With countries such as Syria, Iraq and Egypt and the Daesh, al-Qaida, the PKK and its Syrian offshoot Democratic Union Party (PYD) terrorist groups, our region is surrounded by coups, blockades, proxy wars and chaos. Cities are ravaged and millions of people are massacred while millions of others are forced to become refugees.
But what is this war for? Is it for religious or sectarian reasons or is it a war to eliminate the “Islamic terroism”, which is a man-made plague? The big picture needs to be seen in order to understand the truth. Each country in the region, including Turkey, is led astray to distract them from looking at the big picture.
Over the past month, the major topic in Turkey’s domestic politics has been main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) Chairman Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s justice march and the discourse on the “controlled coup” promoted by the party, although the fight against the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ) urgently needs to be focused on. A similar situation is seen in foreign politics.
The Qatar crisis came at a moment when a new step was expected with regard to the Syrian crisis. Meanwhile, in the midst of the chaos, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an arms agreement worth $350 billion with Saudi Arabia. Following this, a new environment of turmoil was created before anyone could see what was happening. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) took action and imposed a blockade on Qatar all of a sudden, accusing the country of abetting terrorism.
What do these developments stand for? While Turkey and the people of the region are tackling their own domestic affairs or killing each other in proxy wars, what are the motivations of global powers? The answer to this question clarifies what is so far only vaguely seen in the big picture, since it discloses the multi-billion dollar profits arms dealers make and the conflict of interests between imperialist powers led by the U.S. and EU.
The $110 billion part of the $350 billion agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia has kicked in immediately. Large U.S.-based weapons companies, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon, are also involved in the deal. Following the agreement, defense companies made profits of multi-billion dollars in the U.S. stock market.
The conflicts of interest are far more visible in the Qatar crisis. Only five days after the crisis broke out and Trump denounced Qatar as a “high-level” sponsor of terrorism, U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Qatar Defense Minister Khalid al-Attiyah finalized a $12 billion deal for the purchase of 36 F-16 jets, which was the first part of a deal corresponding to a total of $21 billion and 72 jets.
The incoherence is more than obvious. Following the deal, the Pentagon said that the sale “will give Qatar a state-of-the-art capability and increase security cooperation and interoperability between the United States and Qatar.”
The U.S. has entirely different concerns. The country has created 60,000 new business opportunities in 42 states thanks to the deal. In addition, the U.S. expects contributions to the U.S. economy, workforce, companies and politicians with the Saudi deal, which is 15-times bigger than the one with Qatar.
Even this detail is striking: According to a statement from the Lockheed Martin CEO, the company expects to gain $28 billion from the Saudi deal. This case also evokes the bribery scandal from the 1970s. During these years, many governments fell while prime ministers and even princes were put on trial with a bribery scandal that broke out in many countries, including Japan, the Netherlands and Turkey. Only Turkey was unaffected from this. Currently, a new bribery scandal ignited by the Airbus affair is looming over the West and puts the U.S. and EU at loggerheads. I will delve into the details of this in another article.
COURTESY: This article was originally published in Daily Sabah.
