The recent formation of the Lebanese Council of Ministers, now a majority-Hezbollah cabinet, has provoked calls from U.S. lawmakers to halt all aid to Lebanon on the basis that Hezbollah is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. The U.S. federal budget for fiscal year 2011 allots $246 million in foreign aid to Lebanon, of which $100 million is allocated for military aid and which also includes millions for education, social services, economic development, and counter-terrorism operations. Some insist that any and all of this aid would fall into the hands of Hezbollah, and that the United States should immediately halt the transfer of these funds. Others, however, explain that stopping this aid would have disastrous results on the Lebanese population itself and could represent a U.S. "abandonment" of Lebanon as a foreign policy interest. A middle-of-the-road approach, recently introduced by Representative Howard Berman, is the Hezbollah Anti-Terrorism Act, which supports cutting off aid that would go to a Hezbollah-controlled government but retains democracy-building and humanitarian crises as exceptions, without specifically addressing the issue of aid to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF).

Would halting military aid to Lebanon impact the country's stability? Could it weaken the LAF in a way that would work against U.S. interests? Or, conversely, is the risk of American weapons ending up in Hezbollah's hands too great? How would ceasing the other types of aid affect Lebanon, if at all?

Fikra Forum asked for responses to these questions from Lebanese activists in the United States, as well as Lebanese youth inside and outside of Lebanon - all of whom have varying opinions. The following are their contributions to the discussion.