Existentially Desperate Saudi Arabia funding Regional War footing

Saudi Arabia gives Lebanon $3bn to bolster military
The Guardian – 29 December, 2013

Lebanon said on Sunday night that it had received its biggest ever infusion of military aid, as Saudi Arabia offered to contribute $3bn to bolster the country’s beleaguered army in the face of spiralling violence and fallout from the conflict in neighbouring Syria.

The president, Michel Suleiman, said on national television that he would discuss the purchase of French weapons with his visiting French counterpart, François Hollande, as a result of the donation.

“The king of the brotherly kingdom of Saudi Arabia is offering this generous and appreciated aid of $3bn to the Lebanese army to strengthen its capabilities,” Suleiman said in a televised address. “The Saudi grant will allow the Lebanese army to purchase weapons from France.”

Lebanon is struggling to cope with the fallout from the civil war in Syria. That conflict has deeply divided Lebanon along sectarian lines, and paralysed the country’s ramshackle political system to the point that it has been stuck with a weak and ineffectual caretaker government since April.

A wave of deadly bombings and shootings have fuelled fears that Lebanon, which suffered a brutal 15-year civil war of its own that ended only in 1990, could be slowly slipping back towards full-blown sectarian conflict. The latest violence took place on Friday, when a car bomb killed a senior Sunni politician who had been critical of Syria and its Lebanese ally, the Shia militant group Hezbollah.

Addressing those concerns, Suleiman said in his address that “Lebanon is threatened by sectarian conflict and extremism” and that strengthening the army was a popular demand. …more