Per this U.S. Embassy Press Release, the American government has provided its sheepish step-brother, the Lebanese Armed Forces, with the latest batch of “military assistance” hand-me-downs, in the form of:
- 9 ambulances
- 60 Humvee “tactical military vehicles”
- 8 inflatable rubber boats, and
- 1 firetruck
No doubt this equipment is helpful — the Embassy has said that the Humvees are “the same model used around the world by the U.S. military,” and they will eventually deliver 200 of them — but the docile nature of these latest offerings underlines a certain strategic discontinuity: if the Americans hope for the LAF to be powerful enough to obviate Hezbollah, then the LAF will eventually have to be strong enough to not just fight Hezbollah, but also defend against an Israeli attack. And, as Nick Noe argued in a paper for the Century Foundation (pdf), earlier this year, that just ain’t gonna happen:
Unfortunately, as Hizbullah and various opposition leaders have been quick to point out (with a degree of traction that apparently unnerves U.S. officials), the reality of U.S. support for the LAF has been woefully inadequate for either of the two related tasks that Washington considers as its highest priorities in the country: contributing to the state-building process and enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions. In light of this, Washington’s escalating rhetoric concerning its “strong” and supposedly “unfettered” commitment to adequately arming the LAF has been particularly counterproductive, with exaggerated statements by some officials only throwing into relief what has become a routine assumption, even among reliably pro-U.S. media, of a joint U.S.-Israeli “veto” on sophisticated arms transfers.
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As such, the LAF remains effectively stuck in neutral—which means the joint U.S.–March 14 Alliance commitment to state-building continues to be undermined at critical moments. The Nahr al-Barid conflict was, of course, only one particularly glaring example, easily exploited by Hizbullah and its allies. As Commander Kahwagi explained to As-Safir one year later, “the army was compelled to hire giant bulldozers from civilian and commercial establishments to open up some roads or to dismantle mines,” because the LAF did not have such capability. The LAF’s helicopters, he continued, did not have bases or rockets, “thus prompting the engineering corps and the air force to devise the ‘giant bombs’ that were detonated over the gunmen’s positions in a manner reminiscent of some of the scenes of World War I.”
On the other hand — boy, the U.S. Embassy website is fun! — the Americans have sent over the president of the WNBA, Donna Orender, former Mavericks star Rolando Blackman, and current WNBA player Ebony Hoffman as part of the State Department’s SportsUnited diplomacy program. Follow them on their blog, and Donna’s Twitter feed (”Sports is a universal language and my lebanese is getting pretty good!“).
