported Hizballah, even when Hizballah was killing Lebanese civilians during a series of axis-engineered attacks against the Lebanese government in May 2008.
Sleiman, then-commander of the armed forces (and with strong personal connections to terrorist-sponsoring Syria), was quickly dubbed president when a deal was cut by the Arab League to persuade Hizballah to stop killing albeit temporarily.
The most bizarre thing of it all was that Sleiman’s ascension to the presidential palace was praised by our own State Department, and the U.S. government even upped the money.
Then lo’ and behold, we learned that the money was going to an army (already Hizballah-infiltrated) that now officially considered Hizballah a legitimate arm of the Lebanese Defense apparatus.
Was the American taxpayer aware of this? Nope. But he continued to pay for it.
Now comes the latest looniness: Weeks after Sleiman – still accepting our money and during a grand American tour in which he was graciously entertained by the White House – began criticizing our defensive raid from Iraq into Syria, this man has again slapped us in the face.
This week, Sleiman is in Iran embracing and generally palling around with Mahmoud Wipe-Israel-off-the-face-of-the-Earth Ahmadinejad, the president of Hizballah’s primary benefactor.
According to Naharnet: “‘We are grateful that the Islamic Republic of Iran has always stood by the Lebanese people and government,’ IRNA [the Iranian News Agency] quoted Sleiman as saying.”
The Gulf Times reports: “A Lebanese government official said on Sunday that talks with Iranian officials will include efforts to forge a ‘national defense strategy’ for Lebanon, where Hizbullah’s arsenal remains a thorny issue.“
And the Lebanon Daily Star reports: “The London-based Arab daily Al-Hayat said in its Sunday edition that Tehran was planning on providing the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) with heavy weapons, including missiles.”
Yet we’re still sending Sleiman’s army millions of dollars.
The American people are still clueless.
The future military leaders of America are still asking “why?”
And frankly I still don’t have an answer.
— Maj. W. Thomas Smith Jr. (SCSG) – a former U.S. Marine rifle-squad leader and counterterrorism instructor – is a journalist, author, and military analyst whose work has appeared in the New York Post, USA TODAY, U.S. News & World Report, BusinessWeek, CBS News, and many others. Smith writes about military/defense issues and has covered conflict in the Balkans, on the West Bank, in Iraq and Lebanon. Visit him online at HYPERLINK "http://uswriter.com/" uswriter.com.
