Trump’s
Anti-Iran Coalition
By Abdel
Bari Atwan
February 21, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Raialyoum"
- Donald Trump’s new US administration has
adopted the idea of forming a new Arab-Israeli
axis to fight Iran. The objective is not
actually to declare war on the Islamic Republic,
but to exploit the notion of a growing Iranian
threat to get the ‘Sunni’ Arabs to fully
normalize with the Israeli occupation, and to
milk the Gulf states’ depleting coffers to fund
American infrastructure projects as promised
during Trump’s election campaign.
The
Obama administration also exploited the Iranian
threat for the same purpose, selling $130
billion worth of sophisticated aircraft and
weaponry to the Gulf states, even while planning
to contain Iran by political means and engage it
in secret negotiations.
The
right-wing Wall Street Journal reported on
Wednesday that the Trump administration is in
talks with Arab allies about having them form a
military alliance that would share intelligence
with Israel to help counter Iran. It would be
based in Egypt, and would include that country
along with Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan.
Neither the formation of such a coalition nor
the inclusion of Israel as a
security/intelligence partner comes as any
surprise. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu has said openly and on-the-record that
his country’s ties with Saudi Arabia and other
Gulf states do not need developing as they are
already developed.
This
alliance will be bankrolled by the Gulf states,
and its victims will be Arabs – and especially
Yemenis. Given its relative military weakness,
Yemen is likely to be the alliance’s first
testing-ground given its military weakness,
under the pretext of countering Iran’s influence
and its armed proxies – meaning the Houthi-Saleh
alliance – in the country.
The
payback to these Arab states, especially Saudi
Arabia, for joining an unprecedented alliance
with Israel is likely to be two-fold: amendment
of the JASTA law which would allow victims of
the 9/11 attacks, whose perpetrators were mostly
Saudis, to sue for compensation; and US
designation of the Muslim Brotherhood movement
as a terrorist organization.
Agreeing to this alliance would be an act of
political and financial suicide by its four
proposed Arab members. It is trap into which a
US administration that is despised both at home
and internationally is trying to drag them in
order to drain their resources. Regrettably,
they seem to be walking into it with their eyes
wide open.
The US
is using the Iranian bogeyman to extort the Arab
states and bog them down in sectarian wars.
Sadly, they have been submitting to this
extortion and raising white flags of surrender.
They refuse to learn from previous experiences
which affirm that while Iran is becoming
stronger and more influential, they — as
‘moderate’ Arab friends of the US — have become
increasingly weak, ineffective and bankrupt in
every sense.
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It is
telling that Trump should be setting out to form
this alliance at the same time as pronouncing
the two-state solution in Palestine dead and
buried and giving his ally Netanyahu the green
light to hasten settlement expansion and swallow
up whatever remains of the West Bank’s land.
Nothing
could better illustrate the new low to which the
Arab decline has sunk.
