Feb 29, 2016

Saudi Arabia is playing a high-stakes game in Lebanon, seeking to punish and weaken Hezbollah and Iran. It's not clear if the Saudis have an achievable end goal in mind.

Lebanon did not join an Arab League consensus in condemning Iran for the attack on the Saudi Embassy in Tehran in early January. In response, Riyadh suspended indefinitely a $3 billion program to purchase French weapons for the Lebanese military and canceled a $1 billion project to assist the Lebanese internal security service. Then it announced a travel warning discouraging tourists and others from visiting Lebanon. Several Hezbollah-connected companies have been blacklisted by Riyadh.

The Saudis’ Gulf allies quickly followed suit and issued travel bans. Saudi and Emirati banks are said to be leaving Beirut. Next, the kingdom and its allies may start sending Lebanese expatriate workers home — something that would be a major hit to Lebanon's economy given that half a million Lebanese citizens work in the Gulf.

The Saudi-Iranian rivalry in Lebanon is decades old. This current round got started last summer when Saudi spies captured Ahmed Ibrahim al-Mughassil at the Beirut airport, arriving from Tehran. Mughassil is a Saudi Shiite who has worked with Iranian intelligence for a quarter century. He was the mastermind of the deadly 1996 attack on a US Air Force barracks in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, that killed 19 Americans. Snatching Mughassil out of Lebanon was an embarrassment for Hezbollah and Iran. His subsequent debriefing probably also dealt a blow to their covert apparatus in the Gulf states.

The Russian and Iranian intervention in Syria this past fall also increased Saudi anger at Hezbollah, which provides many of the boots on the ground to attack the Sunni opposition to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Riyadh's goal in Syria is to get rid of the Iranian hand there, and Hezbollah is the center of the Iranian hand. So frustration with Beirut grew steadily in the kingdom this fall as a consequence of frustration with events in Syria.