BACHMANN: Why would you normalize trading with a country that sponsors terror? There’s reports that have come out that Cuba has been working with another terrorist organization called Hezbollah. And Hezbollah is potentially looking at wanting to be part of missile sites in Iran and, of course, when you’re 90 miles offshore from Florida, you don’t want to entertain the prospect of hosting bases or sites where Hezbollah could have training camps or perhaps have missile sites or weapons sites in Cuba. This would be foolish.

Watch it:

There is absolutely no evidence to support her claim, which seems to be based on spurious reports in an Italian publication that did not even mention missiles.

Bachmann doesn’t appear to be too pleased that the United States has made significant strides toward normalizing relations with Cuba in the past few years.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen

The U.S. should immediately cut off assistance to the Lebanese government as long as any violent extremist group designated by the US as foreign terrorist organizations participates in it.

While Hezbollah controls most of the country’s south and maintains an armed force, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) are an under-equipped but nonsectarian institution that has cooperated with the U.N.’s mission in the south. Hezbollah, on the other hand, has received weapons from Iran and serves as a proxy for Iranian and Syrian interests in the region.

It’s unclear at this point how the new Hezbollah-dominated cabinet will govern, but it’s important to note that previous attempts to cut off aid have backfired.

When Congress put a temporary freeze on military aid last August, Iran reportedly stepped in and offered its own military assistance to the LAF. Whether Iran will offer to make up for a cut in U.S. aid if Ros-Lehtinen gets her way remains to be seen. But any steps that weaken the LAF and diminish U.S. influence in Lebanon are bound to strengthen the importance of Hezbollah’s militant wing in Lebanon as well as Iran and Syria’s regional power.

And the State Department isn’t ready to write off the potential gains from military-to-military aid for the Lebanese Armed Forces. A State official in October defended the military assistance as an important tool for strengthening democratic institutions in Lebanon:

US support to Lebanon is part of an international commitment to help strengthen the institutions of the Lebanese state and the ability of the Lebanese government to exercise its sovereignty and authority over all of its territory.

In March, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton argued for a continuation of U.S. aid to the LAF, telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

We worry that if the United States does not continue supporting the Lebanese armed forces, its capabilities will rapidly deteriorate, security in the south and along the border with Israel will be at risk.

The State Department was much slower to pass judgement on the new government. A spokesperson told reporters yesterday that it’s important “that the new Lebanese Government abide by the Lebanese constitution, that it renounce violence, including efforts to extract retribution against former government officials, and lives up to all of its international obligations.”

The ruling March 14 Coalition, heirs to the Cedar Revolution, have somewhat unexpectedly carried the day in Lebanon. This is being reported as a defeat for Hezbollah, since Hezbollah was (and is) the main party in the opposition. But Hezbollah’s actual level of electoral support is unchanged. Instead, as I said the other day, the key player was Michael Aoun and his Free Patriotic Movement. Aoun, a Christian, had aligned himself with the Hezbollah-led coalition. But he ultimately wasn’t able to carry enough of the Christian vote to put the opposition in power.

Since the March 14 Coalition is pro-Western in its orientation, this counts as a win for US foreign policy. At the same time, it’s not actually clear to me how anyone’s life in the United States is actually impacted by Lebanese electoral politics and my general sense is that it’s not wise to get too invested in these kind of proxy struggles. The fundamental issue of Hezbollah’s role in Lebanese society will, one suspects, remain unresolved as Hezbollah has no intention of surrendering its weapons and it seems it will still be the case that the Lebanese government isn’t going to be willing or able to forcibly disarm it.

One interesting issue in the current crisis is how come Hezbollah hasn’t acted aggressively to start up a second front in the north while the IDF is conducting major operations in Gaza. Abu Muquwama has some plausible sounding speculations about this. One could, I think, probably construct other scenarios. Part of the reason is almost certainly just status quo bias and inertia — on any given day, Hezbollah has a strong presumption against undertaking a dramatic escalation of the conflict with Israel.

But note that while one can adduce all kinds of reasons to explain Hezbollah’s actions, none of them are consistent with the (apparently popular in Israel as well as among US neocons) line of thinking which holds that both Hamas and Hezbollah are nothing more than puppets of Iran and extensions of Tehran’s relentless drive to eradicate Israel.

Say what you will about Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, but he has an impressive ability to stay on message, blaming the Jews for Georgia’s defeat at the hands of the Russian military:

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on Thursday asserted that “failed” Israeli generals had caused Georgia’s defeat in its current war with Russia.

“Israel exported failed generals in order to train the Georgian armed forces, including general Gal Hirsch, and we all know that the Georgian army was defeated by the Russian forces,” Nasrallah said in a speech to mark two years since the end of the Second Lebanon War.

I feel like the substantial size gap between enormous Russia and tiny Georgia may have played a larger role here, along with what looks to have been daft decision-making from the political leaders in Tbilisi.