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One of the ways Hezbollah earns money — about one billion dollars a year — is by drug trafficking. It controls much of the sale of drugs sent from Colombia and Venezuela to customers in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. For eight years, beginning in 2008, a wide-ranging investigation by the Drug Enforcement Agency known as Project Cassandra uncovered how Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle Eastern political and military organization into an international crime syndicate, but Project Cassandra was shut down by the Obama administration, that wanted to go easy on Hezbollah in order to curry favor with Iran at a time when the administration wanted Tehran to agree to the “Iran deal” that, it was hoped, would stop Iran’s nuclear project from proceeding (spoiler alert: it didn’t). More on the Obama administration’s folly can be found here: “Hezbollah received billions of dollars thanks to Obama shutting down a DEA operation to destroy its drug smuggling operations,” Elder of Ziyon, October 28, 2024:

In 2017, Politico broke a story that has particular relevance to what is happening in Lebanon today.

In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.

“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” said David Asher, who helped establish and oversee Project Cassandra as a Defense Department illicit finance analyst. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

The article also notes how the Obama administration was convinced that Hezbollah had “moderate” elements that could be encouraged….

Of course, there is no “moderate” wing of Hezbollah. This was a fantasy that the greenhorns in the Obama administration allowed themselves to believe.

Did Obama’s attempt to curry favor with Iran by ending an investigation into Hezbollah for drug-and-weapons trafficking work? Did the “Iran deal” that Tehran ultimately agreed to actually halt Iran’s march to nuclear weapons, or only slow it down? Tehran did not stop working on its nuclear project, but the Obama administration refused to recognize its own folly in trusting the Iranians to uphold their side of the Iran deal. Still worse, despite the evidence amassed by the investigators of Operation Cassandra, there was no attempt to stop Hezbollah from continuing its drug trafficking operation. The billion dollars it took in paid both for weapons (not all of its weapons are supplied free by Iran) and for the salaries of its fighters. The Middle East would have become a very different place if the Obama administration had gone after Hezbollah as a criminal enterprise, and shut down its trafficking operations. Had that happened, perhaps Obama would have earned his undeserved and inexplicable Nobel Peace Prize.