← The Watch Floor with Sarah Adams
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the Watch floor. I'm Sarah Adams. When we talk about the Middle east, the headlines usually are about Syria, Israel, Iran. But Lebanon, not so much. Even though today this country sits in the middle of all of these regional pressures. It doesn't matter if it starts in the deserts of Syria, comes down to downtown Beirut, or goes to the diplomatic enclaves in Washington, D.C. riyadh or Jerusalem alike. Today we're going to talk about why Lebanon matters, why actors like isis, Hezbollah, and nation states really have an effect on what comes next, and how this small, fragile country really does impact US national security interests. If you think of Lebanon as like a boat in the sea. It's getting hit by waves all the time from these neighboring countries and from the Gulf. But when you look at the boat, the engine's broke, the hulls cracked, the people inside of it are bailing out the water all the time. We're going to explain to you what's rocking the boat and what actually might come next. Let's first talk about Lebanon's place in the region, population wise. It's a pretty small country. It's about 6 million people. And they have an interesting form of government. It's called confessionalism. If you haven't heard about this, it's just laying out a piece of the government for each of the major religions. So we have the Sunni, the Shia, the Christians, and the Druze. So all get an equal say in an equal partnership in the government. Obviously, this sounds great on paper, but think about if you're in a car and there's four drivers and you all get a say, obviously you might have different opinions. And if you don't really come to a consensus, you can have dreadlock really quickly. And when that happens, then nothing moves forward. Now, when we look at it, then within its region, obviously the country most talked about is Syria. So Syria has had a civil war since back to 2012, and massive amounts of refugees left Syria and came over into Lebanon. And when I say massive, I'm saying 1.5 million. I just told you the entire population of Lebanon is only 6 million. So that's 25% of their entire historic population have all come over in the last 10 years. And as we've seen, Syria now has a member of Al Qaeda running the country. So it's not like it's now a stable country. And it takes pressure off of Lebanon. It's still a constant issue. And we have fighters in Syria attempting to come over the border into Lebanon to be involved in terrorism. And that is where we talk about another regional country, Israel. So Israel has to monitor those regions to stop insurgents from coming into Lebanon. And then, as we all know, Israel sometimes even has to do attacks into southern Lebanon. Again, that causes problems in the country. And we did see even in the last couple years, there have even been attacks in city centers going after some of these senior Hezbollah leaders. All of that has an effect. Then we have Iran. You know, they always kind of stay under the radar with their hidden hand. But they are, of course, who backs most of the security issues in Lebanon because they fund Hezbollah. And even when they're not constantly spoken about, they do have a hidden hand, not just in the military side of the country, because Hezbollah really is the size of an army, but they also have a lot of influence on the political side of things, and that's what makes them extra dangerous. And then we just have the Gulf states. And what the Gulf states are usually doing is pushing some sort of pressure on Lebanon to do more about Hezbollah. Cause obviously, Hezbollah projects outside of Lebanon as well, and they target other areas. I mean, we even have a problem of Lebanon being in the Americas, right? They have a lot of kind of support arms all across Latin America. And it is a concern a lot of external countries have. Now, when we talk about Lebanon, you know, why is it fragile? You know, what's causing these vulnerabilities? One is their financial collapse has been historic since 2019. Their currency has lost 90% of its value. When that happens, everything gets more expensive. So when we're talking about food, food prices have increased.400. I mean, can you imagine what this is like? You know, just. Even just for the middle class? Then when everything costs too much, your confidence in your government just collapses, which is always dangerous, too, because that's when some of these bad actors can come in, as we talked about previously, and take advantage of a situation. And then even the banks kind of hold. Hold tightly onto the money in it. You can't go to the bank of Lebanon and take out your entire savings. They have restrictions on it. So even if you live there, you don't get full access to your money. I mean, think of the uncertainty this is causing.
- [06:22]
B
Imagine this. You walk into your bank, it's a Tuesday. You've worked for 30 years. Maybe you're a doctor, a teacher, or maybe you spent decades waiting tables in Detroit or Dubai just to send money back home to retire. You check your balance. The screen says you have $200,000. It's right there. You can see the digits. You can feel the safety of that number. You walk up to the teller and say, I'd like to withdraw $500 for groceries and rent. The teller looks at you, smiles a tired, sad smile and says, I'm sorry, we can only give you $50. And the kicker, that $50 isn't even in dollars. It's in the local currency. And by the time you walk out the door and get to the grocery store, the value of that cash has dropped by another 10%. You aren't imagining this. This isn't a dystopian fiction. This is the reality for millions of people in Lebanon. We aren't just talking about a recession. We aren't talking about a downturn. We are talking about what the World bank has called one of the top three most severe economic collapses since the mid-19th century.
- [07:23]
A
You know, without any kind of major reforms or, or foreign investment or some sort of debt restructuring. There's not a huge light at the end of the tunnel. And as you can imagine, these financial problems make bringing imports difficult, makes it difficult to bring in things even as simple as medicines. And then getting any kind of foreign aid is a lot harder to secure if it doesn't look like your financial system is sound. Now this, obviously, as you can imagine, trickles down in other ways. So for example, electricity is intermittent. I mean, think if you're running a business and the electricity is constantly going out. Fuel shortages are incredibly common. You have hospitals first, not having being able to keep that power going. But then, as I told you, they have difficulties bringing in high quality medicines to use. Then we have this idea that, hey, if all of these systems aren't doing well and aren't playing together, I feel like I might be in a precarious situation. You don't feel safe and secure and stable, which has other effects. One of the main effects is young adults are immigrating out of the country in large numbers. They're looking for some sort of stability, jobs, a place where I can grow my wealth, build my family in a more secure environment. You don't want to lose this type of talent in a country, especially in a country that has pockets of extremism and terrorism. But since 2019, the public has been very, very frustrated. Cause there's been this corruption, but then there's also this massive decline or stagnation of the economy and they're just not seeing it get better. Now think of it almost like a pressure cooker. So you have all these internal tensions and something can make it blow. And the simplest thing could really cause a massive crisis. And that's what we want to hopefully stop from occurring. Now we also have kind of these internal but also regional forces. So we have ISIS in the region, we have Hezbollah, even though I know it's internal. But because of Iran's role in it, it does kind of play like an external actor. And then I already told you, we have Israel as an external actor. So when we talk about isis, so when everybody kind of thinks ISIS is gone because it doesn't get the attention of like its heyday when it had its caliphate in Syria or had a lot of activities going on in Iraq, but it's still incredibly powerful. There are estimates that there are up to 10,000 members of ISIS in Syria, even as our government says, oh no, it's only one to 2,000. Right. That is a huge range. So while we're doing operations against ISIS in places like Syria and Iraq, the group is growing, so the operations are not effective. Right. They're not stopping this massive resurgence of the group. And a huge piece of this is the new president of Syria obviously protects ISIS in the country, is protecting the head of isis. He's being harbored in Syria. So if we kind of turn a blind eye and pretend this resurgence isn't real and it's not state backed, others unfortunately pay the price for this. You know, if you remember, In June of 2024, there was an attack on the US embassy in Beirut. It didn't get much press, and so I did an investigation into it. And one of the things I quickly learned is that it was even the US Embassy itself trying to downplay the event because the attacker, his name was Qase Farage, he was one of these refugees from Syria. He'd been brought in the country, he had official paperwork from UNHCR to be in Lebanon as a refugee, and he carried out this attack. Well, the embassy didn't want to put forward anti immigrant sentiments in Lebanon. So they're just very, very quiet about it. But there are a lot of questions about this case. First when it happened, they said, oh, it was a lone wolf ISIS terrorist. But as you started peeling back the layers, you stop for a minute, like, hey, wait a minute. So first off, when he came into Assyria, he lived in Becca Valley. That is the hotbed of terrorism in the country. So he likely made relationships there. A couple weeks before he commits this attack, he gets his weapon, which was just like an AK47 from a well known international arms dealer. Now think about it. If I just decided I'm going to be inspired by ISIS and do an Attack. I'm a foreigner in this new country. Do I really have access and direct contact and would even be trusted by a famous arms dealer. So that's the first part that's very strange. Then he does this attack and he puts like, it almost looked like duct tape on his body armor and he writes ISIS like in a Sharpie. Okay, so this is his uniform. Then they arrest his brother and they say, oh, there were a ton of bomb making materials in his brother's apartment. And then they say they arrested 20 other people. So we went from a lone wolf to an international arms dealer to bomb making components to 20 other people. We don't even know who they are. So it's just another one of these really interesting cases that got swept under the rug. And a lot of people really said he wasn't even trying to do the attack successfully. It was probably a probe or of the security at the US Embassy, which should make everybody pay a little more attention. The only reason you'd be probing the security at the US Embassy in Beirut is for a future attack against the U.S. embassy. Well, then who is doing it? Because this clearly wasn't a lone wolf. What is his larger network? Who is he connected to? And why are we not being honest that this was a terrorist from Syria? So again, these are all the problems just you're dealing with on a daily basis in Lebanon. Now again, we go back to the actual main terrorist group in the country, which is Hezbollah. I mean, they're like nation state military in themselves, right? They have the backing of Iran, but they also have a lot of power and influence and control in Lebanon. It's not like they're near being pushed out. There are discussions we should disarm them, kind of negotiate them to being just a political party, but that doesn't seem to be coming true anytime soon. We've talked previously how Hezbollah has invested a lot of resources into the second and third generation of their group. So they don't seem to be going anywhere on the US Side of things. We've long had issues with Hezbollah and then some of the other elements that help form it, like the Islamic Jihad. We had massive attacks against our interests, primarily kind of in the 1983, 1984 time period. The US embassy was attacked, the Marine barracks was attacked, the US embassy annex was attacked. ICIA station chief, you know, was kidnapped and killed. And the crazy part is, you know, it's been like four decades since these occurrences. And a lot of people forgot about them until about two years ago when Israel really started taking out these senior leaders of Hezbollah. Right, because they were concerned about some of their efforts in the aftermath of October 7th to do attacks in Israel. So when that started happening, we had terrorists that had been on the US most wanted list for 40 years be killed. I mean, this is pretty much the first time we saw kinetic action in today's day and age to go after those perpetrators of those attacks. So we had, of course, Fahd Shakir killed. He was killed July 30, 2024. He had a massive role in the incidents I talked about. And then we had Ibrahim Akil killed. And he was the head of all military operations for Hezbollah, and he was killed just a few months later, September 21, 2024. Right. These were major U.S. targets. Right. They were also focusing on harming Americans. So this was a huge win, really. Like the whole Radwan Force, which controlled a lot of the external operations for the group, got wiped out in a meeting. So a lot of wins against Hezbollah. But as we've seen, they always regenerate, they always come back stronger, and at the end of the day, they still are the main power player in the country. And then lastly, as we brought up before, we have Israel, and they really have to monitor the border and spend a lot of time dealing with Lebanon's. I mean, Hezbollah's movements in the area, the movements of weapons. Right, not just into Lebanon, but in the Syria region as well. It's a constant problem. And there are other agencies there. There's the un, the eu, and they're doing a lot of humanitarian missions. But it's like they've long turned a blind eye to the terrorist activity going on. And so it just causes this unstable region that is a constant problem. And really, unfortunately, it's not getting better as all this unrest continues in the Middle East. There is no active functioning peace right now in the Middle East. And if we lie about that and fake it, it's these more fragile states who are really getting a lot of this blowback now. What comes next? So when it comes to Lebanon, you know, financially or economically, you know, the currency looks like it's still going to be in decline for the upcoming future. There is going to be increases in inflation still, and they really have to keep preparing for this scarcity of goods because there is no plan to deal with it. A lot of the outside countries still, still are having discussions. Disarm Hezbollah, focus on Hezbollah, and the country is like, hey, we don't even have a properly functioning economy. If we destabilize our country, we might Actually let Hezbollah get more of a win. And sometimes outside actors don't see the full picture. They say laser focused on their target and they don't look at all the ramifications because you don't want to offer these opportunities for terrorists to take advantage of things. So without some sort of reform or stabilization, you know, Lebanon is not going to get better. Their GDP since just 2019 has actually contracted back to 21%. So. So it's one of the worst economic collapses globally and there's nothing improving it. So politically we also have this gridlock, right? We have all these opposing forces and they're having a lot of disputes. And one is Hezbollah's influence. Right.
- [20:45]
C
I think everyone understands that Hezbollah has become a problem, except for Hezbollah itself, of course. How far the Lebanese state can push, I think they're trying. So far they declared that they've disarmed Hezbollah saud of litany only for them to be proven wrong. This mission has not been completed. Whether they can try harder, I think they can. Whether they want to, I'm not sure.
- [21:09]
A
Does the Lebanese state actually have the ability to enforce this or is that authority still largely theoretical?
- [21:16]
C
Well, I think it does have the ability, and I think regretfully, that the Lebanese state is not even countering the statements coming out of Hezbollah chief Naim Asim. For example, he goes on TV and he says that we are armed and we're keeping our arms. Then in another speech, he goes on TV and he says, if there's war with Iran, Hezbollah will join the war. And it's unfortunate that neither President Aun nor his prime minister, Nawaf Salaam, actually counter this guy, you know, or at least send someone to arrest him. Just say, you can't run your own foreign policy in this country. Even that which is, which is supposed to be easy, like issuing a statement to counter him, even that they're not doing so. I think there's still tiptoeing around the subject, probably still scared of Hezbollah, but even then they've done things that others have not done. So what they've done has been good so far, but much more remains to be achieved.
- [22:18]
A
And Hezbollah is watching these cleavages and even having discussions. How do we increase, you know, our political influence during this time? This obviously shapes a lot of the activities the state does. And think about it. You're in like a neighborhood and you think the police are there to keep you safe and they're in control. But then there's this outside actor, right? That's what Hezbollah is. And Hezbollah is The one who actually has control in your town, they're actually the security arm in your town. And it's almost like these two competing systems. It's a very strange, you know, environment to live in, security wise. We have this border problem, right? This Syria, Lebanon, and of course the Israel issues. And as ISIS is resurging, unfortunately they will always go and take advantage of weak governments. So of course we're going to keep seeing impacts in Syria, we're likely going to see impacts in Iraq. And then of course, you know, they will continue to be a problem in Lebanon. And it really is kind of a difficult thing because when it comes to isis, it's not like they have a base in Lebanon. So you can't say, hey, ISIS controls the city. Let's just focus on counterterrorism operations there. It does not work that way. They like infiltrate in and then we get strange cases like Case Farage who carries out an attack and no one even knew who he was at all then. Socially we have a lot of migration problems, of course, I told you, with migrants coming in. But the bigger problem is all this talent leaving the country. You don't want all these young people leaving, but they have limited access to food, health care and basic services. They're almost being pushed out. Hospitals again, struggle to really service the people in the way they need. Schools actually have to close all the time because of these power issues. And families really are in a tough situation. Is this the best place to raise my children? Now then we have the domino effect of the entire region. Even if you strengthen these internal problems, you get these spillovers from the other regional countries that are hard to control. Right? It's an impact on you. The regional conflict, the political shocks, they all can be felt within your system, even if you weren't being involved in them. Lebanon's instability has broad consequences. It can affect things going on in the eastern Mediterranean. It really can impact refugee flows to Europe. A lot of refugees went to Lebanon. Well, if they all start going the other way, that's a problem. And then it also can give Iran more of an in to influence the economy and the politics and the military inside Lebanon. The last thing we want to allow is Iran to gain further influence and anywhere. So the key takeaways are even though Lebanon is small, it is regionally strategic. It has a lot of internal dysfunction. And then these external pressures from isis, Israel, Iran are threatening its internal security. Even if you're doing a positive security operation against a terrorist group, it obviously has blowback effects in the area. It was done. And we do have to be honest about that. There's going to always be ripple effects. And then we do have a humanitarian crisis. I mean, we have refugees becoming terrorists and attacking the US Embassy. That is a bad pattern. That is not something we want to see continue. And we haven't seen massive numbers of Syrians leave Lebanon for Syria because Syria is still unstable. You know, much of the military was made up of terrorist groups. There's members of HTS in the military. There's members of ISIS in the military. There's members of Al Qaeda, former members of Al Nusra Front. That is not a situation, you know, a lot of people want to bring their families back, too. You know, for Americans, just remember these small countries, they do have, you know, impacts. They do matter. When you're kind of talking about the regional dynamics, especially when we're saying something like, you know, peace and prosperity in the Middle east. Well, is everybody feeling that? How is this external pressure affecting everyone else? And when we put a lot of support, we remove sanctions from somewhere like Syria, how will that affect a place like Lebanon who has been highly impacted by the failures occurring in that country? Thanks for joining me on the Watch Floor. Stay tuned for future episodes where we break down some of these hotspots that aren't focused on as much, but they do play valuable roles and we should talk about them. Thanks for tuning in.