FDD Expert Reporting from Lebanon

FDD Visiting Fellow Mario Loyola is in Lebanon to report on the pro-democracy movement, Hezbollah and Iran’s ambitions, and the current political crisis. He issued his first dispatch from Beirut yesterday on National Review Online.

The article explains how Hezbollah and its allies have crippled the central government for weeks. Hezbollah’s campaign of disobedience, Loyola argues, reflects its ambitious goal: the establishment of “an alternative state — one that wants to create exclusive dependence among its supporters, and whose supreme political leader is not Lebanese but rather the Iranian religious leader Ali Khamenei.”