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The Beirut Blast Is A Reminder That Hezbollah Has Ruined Lebanon
More than any other group in Lebanon, the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah bears responsibility
for the conditions that led to the blast.
More than any other group in Lebanon, the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah bears responsibility
for the conditions that led to the blast.
The Beirut Blast Is A Reminder That Hezbollah Has Ruined Lebanon
More than any other group in Lebanon, the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah bears responsibility for the conditions that led to the blast.
thefederalist.com
The massive explosion on Tuesday that destroyed the port of Beirut, killed more than 130 people, wounded thousands more, and ravaged part of the city, appears to be an accident. A warehouse storing 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate that had been confiscated from a ship in 2013 and stored at the port ever since exploded after an adjacent building caught fire.
But it’s the kind of accident that could only happen in a place as mind-bogglingly corrupt as Lebanon. Simply put, Lebanon isn’t a failed state so much as a facsimile of a state. It has the features of a state—a government, a parliament, a bureaucracy—but none of it works.
Or rather, it works for the deeply corrupt political factions that run the country—a cartel class of religious and political sects that divvy up the functions of government to enrich themselves at the people’s expense. The leaders of these factions style themselves the leaders of political parties, but they’re more like feudal lords.
To put it in more familiar terms, Lebanon is a mafia state governed entirely through criminality and institutionalized corruption. The ranks of the civilian bureaucracy are filled according to sectarian quotas set by a political class that has no regard for the public good. Government jobs, contracts, and services are doled out according to this system, in which the strongest mafia family, the dominant sect that all others must placate and partner with at some level, is the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah.
If there’s one group that bears primary responsibility for the state of affairs in Lebanon that led to the explosion in Beirut, it’s Hezbollah.
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The United States has played an ignoble role in Hezbollah’s rise. As part of the Obama administration’s effort to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, it derailed a major U.S. law enforcement campaign against Hezbollah headed by the Drug Enforcement Administration dubbed Project Cassandra.
According to an extensive report by Politico, the project “amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.”
But allowing Project Cassandra to go forward would jeopardize the Iran deal, so the Obama administration undermined it as a matter of policy. At the same time, it advanced a policy of appeasement toward Hezbollah. Before he became CIA director under Obama, John Brennan advocated for “greater assimilation of Hezbollah into Lebanon’s political system,” and later said the administration was seeking to build up “moderate elements” in Hezbollah.
Project Cassandra members say the administration blocked their efforts to go after top Hezbollah operatives, investigate its envoy to Iran, or charge the group’s military wing as an ongoing criminal enterprise under federal racketeering laws. At every turn, the Obama administration protected Hezbollah.
Lebanon today, including the smoldering ruins of Beirut, is a dispiriting portrait of what happens when groups like Hezbollah are allowed to flourish and wield political power—and a powerful reminder that the United States should never encourage it.
Comment:
From the moment I learned of the explosion in the Port of Beirut Lebanon, I linked Hezbollah to the tragedy. There is nowhere in the terrotory of Lebanon, where 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate is needed to fertilize land. Additionally, Nitroprill is not designed for farming application, but designed to be used as an explosive. So what would Hezbollah need with Nitroprill? Any guesses? Certainly it was now for peaceful purposes...
Therefore the citizenz of Beirut will suffer... and those responsibe as always skate away from their just deserts....
Israel should go ahead and occupy so called Palestine it's just a nest of terrorists. 
