Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Islamic Terrorism, Russia and the Anglo-American Establishment
The ‘coincidences’ and connections have been coming thick and fast over the past few days. Blink and you’ll miss them.
First we had the London bridge terror attack, just two weeks after the Manchester bombing and just a week before what are perhaps the most crucial UK general elections in a generation.
In the last few days we were treated to the farcical spectacle of Qatar being ‘outed’ as a jihadi terrorism sponsor by arch jihadi terror sponsor, Saudi Arabia. That’s pretty much the same as McDonalds accusing Burger King of selling junk food, so there’s obviously more to this ‘spat’ than meets the eye (or the mainstream media are reporting). Coming just a couple of days after the jihadi terror attack on London Bridge, the timing of the Saudi accusation was apparently meant to convey the message, ‘blame Qatar, not us!’
Also relevant to the jihadi-terror lovers’ tiff is the long-delayed “sensitive” UK government report into Saudi funding of terrorism in the UK. This report is, of course, even more “sensitive” given the upcoming UK elections where the Conservative [establishment] government, (which is extremely close to the Saudi head-choppers and very much enjoys selling them large quantities of weapons) is seeking a ‘mandate’ from the British people to provide 5 more years of Saudi-funded terrorism on British soil, not to mention Syria, Libya, Iran and anywhere else where the mass murder of civilians can be put to good geopolitical use.
Another likely motivation for the Saudi smack-down on Qatar is the fact that the Qataris (the world’s largest Liquified Natural Gas exporter) have been engaging in far too much realpolitik as regards Iran and Russia.
Both Iran and Qatar share ownership of the massive Pars/North Dome gas and oil field in the Persian gulf (by far the largest in the world). Vast quantities of oil and gas still lie untapped beneath the gulf floor. While the Qataris have been exporting since the mid-90s, it was only last year that the Iranians secured a deal with France’s Total energy company (along with China’s CNPC and Iran’s Petropars) to expand extraction in their section of the field.
Interestingly, Total (along with several other Western energy corps) are also involved the Qatar gas business. The problem, however, is the shared nature of that field. While both countries have maritime borders defining what they ‘own’, the gas field does not recognize those boundaries and the amount of gas recoverable by either country depends on how much each can extract (gas tends to flow into emptied spaces).
Since sanctions against Iran were lifted in 2015, the Iranians have been steadily catching up with the Qataris in gas production. It makes economic and logistical sense therefore for the Qataris to strike a deal with the Iranians on exploiting their communal field, and that seems to be what they have quietly been doing in recent months. To make matters worse, last year Qatar bought a 19.5% stake in Russian energy giant Rosneft for $10.2 billion, the first foreign interest ever permitted to do so.
All of this raises the specter of the possible resurrection of some version of the Qatar-Turkey pipeline that was intended to send Qatari gas through Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria to Turkey, and on to Europe. When the original pipeline plan was nixed by Assad in order to “protect the interests of their Russian ally” (Russia dominates the EU gas market), Syria was embroiled in a ‘civil war’ (that had long been planned) fueled by Qatari and Saudi-backed jihadi mercenaries with the direct help of Western governments.
In the last year, however, the chimerical Qatari royals appear to have finally accepted that Assad isn’t going anywhere and Russia is in the Middle East to stay. So what may really be spooking the Saudis and their Western allies of late is not just the prospect of an Iran/Syria/Russia alliance in the Middle East, but one that includes the Qataris and their massive gas reserves.
So you can start to see why during his Saudi trip Trump called on “all nations of conscience to isolate Iran” and why the Saudis recently took a step in that direction by threatening the Qataris. You can also understand why today jihadis (no doubt funded by the Saudis) killed 12 people in an attack in Tehran, and why the Iranians immediately blamed the Saudis. And, to round out the farce, when the Qataris responded to Saudi accusations of ‘funding terrorism’ by stating that a Qatari news channel had been hacked and a fake story planted linking the Qatari royals to Iran, the temptation was too much for the US ‘deep state’ to bear, and via their official propaganda channel – CNN – they permitted ‘unnamed sources’ to reveal that the Russians were behind the Qatari ‘hack’.
As I’ve written about on several occasions, terrorism is being used as a foil for the war over who will control Middle Eastern natural resources and therefore, who will ‘control the world’. The anglo-American establishment has long since thrown its lot in with the Saudi headchoppers who sit on the largest oil reserves and production facilities in the world. American firepower and Saudi oil has made it possible for the West to reign supreme for many decades. But that era appears to be rapidly coming to a close.
Sadly, there is little hope that the ‘exceptional’ anglo-American establishment and their head-chopping ideological brothers will bow out gracefully. No indeed, their approach seems to be similar to the one portrayed by the quintessential power-mad tyrant as represented in literature throughout the ages – you know, the guy who, when faced with his inevitable fall from power and grace, decides something along the lines of ‘if I can’t have it, no one can!‘
How very cliché of them.
Update: Three recent news stories that lend support to my analysis above:
Turkey deploys more troops to Qatar
Qatari Foreign Minister to Visit Moscow on Saturday
Iran ready to send food aid to Qatar in face of Saudi Sanctions