As the world watches the rapid transformation of Qatar from wealthy trusted ally in the West’s War on Terror and host to US CENTCOM, the most important US overseas military installation, to having President Trump declare Qatar “… historically being a funder of terrorism at a very high level”, the bigger question is whether Saudi Arabia is next.
All the elements are there. Qatar, for all its pretensions, is small potatoes. Saudi Arabia has for decades provided the ideological foundation and generous funding for terrorism. When President Trump accused Qatar of supporting “extremist ideology” and funding for terrorism he could just as easily have substituted Saudi Arabia and been even more truthful.
From Chechnya, Afghanistan and Al Qaeda to ISIS and the alphabet soup of terror groups in Syria; Saudi Arabia’s hands are dripping in the blood of innocents…plus, the Americans know it and can prove it, if and when its convenient to do so.
For years the Takfiri/Jihadi conglomerate has had a raw and rough face that is the Saudi brand…think Bin Laden, Zawahiri, Taliban, Baghdadi. There have also been the Takfiris in Suits or Tuxedo Takfiris as one commentator has called them. This has been the province of Qatar and to a lesser extent Turkey, Abu Dhabi and Kuwait…Morsi, Qaradawi and Erdogan are the well known faces of this Wahhabi-Lite, Muslim Brotherhood version.
Together, they have all worked to promote the extremist ideological Wahhabi distortion of Islam wherein anyone disagreeing with them was declared outside the faith; i.e., excommunicated, to use a term with which Christians will be familiar, and subject to death. Just like medieval Christian Inquisition and excommunication resulted in loss of life and property, the Wahhabi Takfiris have put hundreds of thousands to the sword, gun, bomb and knife, seized their property and even enslaved their women and children. In many cases they have proudly video-taped their atrocities and broadcast them worldwide with the help of YouTube and Facebook.
Their first targets are Muslims who don’t subscribe to their views, but Christians and those of other faiths are also slaughtered and expelled from their homes mercilessly. With the generous support of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other Gulf states, the Takfiris in Syria declared “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the grave” and when they were flush with their early successes boasted that once they were finished with the Alawite Assad they would slaughter Hassan Nasrallah (head of Hezbollah) like a sacrificial animal and purge Lebanon of Shias.
The coordinated attack on Qatar, starting with the hacking of Qatar’s State News Agency website to plant inflammatory remarks and the lockstep response and escalation by Saudi Arabia and it allies, with the full support of Tweeter-in-Chief Trump, sounds like the demonization usually reserved for targets of regime change.
Some commentators have pointed to Qatar’s considerable wealth, and in particular its Sovereign Wealth Fund as being resources that can be used to resist its enemies. However, it would be easy for the US to announce the freezing or seizure of Qatar’s deposits and investments on the basis of their involvement in terrorism.
As the world’s largest exporter of LNG and one of the top three owners of gas reserves, Qatar is a juicy target. Similarly, Saudi Arabia is the world’s number one oil exporter with the planet’s largest oil reserves. Who needs the Paris Climate Change Accords when they can quite easily gobble up Qatar now and Saudi Arabia later? The US already operates more than a dozen military bases in the Gulf region and unlike the military forces of Iran and North Korea, the Qatari and Saudi armed forces are pushovers.
That’s an awful lot of oil, gas and cash in sovereign wealth funds just there for the taking from regimes that can easily be proven to be behind the vast majority of the world’s terrorism…some might even be thinking that it would be a way to Make America Great Again! After all, President Trump is on record as saying that the US should have kept the Iraqi oil and might have another chance to do so.
Trump might just go for it…stay tuned!
UPDATE, June 18, 2017: Just a week after accusing Qatar of sponsoring terrorism, the US agreed to sell Qatar 36 F-15 fighters for 12 Billion dollars. The numbers don’t make sense! An F-15 costs about 30 Million, so 36 F-15s should cost less than 1.1 Billion dollars. What’s the extra 11 Billion dollars for? Does this mean Qatar is off the hook because of their generosity? Hmmm!