".. Creation of a Lebanese massive & greedy elite, ...bent on sustaining conflict.."

"...earlier this year, Feltman publicly testified before a subcommittee of the Senate committee on foreign relations. He stated that in order to "create alternatives to extremism, reduce Hezbollah's appeal to Lebanon's youth … we have contributed more than $500m to this effort since 2006".
So, if the US has paid half a billion dollars, what is the Saudi number? Or Qatar's?
Part of the answer can be found in the estimated spending on Lebanon's 2009 parliamentary elections. BBC's Nada Abdel-Samad reported in June last year that spending in the elections had reached unprecedented levels: a billion dollars, evenly split between both sides.
According to this report, each campaign has spent $500m dollars – which is $150m less than Barack Obama's record-breaking electoral fundraising. If this estimate is true, the spending in Lebanon's elections matches the Democrat and Republican presidential campaigns expenditures combined....
Do such vast funds risk creating an enriched elite whose welfare depends on sustaining the tensions and the funds, rather than accelerating the end of the crisis?
In 2002, economists Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler investigated a set of conflicts in the years 1960-99, and found that greed (finance) "considerably outperforms" grievance (ethnic and religious divisions, political repression and inequality) in prolonging conflicts. The authors of the World Bank report, titled "Greed and grievance in civil war", mentioned "primary commodity exports" and "a large diaspora" as factors that increase the risk of conflict.
In Lebanon's case, which currently falls short of a civil war, the regional and international players finance the crisis, while the diaspora plays a lesser role. Would Collier and Hoeffler's model apply? In light of those massive funds (per capita), does the greed outweigh the grievances?
Lebanon is definitely facing the prospect of a prolonged crisis whose grievances seem strong and very much alive, but when considering the usually short-lived efforts to resolve the crisis, and the money that is poured in from outside, one might ask: why kill the goose that lays all the golden eggs?..."