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By Ishaal Zehra
Islamabad
Trump surely knows what he wants and how to get it. And apparently what he wants has little to do with peace, stability or prosperity. This has become more evident after assessing the recent Riyadh Summit which saw a good gathering of Muslim heads of state from around the world. He wasn’t there to promote peace and tolerance, as he later proclaimed in his speech to the Arab autocrats, but to sell weapons to the Saudis.
He went to Saudi Arabia to prepare the Sunni Muslims of the Middle East wage a war against the Shia Muslims (read Iran). His focal aim was to secure the arm deals with KSA worth billions of dollars, which was eventually accomplished. Reading between the lines it means that trump will give Riyadh US missiles, planes, ships and ammo amounting to hundreds of billions dollars for the war-to-come. America will be happy (financially) and containing the ‘Shia’ Iran at the cost of ‘Sunni’ Muslims will make the anti-Islam lobby happy too. Trump treated terrorism in the Middle East as a business opportunity to create jobs at home and enrich his defense industry tycoons.
"That was a tremendous day. Tremendous investments in the United States," Trump said after the event. "Hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States and jobs, jobs, jobs." Commenting on the situation Hamidreza Taraghi, a hard-line analyst, said, “This man (Trump) just wants to sell American weapons and use Iran as an excuse.” However Frederic Wehrey, senior fellow in the ME Program at the Carnegie Endowment, seems very clear about trump’s approach towards this whole event. He says, “It is feeding into the gulf narrative, where they project a lot of their insecurities about domestic politics outward and onto the Islamic Republic of Iran, but is Iran the source of all evil in the region? No.”
Trump appealed the Muslim nations to ensure that “terrorists find no sanctuary on their soil”, and announced an agreement with Gulf States to combat financing for extremists. He also singled out Iran as a key source of funding and support for militant groups. Honestly, this moment, in history, would never be remembered as the beginning of peace in the world, but rather a boost to the war between Muslim countries emanating from the Middle East with the weapons provided by the US.
The Podesta emails show that Hillary Clinton believed that in Middle East “there are a lot of proxy battles going on, you know, there's proxy battles between the Saudis and the Iranis and the Jordanians and the Iranians and the Turks and, you know, it goes on and on... If you look at what's happening in Syria, it's clearly a multiply leveled proxy battle… I think that the other places that you have to watch is what's happening in the gulf, the Saudis are becoming much more active participants in Egypt, in Lybia, in Syria. There's a lot of moving parts here.” And this arms sale by the Trump administration will inevitably fuel the on-going proxy war and will take it to the next level. And if someone doesn’t know what this ‘next level’ is just try and remember the Iraq-Iran war of 1980’s.
Trump’s speech at Riyadh Summit was publicized as a major event. But we should not expect any meaningful attempts by them to decrease terrorism. Rather, the focus of US counter-terrorism strategy seems geographic - limited only to containing and fueling the violence within the Middle East and preventing it from reaching the United States.
Interestingly, President Trump who, in his magnificent speech prepared for the Muslim audience, has praised Lebanon and Turkey for accommodating Syrian refugees fleeing war at home gave his first executive order as a president to bar millions of people from Muslim countries from entering the United States. The refugee clause, directed by him, applied only to Muslim Syrian refugees while exempting Christian Syrian refugees.
One must admit that Trump quite aptly used his visit to the Saudi Arabia to try to persuade the Islamic world he is not against Muslims or Islam, but his election campaign that saw him repeatedly vilify Muslims and proposing a ban on them from entering US is still fresh in memories of those who followed the American elections with interest. Throughout his election campaign and even after that trump has repeatedly stated that Islam is a "hateful foreign ideology". His interview to CNN in March 2016 is still fresh in mind where he said, “I think Islam hates us. There is a tremendous hatred there. We have to get to the bottom of it”. This rhetoric of him encouraged his supporters to discriminate against Muslims and attack them.
It seems a deliberate move of President Trump to disconnect Islam from terrorism while addressing his Saudi arms purchasers whereas back at home he is always found rousing Islamophobia. Sahar Aziz, an associate professor at Texas A&M University School of Law and nonresident fellow at Brookings Doha Center, opines that over the past five years, extremist ideology from the right has risen at troubling levels. And Trump's speech will not put an end to the Islamophobia and bigotry that he has spent the past two years inciting. After all, he needs scapegoats to blame when the terrorism in the Middle East inevitably reaches the United States.
