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As TomDispatch regular Juan Cole (whose Informed Comment website is a daily must-read) reminds us, wherever Donald Trump lands -- in this country or just about anywhere else on Earth -- he has a tendency to turn worlds upside down. His recent trip to the Middle East, as Cole makes vividly clear today, did just that when it came to Israel and the oil regimes of the region and not only because he came away with a "free" gift of a Boeing 747-8 jet from Qatar (after Boeing itself proved incapable of producing a new Air Force One plane faintly on time for Trump). Mind you, when it comes to airplanes and air power, that's just the tip of the ice (or do I mean air?) berg. After all, while the Qataris offered that plane for free -- "one of the biggest foreign gifts ever received by the U.S. government for use by a specific person," as the New York Times reported -- that was nothing compared to the $1 billion that will go into retrofitting the plane for the president or the $8 billion Qatar has already invested in its Al Udeid Air Base, so that it can continue to be used by the U.S. military to support its operations throughout the Middle East. And hey, while there, the president did indeed speak to U.S. service personnel at that very base and announced that the Qataris were planning to spend another -- yes! -- $10 billion on it.
Oh, and while he was at it, President Trump essentially turned the Middle East upside down by removing U.S. sanctions on Syria and meeting with its new president Ahmad al-Shara, the former head of an al-Qaeda affiliate known as the Al Nusra Front, who once had a U.S. bounty of $10 million on his head. The American president insisted that Syria deserved "a fresh start." And oh (again), in case you've forgotten, though it went unmentioned while he was in the Middle East, there's nothing fresh about the 1,000 troops that, as Nick Turse reminds us at The Intercept, the U.S. still stations in Syria, though for what purpose at this point remains essentially unknown.
In a sense, except for its overwhelming support of Israel, Washington's policy in the Middle East in this century has long been chaotic. And in its grim and brutal campaign not just against Hamas but against, it seems, more or less every Palestinian living anywhere in Gaza, Israel appears to be turning much of the Middle East upside down. Now, as Cole reports, Donald Trump seems ready to lend a hand in flipping that region (at least as Washington has long known it) upside down as well. What follows that and him (and Benjamin Netanyahu), no one can possibly know. Tom
Is Trump's Axis of the Plutocrats Marginalizing Israel?
And What Does the Future Hold in the Middle East?
By Juan Cole
Colorful career criminal Willie Sutton once may (or may not) have been asked why he robbed banks. "Because that is where the money is," he supposedly replied. A similar principle may explain the first foreign trip of President Donald J. Trump's second term, which was not to a traditional U.S. ally in Europe. Rather, he set off to visit the capitals of the Gulf hydrocarbon potentates Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. In royal palaces there, he feasted and was offered hundreds of billions of dollars in investments in American companies and opportunities for the Trump Organization, too. Qatar even courted controversy by giving him a $400 million Boeing 747-8 plane to serve as a future Air Force One.
And the publicity was regal. Strikingly missing, however, was a side trip to Israel or any evident consultations with the extremist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Instead, Israel was frozen out and blindsided by Trump's pronouncements. On the eve of his trip, the president took the Israelis by surprise when he abruptly announced that he would halt his (costly and fruitless) bombing campaign against the Houthis of Yemen. Israeli leaders then had to listen to Trump proclaim that the U.S. "has no stronger partner" than Saudi Arabia, with which he brokered a $142 billion deal for American arms. The United Arab Emirates has a sovereign wealth fund of $2.2 trillion, while Saudi Arabia's is $1.1 trillion and that country's leader, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, has already deposited $2 billion of it in the investment firm of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. Qatar's sovereign wealth fund has $526 billion. And such sums don't even include those countries' vast currency reserves, earned by selling petroleum and fossil gas.
And in that single, several-day trip, President Trump managed to realign U.S. Middle Eastern policy to center on -- and yes, it should be capitalized! -- an Axis of the Plutocrats, Gulf sheikhs who are using their galactic fortunes to reshape the region from Libya to Sudan, Egypt to Syria, and who are hungrily eyeing new investment opportunities in areas like the emerging artificial intelligence industry.
Syria: A Very Strong Background
Oh, and while he was traveling Trump revealed that Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and Saudi Arabia's bin Salman had indeed convinced him to lift American sanctions on Syria, a step distinctly opposed by the Israelis. While in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, he even held a surprise meeting with fundamentalist Syrian President Ahmad al-Shara, who had once led an al-Qaeda affiliate. Asked about whether the Israelis opposed the step, Trump replied, "I don't know. I didn't ask them about that." In fact, the Associated Press reported that, in an April meeting with Trump, Netanyahu had specifically pleaded with him not to lift those sanctions on Syria, since he claimed he feared that the new fundamentalist government there might eventually stage an attack on Israel.
Trump appears to have been entirely unmoved by Netanyahu's plea. After meeting al-Shara in Riyadh, the president summed up his view of the former guerrilla and supporter of hardline Salafi Islam this way: "Young, attractive guy. Tough guy. Strong past. Very strong past. Fighter." On recognizing Damascus's new government and issuing a waiver on those congressionally mandated sanctions, Trump observed, "Now it's their time to shine" So, I say, 'Good luck, Syria.' Show us something very special." It's worth noting that al-Shara claims he wants good relations with all his country's neighbors and is open to peace with Israel.
You wouldn't know it from Netanyahu's heated rhetoric, but during the Syrian civil war of the last decade, Israel did give medical help to the Support Front (Jabhat al-Nusra) that al-Shara founded and led when it was fighting against Bashar al-Assad's dictatorial regime. Since al-Shara's group sometimes persecuted the heterodox Druze minority in Syria, this step outraged Israel's own Druze minority, some of whom at one point attacked an ambulance taking a wounded Syrian rebel to an Israeli hospital, while the group's leaders lobbied Netanyahu to cease aiding the al-Qaeda-linked outfit.
Netanyahu's recent suggestions to Trump that al-Shara, now in control of much of Syria, poses a threat to Israel, were therefore wholly disingenuous. Moreover, the jackboot is entirely on the other foot. As soon as the revolution in Damascus succeeded, Netanyahu ordered an orgy of destruction, bombing naval ships in the Syrian port of Latakia and military installations across the country, leaving Syria virtually helpless. Israeli troops then marched into Syria, occupying swathes of its territory and taking control of a dam that supplies 40% of its water. Israeli far-right cabinet member Bezalel Smotrich then pledged that Israel's multi-front war of expansion there would only end when Syria was -- you couldn't put it more bluntly than this -- "dismantled."
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