{"id":19528,"date":"2013-12-30T14:45:29","date_gmt":"2013-12-30T21:45:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=19528"},"modified":"2013-12-30T14:45:29","modified_gmt":"2013-12-30T21:45:29","slug":"existentially-desperate-saudi-arabia-funding-regional-war-footing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=19528","title":{"rendered":"Existentially Desperate Saudi Arabia funding Regional War footing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Saudi Arabia gives Lebanon $3bn to bolster military<\/strong><br \/>\nThe Guardian &#8211; 29 December, 2013\t<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s beleaguered army in the face of spiralling violence and fallout from the conflict in neighbouring Syria.<\/p>\n<p>The president, Michel Suleiman, said on national television that he would discuss the purchase of French weapons with his visiting French counterpart, Fran\u00e7ois Hollande, as a result of the donation.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;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,&#8221; Suleiman said in a televised address. &#8220;The Saudi grant will allow the Lebanese army to purchase weapons from France.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;s ramshackle political system to the point that it has been stuck with a weak and ineffectual caretaker government since April.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Addressing those concerns, Suleiman said in his address that &#8220;Lebanon is threatened by sectarian conflict and extremism&#8221; and that strengthening the army was a popular demand.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2013\/dec\/29\/saudi-arabia-lebanon-military-aid\" target=\"_blank\">&#8230;more<\/a><\/p>\n<div class=\"igit_tsb_button\" style=\"float: left; margin-right: 10px;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/share?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.crookedbough.com%2F%3Fp%3D19528&amp;text=Existentially+Desperate+Saudi+Arabia+funding+Regional+War+footing&amp;count=horizontal&amp;via=\" style=\"\" class=\"twitter-share-button\">Tweet<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Saudi Arabia gives Lebanon $3bn to bolster military The Guardian &#8211; 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&#8217;s beleaguered army in the face of spiralling violence and fallout from the conflict in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/?p=19528#more-'\" class=\"more-link\">more \u00bb<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[247],"tags":[4176],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19528"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19528"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19528\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19529,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19528\/revisions\/19529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.crookedbough.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}