U.S. Weighs Tough Choice Over Aid for Lebanon

By ROBERT F. WORTH

Published: August 21, 2010

WASHINGTON — Earlier this month, Israeli soldiers were pruning a tree on their country’s northern border when a firefight broke out with Lebanese soldiers across the fence, leaving one Israeli and four Lebanese dead.

The skirmish seems to have been accidental. But it quickly set off a war of words in Washington and Beirut, with American lawmakers warning of Hezbollah infiltration in the Lebanese Army, and threatening to cut off $100 million in military aid.

It is a situation that has played out many times before — in Yemen, Pakistan and other countries troubled by insurgencies or militant movements and receiving American military aid — and that is likely to be repeated. The Americans want to help their friends in the Middle East while insisting that they rigorously cut off militant groups like Hezbollah, the Shiite movement that is committed to Israel’s destruction. But the realities on the ground almost always demand difficult compromises that can seem, from Washington, like dangerous concessions to the enemy.

Lebanon, for instance, is an intricate patchwork of sects and political factions where the army plays the precarious role of a middleman. No one can avoid working to some degree with Hezbollah, the most powerful military and political force in the country. The alternative, Lebanon’s pro-Western factions say, is much worse.

“Should we undermine the army and give the whole country to Hezbollah?” said Paul Salem, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. “It’s a classic ‘cut off your nose to spite your face.’ ”

So far, the State Department has strongly defended the military aid to Lebanon, saying that the army’s presence in the south helps to keep the country stable, and that withdrawing the money could create a dangerous vacuum. But the argument is likely to resurface, especially in light of Syria’s resurgent influence in Lebanon and the relative weakness of the more secular Western-allied political factions.

Even before the border skirmish, some in Congress had voiced deep unease about providing military aid to a country where Hezbollah has a place in the cabinet and runs its own inte