Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Islamic terrorist group in control of Lebanon, used to boast that it was unbeatable because of its arsenal of over 100,000 missiles and rockets.

That arsenal, which was severely depleted by Israel before the Biden imposed ceasefire, relied heavily on a large collection of anti-tank missiles that could also be used against civilian targets, shelters and even, in the case of a Hamas attack in 2011 with a Russian Kornet, a school bus.

The TOW missile, originally developed in the 1960s, is a mainstay of the terrorist arsenal.

Hezbollah’s TOW missiles come from a variety of sources. The United States sold TOWs to the old Iranian government and after the Islamic takeover, the new regime cranked out copies called ‘Toophans’ which its Islamic terrorist networks have distributed to Jihadists around the region.

The Obama administration had also handed out TOW missiles like candy to Sunni Jihadists across the border during the Syrian civil war. Some of these were captured by Shiite Jihadists, including Hezbollah, fighting for the Assad regime and then transported to Lebanon.

Russia has been passing along to Iran the captured weapons that the United States had sent to Ukraine. Iran will attempt to reverse engineer our more advanced weaponry, but any TOW missiles will be directed to Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas and other allied terror groups.

But there is still yet another troubling question about the source of some of Hezbollah’s TOWs.

In 2015, the Obama administration announced its intention of selling 1,000 TOW 2A anti-armor missiles and 500 bunker buster TOW BGM-71s along with “launchers, containers, spare and repair parts, support equipment, publications and technical documentation, personnel training and training equipment” to Lebanon’s military. But whom was Lebanon’s military going to fight?

The only tanks the Lebanese Armed Forces were likely to meet in battle were Israeli ones.

The State Department claimed that sending anti-tank rockets to Lebanon, “will enhance the foreign policy and national security of the United States”, without actually clarifying how sending missiles into a terrorist state and training the locals to use them would enhance American national security. It also argued that the anti-tank missiles would allow Lebanon to “meet current and future threats and provide greater security for its critical infrastructure” without clarifying who besides Israel might be considered as posing a threat to Lebanon’s infrastructure.

The Lebanese Armed Forces are a threadbare operation which made headlines for selling helicopter tours to tourists. Its military has been hardly active and exists as a jobs program, a way to soak up U.S. foreign aid and is functionally little more than a puppet of Hezbollah. The same military that could only afford $90 monthly salaries for its soldiers and was using choppers for tourism tours somehow needed $245 million worth of missiles from the United States.

Much of the LAF’s officer class came out of Hezbollah and top military leaders have been caught coordinating with Hezbollah. Training and arming the LAF is training and arming Hezbollah. And ultimately aiding Iran’s ability to use its proxies to start another war.

After the first delivery of anti-tank missiles, Obama officials claimed that they were needed to help fight Al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria. The Obama administration also sent Bradley fighting vehicles, hellfire missiles, howitzers, laser-guided artillery shells, grenade launchers, 1,100 machine guns, including 800 50-caliber machine guns, 4,000 M4 rifles, half a million rounds of ammunition, and other equipment under the guise of helping the LAF fight ISIS.

The LAF however avoided fighting ISIS for years, apart from a few brief clashes, and then stood aside while Hezbollah engaged in a more prolonged engagement that ended in a ceasefire between the two terrorist groups while the LAF fiddled with the equipment we had given them.

The Obama administration had sent a fortune in weaponry to the LAF for a fake war in which Hezbollah and ISIS cut their own deal, while Hezbollah’s puppet army pocketed our weapons. And all of this armament was only a small part of the more than $3 billion in military aid provided by the United States since 2006 to Lebanon’s military which runs tours rather than fight.

But the real question is how much of that armament eventually made its way over to Hezbollah?

When Hezbollah barraged Israeli frontline communities with rockets and missiles in the months after Oct 7, did any of them come from the rockets that Obama sent to Lebanon?

During the 2006 war with Hezbollah, Israeli forces had captured Hezbollah supplies of TOW missiles carrying U.S. markings that had likely been sold to U.S. Muslim ‘allies’  in the region, but by providing TOW missiles directly to Lebanon’s armed forces, Obama may have cut out the middleman and enabled Hezbollah to benefit directly from U.S. weapons and training.

Obama had sent pallets of cash to Iran and provided an even bigger fortune in sanctions relief, but the transfer of anti-tank and bunker busting missiles to a military organization manned by Hezbollah operatives provided the most direct link yet between the administration’s support for Iran’s axis of terror and the carnage that it wrought in Israel.

Hezbollah attacks on Israel caused the deaths of civilians. And the Obama administration knew what would happen because as far back as the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon under the Clinton administration in 1999-2000, the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center described how “using American-made, tube-launched, optically-tracked, wire-guided missiles (TOWs)”, Hezbollah continued its campaign of attacks on Christian Lebanese and Israeli forces.

American weapons were being used by Islamic terrorists to kill Christians in Lebanon.

The Obama administration was staffed by many veterans of the Clinton administration, including Secretary of State Blinken, who surely knew what would happen and did it anyway, and then went on to promote the same policies, providing yet more weapons to Lebanon during the Biden administration. And yet, as documented in a previous Front Page Magazine article, “The U.S. Sent Over $3 Billion to Hezbollah’s ‘Army’”, even at the very end of its time in office, reprogrammed millions in military aid for Israel to the Lebanese Armed Forces.

Rep. Greg Steube introduced the PAGER Act (Preventing Armed Groups from Engaging in Radicalism) to stop “sending U.S. taxpayer dollars to Lebanon.”

“For two years I filed an amendment to the annual State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations bill to eliminate funding to the Lebanese Armed Forces, as the money goes to Hezbollah. Republicans and Democrats continue to vote it down.”

American taxpayer money should not be used to arm Islamic terrorists.