The last time a vice president dropped in on Lebanon, before Joe Biden's visit on Friday, was on Oct. 26, 1983, when the first George Bush stopped by for a few hours to take stock of the bombing of the Marines barracks that killed 241 servicemen. It was one of Hezbollah's coming-out attacks. Biden stopped in today, less than a month after Hillary Clinton's campaign stop there, to lend the Obama administration's weight against another Hezbollah campaign, this one political, in Lebanon's June 7 parliamentary election. Hezbollah is poised to make big gains, possibly crippling the pro-Western March 14 coalition of Sunnis, Druze and Christians with its own March 8 Alliance of Shiites and Christians.
Biden's Short-Sighted Purpose
Biden spent seven hours in Beirut (after spending a few days in that other Balkanized region, the Balkans), meeting with the Lebanese president and doing his damndest to pretend that he wasn't there to prop up the March 14 alliance. No one believed him, and no one should, when he claimed that he wasn't there to cast a symbolic vote--least of all when he made his unwise threat plain: “We will evaluate the shape of our assistance programs based on the shape of the new government,” he said.
Lebanon has received about $1 billion in aid from the United States since 2006, half of it military. Here's why the remark--and the policy, if it is policy--was silly.
Why Cutting Off Aid Will Backfire
First, (a lesson the United States has yet to learn in half a century of head-butting) threats don't work in the Middle East. Open doors do. Second, U.S. aid has been flowing to Lebanon despite Hezbollah's role in the government. That's not a bad thing. There's a precedent, if you want to look at it as American taxpayer money going, in part, to an organization deemed "terrorist" by the State Department. Aid is also flowing to the Palestinian Authority even though Hamas is the official and legitimate majority representative of the Palestinian people.
The aid has allowed the authority to "restore order in the West Bank to a degree not seen in many years," as Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki wrote in The Times. The aid has also allowed the United States to maintain a considerable degree of influence with Palestinian moderates. (Don't think the relative quietness of the West Bank is an accident.) Throwing that away would be foolish.
Equally so in Lebanon, where the president will not change and Hezbollah's accountability, should the militants make political gains, will only increase, forcing the group to modulate its approach. The one thing that would re-energize its extremists would be further belligerence from the United States. Wasn't that the Bush way? Obama promised something different. We'll see.
Hezbollah Hypocrisy
Hezbollah made a few stupid comments of its own, of course, judging Biden's visit as it did Clinton's last month--as "interference." Tell me something, Hezbollah: how is it not interference when you have open and dual pipelines sloshing verbiage, dollars and weaponry from to Tehran and Damascus 24/7?
See Also: Is Hezbollah Still a Terrorist Organization?