The Guns of August

Is U.S. military aid to Lebanon being used against Israel?


Yoav Fromer
tabletmag.com
06 August '10

Even to the untrained eye, there was something disturbing about the images flowing in from the Israeli-Lebanese border clash on Tuesday, which left one senior Israeli officer and three Lebanese dead. The pictures speak for themselves: Freshly uniformed Lebanese soldiers, armed with U.S.-made M-16s and backed by U.S.-made M113 armored personnel carriers, can be clearly seen firing at Israeli soldiers who are standing on Israeli territory. Given the generous military aid that Lebanon has been receiving from the United States in recent years—aid that included sophisticated sniper rifles of the kind that may have been used to target and kill the Israeli officer, Lt. Col. Dov Harari—one cannot ignore the possibility that the same U.S. weapons intended to help stabilize Lebanon and secure the northern Israeli border may be having the opposite effect.

As a result, Israel—which has long concerned itself with preventing the sale of strategic U.S. weaponry such as F-15s to competing regional powers like Egypt and Saudi Arabia in order to maintain its qualitative military advantage in the region—has begun to turn its attention to the relatively small and historically ineffective Lebanese army on its northern border. In his first public interview since the deadly incident, Defense Minister Ehud Barak called on Washington to halt the supply of advanced weapons to Lebanon, and referred to continued arming of the Lebanese Army “a mistake.”

“We always feared that these weapons could end up in the hands of Hezbollah,” Barak explained on Israeli radio, “but now we are witnessing a reality far more troubling in which these weapons are being used directly against us by the Lebanese forces.” Jerusalem has become so alarmed, Haaretz reports, that it is now planning to launch a diplomatic blitz to convince the United States (and France) to cease arms shipments to Beirut.

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