Hezbollah Offers Bright Future In Drugs, Crime And Terror
An excellent new report by Chatham House’s Lina Khatib not only illustrates why Hezbollah poses an existential threat to Lebanon, but is also a timely reminder of how rapidly Hezbollah mutated from being an anti-state critic of corruption to embodying that corruption, and becoming the supreme defender of this rotten-to-the-core governing system.
Hezbollah’s usurpation of the governing system has
transformed Lebanon into a bankrupt pariah state, with a basket-case economy
dependent on the export of narcotics, weapons and terrorism.
From the moment Hezbollah controlled ministerial posts,
these institutions were put into the service of its own partisan goals and
those of its Iranian paymaster. Hezbollah’s hold over the Agriculture Ministry
was exploited to divert agricultural investment exclusively to Hezbollah
strongholds, while controlling the import of chemicals such as ammonium nitrate
for use as explosives. Paperwork for the export of agricultural products was
falsified to cover up the smuggling of contraband goods.
Hezbollah controls the regional trade in explosives, and
also controls Beirut’s port. No wonder it is moving heaven and earth to block
the investigation into why hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate stored in the
port destroyed half of Lebanon’s capital city, with colossal loss of life.
With the Transport Ministry in the hands of key ally Yusuf
Finyanus from 2016 to 2020, Hezbollah’s control of the airport, ports and
borders became absolute. One of the reasons Lebanon doesn’t have a functioning
government now is that Hezbollah insists on appointing the next Finance
Minister, which would allow for the cover-up of the full spectrum of
criminality.
Lina Khatib’s report stresses the fact that while such
corrupt practices are nothing new among Lebanon’s mafioso factions, Hezbollah
and Iran embarked on these corrupt activities in such a systematic manner as to
bankrupt and shatter the state. Hezbollah uses its vast intelligence
infrastructure to spy on rivals and target its enemies. An immense $300 million
a month is lost to the state due to Hezbollah smuggling subsidized diesel into
Syria. While half of Lebanon can’t afford to feed itself, Hezbollah makes a
killing flogging subsidized wheat across the border.
Hezbollah plunders the state and then scatters a few crumbs
from its immense profits to portray itself as the God-given benefactor of its
client communities, when in reality it is nothing but an immense predatory
parasite draining Lebanon’s lifeblood.
Hezbollah is the principal benefactor from the fact that,
out of $3 billion customs duties collected from Beirut’s port, the Lebanese
state purse receives a paltry $800 million. Hezbollah is a leading player in
the multibillion-dollar Captagon trade, while reaping hundreds of millions
through complicity in the Latin American narcotics trade. Hezbollah’s
Transportation Unit 112 oversees the movement of weapons, missiles, money and
other contraband goods, along with smuggling and money laundering operations in
Africa and the Americas.
With Lebanese GDP nearly halving from $55 billion in 2018 to
about $30 billion in 2021, Hezbollah’s massive levels of crime and systematic
corruption, along with its stipends from Tehran (about $700 million a year),
leave it with a comparable financial turnover to that of the state itself.
Hezbollah is profiteering from Lebanon’s demise. With dozens of businesses
going bankrupt every day, Hezbollah is establishing its own parallel network of
banks, trading outlets and institutions, which undercut rivals due to
exemptions from border fees and taxes.
Lebanon is becoming a proud member of an exclusive club of
states where the national infrastructure has been repurposed for smuggling and
organized crime. With their monetary systems in freefall, Lebanon and Syria are
becoming outright narco-economies. Numerous financial institutions already face
international sanctions after Nasrallah’s “Party of the Devil” dragged them
into its orbit.
In this dystopian, narco-state future, if you want to
prosper and feed your family your career options will be drugs and explosives
manufacture and transport, money laundering, human trafficking, terrorism or
paramilitarism.
Lebanon’s disintegration poses challenges for Hezbollah, but
it will emerge from this implosion ten times stronger than any rival.
Boycotting Lebanon has failed. Those banking on Lebanon’s demise as a means of
purging the region of Hezbollah have it all wrong: Hezbollah possesses all the
arms, the power, the money and the manpower. It will be the last man standing
after this Lebanese apocalypse.
Yet let’s not forget that in the 2009 and 2018 elections,
Hezbollah candidates won a miserable 13 seats. Hezbollah wields influence only
through exploiting corrupt allies. This is a precarious house of cards that
would collapse if the entire nation succeeded in mobilizing against it.
Hezbollah’s supposed raison d’être was defending the
motherland against Israel, yet such a Hezbollah-dominated terror-exporting
state would only make war inevitable. With Israel conducting daily overflights
and airstrikes again Iran-aligned targets, Hezbollah appears powerless to act.
The reality is that when the West and the Arab world step
back from weaker states like Lebanon, Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, the vultures
come swooping in. Vulture states like Iran and Russia, and non-state actors
like Hezbollah, Daesh and the Taliban are highly adept at filling the void when
the international community fails to act in support of good governance and
stability.
The world has scarcely grasped the consequences of
abandoning this cluster of Arab states — Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq — to the
vultures and terrorists. The legitimate economies of these nations have
imploded, but there are fortunes to be made from exporting drugs, arms,
terrorism and anarchy. The entire planet will suffer the consequences, and just
as in Latin America, when narco-states become established such criminalized
systems quickly gain a veneer of self-sustaining permanence that is almost
impossible to eradicate.
This is not alarmism; it is already happening, and will
shortly become 100 times worse if citizens and the international community fail
to prevent the wholesale emergence of these Tehran-sponsored spawning grounds
for chaos and disorder.
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