Comment by sudosysgen
4 days ago
Most of these groups are governmental or semi-governmental, many operate hospitals, schools, and so on. They aren't small time criminals making small time goon money, they operate at the level of states and have significant legitimate income streams.
Being sanctioned organizations, they still need to launder money even if it is obtained legitimately in order to obscure their control of it. But being in the position they are, a billion dollars is not actually a huge sum compared to their assets and income streams. A conservative estimate would put total legitimate assets for Hezbollah over 10 billion dollars.
There was a time where this wasn't true, somewhere in the 1980s, but that time is long past. Iran's proxies have grown beyond directly being funded and they have largely established themselves in the social and economic fabric as an essentially governmental entity.
This is clear when you look at the US sanctioning various Lebanese businessmen and large companies in sectors from telecommunications to construction to pharmaceuticals as well as functionaries in it's government. It's not a question of selling weed.
Criminals handling quasi or even fully governmental functions to control the populace is nothing new. Look at Russia or Venezuela where it happens at massive scale.
They do have big income streams, but "legitimate" is way more than a stretch here. More like they use population for those streams, and anything else they can reach, "legitimate" or not.
Whether you like it or not, productive activity in sectors like telecom, construction, healthcare and so is simply legitimate.
Deciding that another country's laws do not matter and considering a foreign governmental entity to be criminal in its own country is just not a rational argument. Russia has a corrupt government, that doesn't change the fact the Russian government is largely self-sufficient draws its income from legitimate and productive activities.
At that point you're just making a circular argument that it's a fundamentally illegitimate organization. Well you can consider them to be, it doesn't change the fact that they have large revenue streams from productive activities that are legal within their jurisdiction, and as a result are far less reliant on Iranian funding than they used to be.
And to the point, it doesn't change the fact that Iran doesn't spend much money on their proxies anymore.
Doesn't change the fact that even such institutionalized criminals can depend on Iran's backing. Even Russia does for that matter. And that's not free and normally they'd want to be paid back in some kind of dividends. But the smaller fish is more of a one way street in expenses in exchange for serving as their muscle.