After the first oil price increase in 1973/1974 and the rising oil revenues, an arms race in the Middle East was deliberately fueled. This development has so far provoked numerous wars, leaving over 2 million dead and scorched earth throughout the region. The current arms race between the unholy alliance of Israel and Saudi Arabia on the one hand and Iran on the other is the culmination of an externally fueled strategy, which has brought dramatic consequences for Europe through the mass influx of refugees. How can this disaster be prevented and what would Europe have to do out of sheer self-interest?
Review of events in the Middle East 2017
The most important event in 2017 was undoubtedly the recapture of all major Islamic State-controlled cities in Syria and Iraq, notably the reconquest of Aleppo and Mosul. Mention should also be made of Donald Trump's $ 110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia in May 2017. Against the backdrop of unrestricted US backing, Saudi Arabia is engaged in a series of activities, all of which are manifestly against the - real or perceived - regional main enemy Iran: This includes first the continuation of the war in Yemen against the Houthi rebels. Riyadh blocks important ports in Yemen needed for the delivery of humanitarian goods and services. The UN warns of the "world's worst famine" in Yemen. Cholera spreads, child mortality is commonplace. In addition, Riyadh will break its ties with Qatar in July - a hitherto important ally and member of the Saudi Arabia-dominated Gulf Cooperation Council.
One of the reasons for this break is, in all likelihood, Qatar's refusal to participate in Riad's anti-Iranian encirclement policy. This policy also includes diplomatic activities in Saudi Arabia, including the visit of the Saudi King Salman in October in Moscow and then in Baghdad the same month. Also worth mentioning in this context is the bewildering appearance of Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri's newly elected Lebanese state television at the beginning of November after nearly two years of negotiations, announcing his resignation from the Lebanese government and massively attacking Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah. Trump's refusal to authorize the lifting of sanctions against Iran under the Iran Agreement agreement must also be interpreted as another element of Iran's encirclement.
Another momentous event in the region in 2017 is the development in Kurdistan. On the one hand, the Kurdish nationalist forces in Iraqi Kurdistan tried to found their own Kurdish state under the applause of Israel in northern Iraq and failed miserably. In contrast, Kurdish federalists established themselves as PYD / YPG in Syria, a very serious power factor that Turkish President Erdogan does not want to tolerate and which he has declared war under the pretext of combating terrorism.
The Syrian conflict is undoubtedly the biggest challenge for world politics at present. But this conflict should not distract from the fact that at the same time a gigantic arms race between Saudi Arabia and Iran takes place, which could soon prove to be a smoldering fire under the ashes. If the world community does not manage to contain the impending fire in time, we will all pay a very high price for it. Because a Saudi Arabian-Iranian war is likely to overshadow all previous wars and conflicts after the US war in Iraq. Striking is certainly the massive rearmament of Saudi Arabia and - in its wake - the Emirates on the Persian Gulf.
Iran's Perspective Plan 1996 to 2021
Undeniable is the fact that Iran's military preponderance over the last few decades has indeed been perceived as a threat in neighboring countries. How did it come to Iran's superiority in arms? To better understand complex conflict structures in the Middle East, this question needs clarification. An important reason for this was undoubtedly the Iranian trauma in the face of Iraqi chemical weapons deployment in the Iran-Iraq war between 1981 and 1988, which resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of invalids on the Iranian side. The trail of this crime leads to German, but above all to American supplies of chemical weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein, which had been the later Secretary of War by George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, threaded. The use of weapons of mass destruction by Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war led to the abandonment of Iran's post-revolutionary doctrine, to abandon the goal of building nuclear arsenals under the Schahregime.
The leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran began to build on the after-revolution manned and built with the help of Siemens nuclear power plant in Bushehr and also to procure all the necessary for an independent nuclear cycle technologies. Iran, increasingly under the influence of its own developing military-industrial complex, also called for the development of its own defense industry, including a missile program with launchers of various ranges. Last but not least, Russia helped Iran to close the remaining arms shortages, especially in the Air Force and the Navy. At the same time, the rulers of the Islamic Republic did not even need to legitimize their costly rearmament on domestic policy. The neo-conservative US President George W. Bush, with his constant threats and his undisguised intention to bring about a regime change in Iran, provided legitimacy for Iranian rearmament.
The Iran-Israeli conflict - a problem created by the Islamic Revolution and Iran's crackdown on the Israeli occupation of Palestine - and the fact that Israel's nuclear arsenal was the only nuclear power threat in the Middle and Near East was certainly a source of concern Building the Iranian nuclear program plays a central role. Despite this, the US and the EU, instead of embarking on a nuclear-free zone for the entire region, have chosen to unilaterally prevent Iran as a new regional nuclear power. The Iran nuclear dispute, which began in 2003 and merged into the international agreement between Iran and the West in 2015, arose from the basic security conflict that has remained unresolved despite the Iran nuclear agreement.
Militarization of the Sunni-Shiite conflict
During the peak of the nuclear dispute, Condoleezza Rice, the Secretary of State of the Bush administration, well-connected to the US defense industry, summoned the Sunni states to the capital of Saudi Arabia in the summer of 2006 against the Shiite belt of the Islamic Republic (Iran-Syria-Lebanon). build your own Sunni belt. This was the historic beginning of the militarization of the Sunni-Shiite conflict. Riyadh quickly intensified military cooperation with the Sunni states of Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf pirates, Palestine, including Hamas, and finally massively supported the "Islamic State" and other Sunni terrorist groups. Tehran's pro-active support on the side of the regime of Bashar al-Assad since the beginning of the Syrian conflict did her part, so that the Shiite Iranians in the Arab-Sunni world were hyped up as a hate object and a threat par excellence.
Contribution of the USA and Saudi Arabia to the arms race in the Middle East
All presidents of the US, including Barack Obama, have been hauled before the cart of the military-industrial complex (MIK) because the internal wars on the Persian Gulf and the diabolical cycle of oil and blood against weapons make for US hegemony in the world produce a very fundamental side effect, which, to use a term by Pentagon strategists for US policy in the Middle East, could be termed "constructive chaos." This side effect is that the oil trade is always denominated in dollars, and that the US, with the dollar as world money, still needs to worry about its economic hegemony in the world (1). In order to set in motion a permanent arms race in the Persian Gulf as a quasi-automatic upgrade, the MIK strategists caused the emergence of a military imbalance, so a long-established instrument that is propagated in the security literature to close "security holes". This gap was created by the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 2003 and the rise of Iran as the de facto strongest regional power.
In 2011, Barack Obama justified the conclusion of a gigantic arms deal with Saudi Arabia with the argument of Iran's military preponderance of Saudi Arabia. As a result of this upgrade, Saudi military spending increased dramatically from $ 29.5 billion in 2011 to $ 81 billion in 2015, according to the 2015 SIPRI Report. This puts Saudi Arabia third in the list of countries with the largest arms spending after the US and China and even ahead of Russia. In terms of gross domestic product (GDP), this country even comes first with 13.7 percent, far ahead of the Arab Emirates with 5.7 percent, Israel with 5.4 percent and the US with 3.3 percent (see Figure 1).
Saudi armaments include weapons imports of all kinds, state-of-the-art combat aircraft, combat helicopters, tanks, and warships, primarily from the United States. This rapid rearmament followed the US-terminated arms deal of November 24, 2011. Barack Obama defended Saudi rearmament by arguing Iran's military preponderance and the need to establish a military equilibrium in the Middle East.
As early as 2015, Saudi Arabia's massive rearmament seems to have largely established the "military balance" between Saudi Arabia and Iran. (see picture 2) Saudi Arabia has now built the largest army in its history. The country now has 227,000 troops, including ground troops with 175,000 troops and 600 tanks. On the other hand, there are 523,000 soldiers on the Iranian side, including ground troops with 450,000 soldiers and 2,300 tanks. Thus, the army of Iran seems to outnumber the Saudi in terms of numbers. In fact, Saudi Arabia has significantly more modern weapons than Iran. There is no question that the Iranian side with its combat-driven soldiers on the ground still has an overall advantage. However, according to experts, this advantage can be compensated for by the Saudis with their 313 state-of-the-art fighter jets, as the 332 Iranian aircraft are heavily out of date and lack much-needed spare parts. This obvious weakness tries to compensate Iran with self-produced medium-range missiles.
with stability, but with the further arms escalation in the Middle East. Donald Trump's announced and, in some cases, partially implemented political goals are clearly in the right direction. Firstly, the new US president agreed a new arms deal with Saudi Arabia in Riyadh in May 2017, at a record level of around 110 billion US dollars once again to rekindle a military preponderance in favor of Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, Trump seems to want to force Iran to dismantle its launcher by revoking Iran's nuclear deal and renegotiating it.
This was to seriously weaken Iran's military deterrent potential and make the country vulnerable. In any event, both measures are likely to drive Iran into a new and more massive round of upgrading, in the spirit of the country's militarist forces. Here, the historical parallel of Reagan's policy of killing the Soviet Union can be brought into focus. Whether this assumption is correct or whether this strategy can lead to a regime change in Iran remains open. What is certain, however, is that the current arms race in the Middle East is further exacerbating conflicts in the region and is likely to provoke a new war with unimaginable consequences for the peoples, for the economies and the environment in the region.
The arms race of the 1970s shook the entire region
Remember, the arms race between Iran and Iraq in the second half of the 1970s - to take historical facts as evidence - eventually led to the eight-year Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, with one million war victims, including three hundred thousand dead tens of thousands dead as victims of Iraqi chemical weapons. After 1975, the Iranian Shah regime - at that time the main ally of the US - just as oil revenues soared, was upgraded with all sorts of US weapons, including state-of-the-art fighter jets, and spurred on to the strongest regional power. It was certainly no accident that this meant a military preponderance of their own ally in the Middle East. Iran's rival for supremacy in the region promptly responded: Iraq's massive rearmament of Saddam Hussein, particularly by the Soviet Union. While Iran's defense spending increased more than threefold from $ 2.1 billion to $ 6.2 billion over the period 1975-1980, Iraq's defense spending increased more than six-fold from $ 0.3 billion to $ 2.1 billion over the same period ,
This arms race shook the internal and external power relations in the region. In 1979, the Shah regime was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution. Regime loyal army generals were partly executed, partly beaten to flight. The collapse of the leadership structure of the Iranian army created a military power vacuum. For Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who now felt militarily superior, the hour had come to make his old dream of gaining direct access to the Persian Gulf come true. In a blitzkrieg in 1981 he occupied the southern Iranian oil region. The Iran-Iraq arms race in the 1970s not only triggered the Gulf War, which lasted eight years, but also contributed to two more Gulf wars in 1991 and 2003, which eventually led to the overthrow of the Iraqi dictator. The subsequent escalation of violence in the region, including the emergence of the "Islamic State", also resulted in closer inspection of all this cruel warfare in the Middle East. Well, today, and more than thirty years later, a new arms race, this time between Saudi Arabia and Iran, is to be provoked.
And the current conflict structures in the Middle East are in many ways comparable to those of the 1970s. Only the Alliance constellation has changed. In those years, Iran was in league with the US, the West and Israel with the Shah regime; and Iraq was in geostrategic alliance with the Soviet Union and nationalist Arab states. Today, conversely, the US is the ally on the Arab side and Russia on the Iranian side. From the perspective of the military-industrial complex, however, it is irrelevant which geopolitical alliance constellations are fueling the arms race and fueling conflicts. The main thing is that it will lead to a new war and destruction, resulting in new conflicts and new arms markets, as we have seen since the Cold War and the first arms race in the Middle East.
Actually, one would have to be more than ignorant, not to realize that behind the two-time arms race in the Middle East, both in the 1970s and again before our eyes, the US defense sector and - in its wake - the European armaments sector stuck , Because they both live on the fact that somewhere in the world governments resort to these weapons, millions of people are slaughtered, that new cultural struggles between ideologies and religions are fueled, that more and more hatred is sown among the peoples, not least of all terrorism it grows. Despite the millions of woes and the gigantic destruction of resources and human lives, a vicious circle of oil and blood against weapons has now been installed in the Middle East. The current conflicts are creating new and even worse, masses of refugees in the direction of Europe. Those seeking the real causes of flight would now have the opportunity to take action and thwart this vicious circle by preventing another war in the Middle East.
Can a new disaster be prevented?
Although Iran's rulers are seriously trying to avoid a new war against an Arab country against the backdrop of the Iran-Iraq war, Saudi rulers attach great importance to preventing Iran as a regional power at all costs. By contrast, Saudi Arabia - incidentally along with Israel - has so far failed to incite the US to a war against Iran. After the end of the nuclear dispute, Saudi rulers must even see that Iran's march towards an economic and military regional power could soon be irreversible. And so it can not be ruled out that the Saudis themselves are starting a war against Iran and hoping to involve the US in a new war adventure because of its strategic oil interests. A new conflagration, which would set the Middle East back decades and extend the existing cycle of oil and blood for weapons into the next decades, would then no more stand in the way.
However, it is still not too late to prevent this gruesome perspective. The Iranian government has the important task of keeping its own forces in check and by no means falling for possible Saudi provocations. Even the EU should not remain idle and should, out of massive self-interest, be the first to stop immediately any arms deliveries to both countries and the Middle East. The concept of common security for the world's largest crisis region has always been legitimate. Today, it has become a mandatory peace task. After all, Iranian Foreign Minister Sarif pleaded for a new regional security architecture at the last Munich Security Conference in February 2018. Here, the EU has the historically unprecedented opportunity to positively embrace and by all means support this option, thrown into the debate by one of the most important states in the Middle East. Most of the current conflicts in the region, the Syrian and Kurdish conflicts, and a general disarmament of all arms, including weapons of mass destruction as an alternative to the incessant arms race, are part of a common security and economic cooperation in the Middle and Near East. Not only the Middle East, but also Europe and world peace as a whole would then all be the winners of this concrete utopia.