“Arab NATO” Explodes On Takeoff

by Martin Berger

It hasn’t gone unnoticed by the majority of geopolitical analysts that the Trump administration has been promoting the idea of a Middle Eastern military alliance rather aggressively. The so-called Middle East Strategic Alliance (MESA) that is being more commonly referred to as the “Arab NATO” was first mentioned in public back in 2017, when Donald Trump was paying an official visit to Riyadh. Back then the Saudi royal family announced that it would love a form of a “security pact” to be signed by all of the US-aligned states in the region. Next year, it was Washington that would be advancing this idea during its talks with regional forces, arguing that “joined Arab forces” should intervene in the Syrian conflict and pursue the agenda of countering Iran and radical terrorism (as if those two had something in common).

However, no matter how great this idea looked on paper for Washington, it’s a given that over the years, the absolute majority of the Persian Gulf states, the potential members of MESA, have tainted their reputation with various terrorism sponsoring ventures, while the most powerful of those states – Saudi Arabia is reported to have spent some 100 billion on the promotion of Wahhabism. Moreover, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are known for their destabilization attempts in Yemen, Libya, Syria and Lebanon. Therefore, the slogan that Washington would use to promote MESA – that it is an Arab coalition aimed at countering terrorism, extremism and aggression in all shapes and forms would really hilarious to any sane person.

Moreover, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are known for their destabilization attempts in Yemen, Libya, Syria and Lebanon.

So it’s clear that MESA has nothing in common with countering terrorism, so why would Washington need it in the first place? Well, it wants to draw the US-friendly regimes of the Middle East into a military bloc that would resemble NATO. Yet, this block would still have unique Arab characteristics, cementing various players in a Sunni stronghold that would try to prevent Iran’s regional expansion.

Washington expects that Jordan, Egypt and six Gulf states (Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Saudi Arabia) will become the founding nations of the “Arab NATO”. However, it’s more of an example of wishful thinking than anything else , since there is a number of visible obstacles standing in the way of such a development, namely, the conflict between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on the one hand, and Saudi Arabia and Qatar on the other. Even though Doha hosts the largest US military base in the region, it is still treated like an outcast by its immediate neighbors, which resulted in Qatar making numerous steps towards improving its standing with Iran.

In turn, Oman would traditionally adhere to its neutral status, while Kuwait and Bahrain together would have a hard time committing more than two hundred servicemen to MESA together.

As a result, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the United States are the only beneficiaries of such an alliance and main players within it at the same time.

Last November, the largest international military games across the Middle East, the so-called Shield of the Arabs 1, were held in Egypt. These exercises brought together soldiers and observers from a total of eight Arab countries, with regional media sources describing those as a preparatory stage for the creation of the “Arab NATO”.

However, in spite of the loud protests voiced in Washington, both Kuwait, Oman and Qatar maintain close ties with Tehran, and should those states be drawn into MESA, its members will end up fighting each other.

It curious that more than four years ago, Saudi Arabia would announce the creation of the largest anti-terrorism Islamic alliance in existence that had the exact same countries listed as its members, but then nothing happened, and Riyadh enjoyed far better relations with regional powers back then.

It has recently been reported that Anthony Zinni, a retired Marine Corps general and former head of US central command who has been working as an envoy for the Trump administration to resolve Washington’s disputes with Qatar, has resigned from his position with the US state department. He is the latest four-star general to exit the administration, which is a clear indicator that the concept of MESA is not really advancing. Before calling it quits, Zinni would try to sweet talk Doha in supporting Washington’s agenda, while it still remains besieged by American allies in the region. But then he realized that those attempts were fruitless because of the unwillingness, as he put it, of the regional leaders to agree to a viable mediation effort that Washington offered to conduct or assist in implementing.

Anthony Zinni

But it’s goes much further than that. Among the factors that influenced Zinni’s decision to leave was Trump’s impulsive decision to announced an emergency withdraw of American troops from Syria, since this old veteran would tend to believe that strength is in numbers, so he would advocate the continuous increase in American boots on the ground all across the Middle East. It’s said that Anthony Zinni was particularly close to the former US state secretary Rex Tillerson, and once the latter decided that he had enough, Zinni tried to approach Michael Pompeo, but to no avail. Additionally, negotiations with Egypt, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey on their involvement in MESA would all but fail too.

The American media was quick to point out that the general suffered a defeat on his mission to resolve the Qatari crisis. Zinni himself admitted that his mission to smooth out the contradictions between Qatar and its immediate neighbors was close to impossible for anyone to pull out.

The US State Department is trying to downplay the importance of his resignation, arguing that he was supposed to lay the grounwork for MESA, while Pompeo, Bolton and Kushner are said to be able to take it from there.

On the contrary, independent analysts would all point out that there’s no replacing the general, who was respected all across the Persian Gulf and had trusted contacts in the majority of Arab capitals. Some of them would also point out that two years into Trump’s term in office resulted in a significant shift in the leading figures playing lead roles in Washington’s designs, with more than 20 high-ranking officials abandoning their posts. According to the Brookings Institution, some 65% of senior advisors in Washington would call it quits over Trump’s presidency.

It’s clear that Washington’s agenda in the Middle East has suffered a huge blow when Anthony Zinni chose to resign, as this will literally kill the prospects of a MESA-related summit being held in the foreseeable future, putting a stake in the hear of Washington’s plans to draw together an anti-Iranian coalition.

MESA; Arab NATO-like Alliance

by Dr Elias Akleh 

The major media outlets had totally ignored the important three days October 26-28 IISS Manama Dialogue 2018 conference that was organized by International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in the city of Manama; the capital of the tiny island of Bahrain.

This Manama Dialogue was attended by very important international political representatives such as General James Mattis; US Secretary of Defense, Brett McGurk; Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS, Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmad Al Khlifa; Bahrain’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Adel Al Jubeir; Saudi Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ayman Safadi; Jordanian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Yousef bin Alawi; Oman’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Taro Kono; Japan’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ursula von der Leyen; German’s Minister of Defense, Elisabetta Trenta; Italy’s Minister of Defense, Raychelle Omamo; Kenya’s Secretary of Defense, Abdisaid Ali; Somalia’s National Security Adviser, and Jean-Christophe Belliard; Deputy Secretary General, Political Affairs, Political Director, European External Action service. Yet, surprisingly, the media had ignored the gathering of these important persons!!!???

The speeches of these representatives were characterized mainly as Iran bashing and condemnations, particularly the speeches of the American representatives; Mattis and McGurk, and the Bahraini and Saudi ministers. While their governments are pursuing hegemonic policies within the region, they accuse Iran of pursuing a hegemonic Iranian Crescent, previously called Shi’ite Crescent, covering Lebanon, Syria and Yemen. Iran did not impose itself on these countries. Lebanese Hezbollah requested Iranian help to free Lebanon from the 1982 Israeli occupation. Syria requested Iranian help to defeat American/Israeli/Gulf States supported terrorist groups. Yemen cannot get any outside help due to the air and sea siege imposed by American/Saudi/UAE’s forces.

While the USA and the Gulf States have enlisted, trained and armed all the terrorist groups that have been destroying Syria and Yemen during the last decade, they accused Iran of a terrorist supporting state. The facts on the ground show clearly that Iran has been fighting and defeating terrorist groups and protecting Syrian cities first and eventually the whole region.

While the USA and the Gulf States are spreading sectarianism, encourage terrorism, seeking to dominate other countries, waging wars and seeking to destabilize the Middle Eastern region, they accuse Iran of such crimes. Iran has never started any war or sent its military forces out of its own borders for the last 400 years.

While the American administration is gradually turning into a police state, and the Bahraini and Saudi kingdoms are despotic beheading dictatorships they accuse democratic Iran of abusing and suppressing its own people. Since its 1979 revolution Iran had held several democratic elections, something that had never happened in neither Bahrain nor Saudi Arabia.

None of these representatives dared to point to the core issue driving all these wars and destructions in the region except the Omani Minister; Yousef bin Alawi, who stated the following:

“We consider that the Palestinian issue is the core of all the problems that we have seen during the second half of the last century and the 18 years of the 21st Century … the state of Palestine needs to be established, because it has become a strategic necessity”

This Manama Dialogue came as a preliminary foundation for the planned for summit in November of the six leaders of the GCC; Gulf Cooperation Council (Oman, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait) plus Jordan and Egypt in Washington with President Trump to lay the foundation for what Trump had called Middle Eastern Strategic Alliance (MESA) also dubbed Arab NATO-like Alliance.

Forming military alliances between Arab states to protect the Middle Eastern region goes back to post WWI era. The Arab League, formally known as the League of Arab States, was formed in 1945 with six-member Arab states and later expanded to include 22 states. The League was rendered ineffective first by British and then by American interfering policies and banking systems especially after the League’s opposition to the establishment of the illegal Zionist state of Israel on occupied Palestinian land. Such policies had also foiled any inter-Arab military alliances such as those attempted by former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser.

Nasser’s pan-Arabism ideology was very popular in the 1950’s. It led to the formation of the 1957 Regional Defense Pact between Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Jordan. Nasser’s pan-Arabism was viewed by the US as a threat to Israel, and when Nasser nationalized all British and French assets in Egypt, President Eisenhower’s administration decided to do everything it can to isolate Nasser and his ideology by transforming King Saud as a counterweight. Nasser was portrayed as a threat first to Jordanian King Hussein, and later a threat to King Saud. Eventually the Regional Defense Pact was dissolved.

In mid-1957 when Turkish troops were amassed on the Syrian border threatening to topple the government, Nasser sent a contingent force to aid Syria. In February 1958 Egypt and Syria were united into United Arab Republic (UAR).  Later Yemen joined the UAR, and a loose federation was formed under the name of United Arab States.

With tacit Eisenhower’s encouragement king Saud planned to assassinate Nasser while in Syria, but the assassination failed and was exposed by Nasser in a public speech.  King Saud then was replaced by his brother; King Faisal, who advocated pan-Islamic unity with non-Arab Moslem countries to counter Nasser’s pan-Arabism.

In September 1961 a Syrian army unit launched a coup in Damascus declaring Syria’s withdrawal from the UAR.  Avoiding inter-Arab fighting Nasser refused to send Egyptian forces to Syria to reinforce the allies, and accepted the separation.

Saudi Arabian money provoked civil war in Yemen in 1962. This war drew Egyptian forces in a war of attrition that ended in 1967 when Nasser withdrew his forces leaving Yemen divided into North and South.

With the death of Nasser in September 1970, the ideology of pan-Arabism and United Arab States faded gradually since none of the Arab leaders, except Syrian Hafez al-Assad, had called for it but found no positive response. It was left to the inefficient non-unitarian and divisive Arab League to deal with regional security issues.

It must be said that since WWI the western powers; US, British and France, had planned to divide the Arab World into weaker states that could be controlled and manipulated through pro-western despots in order to blunder its resources, particularly oil, and to control its geostrategic location. The Zionist Greater Israel Project had been adopted and implemented for this purpose. Any Arab attempt to unite militarily was opposed and spoiled.

Yet, at the present, Trump’s administration is in the process of forming a military Middle Eastern Strategic Alliance (MESA) allegedly to protect the region from any military threat. MESA is just a new form of the old western designed Middle Eastern Alliance projects; whose real goals were to wage American proxy inter-Arab wars to further divide and weaken Arab states to safeguard Israel and to rake great financial profits for the American military industrial complex.

We had witnessed these military alliances in the 1980-1988 Iraq/Iran war where the Gulf States supported Iraqi Saddam Hussein. Then the same Gulf States allied with Egypt, Jordan and Syria to join the western coalition in the two Gulf Wars; 1991 and 2003, against Iraq. In 2011 the Gulf States of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Jordan and Turkey joined the so-called American Coalition to defeat ISIS in Syria when the facts on the ground showed that such coalition was a terrorist supporting coalition providing training, finance and weapons to ISIS to destroy Syria. In 2014 this same coalition supported terrorists who destroyed Libya. In 2015 we witnessed Saudi/UAE coalition, supported by Israel and US, waging war against Yemen.

So far, all these alliances had led to the destruction of Arab states. The proposed MESA is no different. Its major goal is to finish what the terrorist groups had started; destroying Syria, destroying Hezbollah and weakening or affecting a regime change in Iran. MESA, though, has one important distinction from its previous alliances, namely Israel.

As we have seen in the past, the American administrations will not allow the formation of an Arab military alliance that would threaten Israel. MESA will actually include Israel in the alliance as intelligent gathering partner. This would allow Israel to infiltrate its Arab partners’ military, security and intelligence systems. Israel is already involved in the terrorist war against Syria and in the Saudi/Emirati war against Yemen. MESA is perceived to include nine states; the six Gulf States (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Oman), Jordan, Egypt and Israel.

The Arab’s enmity towards Zionist Israel, who occupied Palestine, attacked neighboring Arab states, and supported terrorist groups in Syria, would be turned into a friendly alliance, while Iran, who shares same religious faith with Arab states, supports the Palestinian cause, and considers Israel a main threat to the region is turned into an Arab enemy.

Vital issues remain to be tackled for this alliance to succeed. Arab states have their own separate policies and conflicts. Qatar was branded as a terrorist supporting state due to its conflicting agenda with those of the Saudi Arabia/UAE/Bahrain/Egypt alliance. Turkey, annoyed by Saudi decision to assist the Kurds in Syria, moved to become a shield for Qatar against the Saudi alliance by building a military base in the peninsula.

Kuwait took a neutral position towards the Qatar/Saudi conflict. Kuwaiti/Saudi tension increased during MBS’s short visit to Kuwait early October demanding that Kuwait re-open the Khafji and Wafra oil fields to compensate oil shortage and high prices anticipated by the expected American sanctions against Iran. Kuwaiti crown prince; Sheikh Nawaf Al-Ahmad was displeased by MBS’s snobby attitude and ordered him to leave Kuwait immediately.

To reconcile these inter-Arab conflicts the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been touring the Middle East offering incentives as well as inciting enmity against Iran at the same time.

There are other complicated issues to be solved before this alliance is formed. Issues such as finance, command, bases, cooperation between member states, and logistical arrangements. It is obvious that Saudi money will mainly finance the alliance. Saudi Arabia is the milking cow as described by President Trump. American military generals will assume command for sure, and will impose how member states would behave and contribute militarily.

Iran and the rest of the Arab states; Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, perceive MESA as a pro-Zionist anti-Arab coalition, whose covert real goals are further division, destruction and weakening of the Arab World.  This coalition is looked at as a political and financial Arab suicide succeeding only in milking billions of Saudi money to buy American weapons that will only rust in Saudi desert, and in accepting the Zionist occupation of Palestine, that will eventually expand to cover more Arab land.

If stronger and larger international “ … 79 members of coalition in 75 countries, plus NATO, the EU, Interpol and the Arab League” according to Brett McGurk, had failed to affect regime change in Syria for a period of seven years, and the armed to the teeth with the latest sophisticated weapons American/Israeli/Saudi/Emirati/ coalition had failed to defeat the impoverished state of Yemen during the last three years, how then, would conflict-ridden MESA can accomplish any real victory?

The Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs; Mohammad Javad Zarif, suggested a more efficient mechanism for security in the Persian Gulf region rather than building military alliances that create more enmity. He proposed starting a modest confidence building measures leading to a non-aggression pact. He suggested creating “a regional dialogue forum” among all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf to build “a security networking, rather than security alliances” to create “a strong region as opposed to a strong man in the region, where small and large nations – even those with historical rivalries – contribute to stability”

“You cannot have security at the expense of the insecurity of your neighbor.” Zarif emphasized.

Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab American from a Palestinian descent. His family was evicted from Haifa, Palestine, after the 1948 Nakba when the Zionists stole his family’s property. Then the family was evicted again from the West Bank during the 1967 Naksah, after the Zionist, again, occupied the rest of Palestine.

Binsalman Backbone of US Plots to Destabilize Iran

By: Abdel Bari Atwan

When US President Donald Trump accuses Iran of being behind most if not all terrorist attacks in the world; Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad Bin-Salman openly vows to take his battle with Iran into Iranian territory; and Israel threatens to continue attacking Iranian military targets to prevent the country from establishing missile bases in Syria; then Saturday’s bloody attack on a military parade in Ahvaz in which 29 people were killed comes as no surprise.   Indeed, such an incident could have been expected earlier, and more such attacks, even bloodier, can be expected in future. The region stands on the threshold of an unprecedented terrorist war waged by intelligence agencies that will be destructive to all parties concerned.

Trump is imposing a suffocating economic blockade on Iran which is set to peak in November when its most important component, the ban on oil exports, becomes operative. Its principal objective is to wear down and destabilize the Iranian regime with the aim of ultimately overthrowing it by military force. Experience has taught us that American wars in our region do not come out of the blue, but are the culmination of strategies that entail years of preparation.

Trump well knows that economic sanctions alone cannot topple regimes. Otherwise the North Korean and Cuban regimes would have fallen years ago, not to mention the Iraqi regime led by Saddam Hussein and the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. Blockades that are not followed by military intervention tend to backfire. That is why planning began to create an ‘Arab Nato’ consisting of the six Gulf states plus Egypt, Jordan and Morocco in anticipation of such an intervention should it go ahead. Israel’s successive air and missile strikes inside Syria are one of its components.

Iran is a powerful state with a strategic project that it seeks to bolster with a national and regional military capacity. At its heart is a missile capability that can have a decisive effect on the ground and strip Western air superiority of its most potent weapon: the ability to terrorise and thereby impose early surrender on the other side.  Iran has gone from exporting the revolution to exporting missile capability and bolstering allied paramilitary groups, which have come to be seen as an ‘existential threat by most of its adversaries, particularly Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi heir apparent Muhammad Bin-Salman is Trump’s closest Arab ally and the mainstay of his strategy for undermining Iran’s security and stability from within. He would not have made the statements he did a year ago pledging to take the battle to the Iranian interior were he not aware of the US and Israel’s plan for changing the regime and its various stages. That was the first time in the history of the Saudi-Iranian rivalry that a Saudi official dared speak openly of intentions to foment rebellion among religious and ethnic minorities in Iran. Previously, Saudi rulers never publicly acknowledged or boasted about meddling in other countries’ affairs or waging war on them. What we have seen in Yemen we are set to witness in Iran.

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard – which was targeted and humiliated in the Ahvaz attack at a time when it and its direct and indirect allies have been achieving victories in Iraq, Syria and Yemen – was accordingly quick to accuse a Saudi-backed Arab separatist group of being behind the incident. It vowed to retaliate, a threat reiterated by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, President Hassan Rohani and other officials.

It was not by chance that Dr. Abdelkhaleq Abdallah, described as one of the closest aides of Abu Dhabi’s Crown Prince Muhammad Bin-Zayed, wrote a tweet justifying the attack on the military parade in Ahvaz and insisting it was not an incident of terrorism. This was not a slip of the tongue. It was said at the express direction of his country’s leaders and their Saudi counterparts. Otherwise, the tweet would have been immediately erased as a way of disowning it, and the writer would have been thrown in jail. But that did not happen.

To elaborate, military matters are not a subject that Arab, and especially Gulf, tweeters can discuss freely. Every word is carefully considered and dictated with the aim of sending a specific message to one party or other. Dr. Abdallah is an political scientist, not a military spokesman for him declare that “taking the battle to the Iranian interior is a declared option and it will increase in the coming period” as though it were merely his personal assessment.

That being the case, we can be sure that we are now facing a war waged by intelligence agencies targeting Iran from within. It is based on recruiting some of the country’s Arab, Sunni, Azeri and Baluch minorities (the latter live mostly in southeastern Iran by the Pakistani and Afghan borders and are represented by the hardline Sunni Jundallah organization) as was done in Afghanistan during the Soviet era, resulting in the collapse of the communist regime of Muhammad Najibullah.

It is perhaps premature to say that this plan stands much chance of succeeding. The regime of the Islamic Revolution in Iran bears no comparison to the former communist government in Afghanistan, even if the US spearheaded the campaigns against both, with Saudi Arabia playing a key part in providing financial, military and sectarian/ideological backing. The differences between the two cases are very big, and the times, too, have changed.

Iran has more experience of ‘spook wars’ than Saudi Arabia and some of its Gulf allies (Kuwait, Qatar and Oman denounced the bloody attack on the military parade and describe it as terrorism). This experience has been enhanced ‘operationally’ through the direct involvement of Iranian intelligence offshoots in wars in three arenas – Syria, Iraq and Yemen – and especially against the Islamic State (IS) organisation, as well as indirectly in South Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. Saudi intelligence expertise has only been tested in practice in two countries, Syria and Yemen, and the achievements in both cases have been modest, given the results so far.

Iran has faced foreign meddling, internal revolts and externally-backed separatist movements for the past thirty years. But its regime has never once been threatened with collapse. It has become stronger and more resilient, scoring one military achievement after another.

Trump wants to involve Saudi Arabia, along with its Gulf allies and some of the Arab Sunnis, in a proxy ‘terrorist’ war in Iran. As well as draining it financially this could jeopardise its own domestic security, at a time when it needs stability due to the bumpy transition it is going through under King Salman. While there are tools the kingdom can employ at the US’ behest to destabilise Iran, there are also other tools and means that Iran can employ. One need only take a glance at what has been achieved by Iran’s revolutionary, political and military arms in Iraq and Syria, and further away in Yemen, which has been able to withstand what is perhaps the longest assault ever waged on the country.

The problem in our estimation does not lie in whether the attack on the military parade in Ahvaz is described as terrorist or not. It lies in the consequences that could ensue. We have begun entering a period of involvement in a secret war of terrorist attacks and counter-attacks, at a time when other countries are resorting to dialogue to resolve their differences – witness the leaders of North and South Korea negotiating an end to a 70-year war that almost turned nuclear.

The US is playing with fire with the clandestine and economic wars whose fuse it has lit in the region at Israel’s instigation. The irony is that it is the fingers of Saudi Arabia and maybe some other countries that are most likely to be burned, and perhaps, who knows, even incinerated.

"Arab NATO" Project Doomed

The United States' initiative purportedly designed to bring stability to the Middle East by forming an Arab alliance is doomed not only because its strategies are at odds with efforts to address regional security challenges, but also because it ignores the role of key regional stakeholders as well as major global players, a foreign policy expert said.

The effort, tentatively known as the Middle East Strategic Alliance, aims to create a new security and political alliance with the six countries of the (Persian) Gulf Cooperation Council, namely Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, along with Egypt and Jordan, to confront Iran which is accused of fomenting regional turmoil.

Although setting up a collective security pact with stakeholders in the region is necessary given the rising tensions and conflicts across the Middle East and North Africa, Hossein Mousavian, a former Iranian diplomat, argues that the US scheme is not effective for at least five reasons.

In an opinion piece published in the US magazine Newsweek on Tuesday, Mousavian, who is a Middle East security and nuclear policy specialist at Princeton University, has outlined several reasons why the so-called "Arab NATO" initiative has little chance of success.

> Misguided Effort  

To begin with, a main challenge of security in the region is a sectarian conflict, which the US plan seems to more heighten than resolve by pitting "Arab and Sunni countries on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf against the Shia Iran, and perhaps Iraq with Shia majority."

Mousavian highlighted the paradoxical fact that some members of MESA provide support for militant groups that are major threats to regional security. 

He cited copious evidence of the Saudi royal family's financial support for terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda and Taliban, which has continued to date, in the Syrian conflict and far beyond it.

Mousavian also stressed that no collective security project will be efficient in the absence of Iran and Iraq as two major powers in the region. 

Egypt and Jordan, which are included in the Arab NATO instead, have zero geographic share of the Persian Gulf.

Not only does the plan ignore regional players, but it also omits the interests of other world powers in the region, namely the European Union, China, India and Russia. 

Mousavian described the US move as "a push for unilateralism as opposed to multilateralism in the Middle East", which would only hamper the formation of a realistic and workable collective pact.

The Arab world is more divided than ever at present, with Saudi, Emirati and Bahraini boycott of Qatar and inter-Arab conflicts in Yemen and Libya ravaging the community.

Following a late September meeting between US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with foreign ministers from (P)GCC countries, Egypt and Jordan to advance the project, Qatar also emphasized that the crisis among Persian Gulf countries must be resolved first before any push to form a new security structure.

Qatar's Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani told a news conference afterwards that the alliance should be built on existing institutions, and he asked how that could be done when the most powerful Persian Gulf countries have been engaged in a more than a yearlong dispute.

"The real challenge facing the US-led alliance is to solve the [Persian] Gulf crisis," he was quoted as saying by AP.

> Non-Starter 

In addition, Oman, Kuwait and Qatar also prefer to keep a balance in relations with Washington and Tehran rather than lean toward one side.

Therefore, "a proposal as such to align these countries seems more like wishful thinking than a practical political strategy" he states in his article.

Mousavian concluded that without simultaneous multilateral approaches and bilateral talks, an imported collective security project such as the "Arab NATO" has almost no chance of success.

"It will only fuel animosity between the countries of the region along racial and sectarian lines," he concluded.

‘Arab NATO’, US new pretext to spark war

By: Ayatollah Mohsen Araki, Secretary General of World Forum for Proximity of Islamic Schools of Thought

Since colonial powers plagued the world of Islam, they started series of measures to undermine Islamic

unity and preventing Muslim solidarity based on regional, ethnical or tribal differences.

Another endeavor to undermine Muslim unity include racial segregation and ethnicism. Since colonial powers plagued the world of Islam, they started series of measures to undermine Islamic unity and preventing Muslim solidarity based on regional, ethnical or tribal differences. Basically intentions to dominate Muslims should focus on dividing the Islamic community though hostile endeavors have all been foiled due to insight and gallantry of Muslims besides their religious leaders.
 
Whenever the world of Islam has found the opportunity to revive its solidarity and honor, hostile efforts to create religious and ethnical tensions surge; therefore, with the appearance of racial voices, particularly in the decades following post-revolution era, we have witnessed the outbreak of an 8-year war under the title of “Magus Persians” (Zoroastrian Persians) which let out racial and sectarian cries to invade Islamic Iran.

 
Clearly merely by Iraqi dictatorship has not been behind the plan and mottos for this war rather it was an international and regional plot which hired all available military might as well as intelligence and media capabilities in the region and across the globe. However, the world has been witness to failure of the plot and topple of Iraqi dictatorship.
 
This ripple of sectarianism and racism had happened once more when Lebanese Hezbollah beat Zionist forces. Condoleezza Rice immediately headed for regional countries to prepare them for sectarian war. Though today, following failure of the American project across Muslim world and following the Islamic Awakening, al- Aqsa Mosque Intifadha and Palestinian March of Return, the US has once again returned to mobilize the regional people under the title of ‘Arab-Sunni NATO’ and pretext of confrontation with development of Iran.
 
This thought is not a maiden one since it has previously been proposed by former US presidents for several times. What encouraged Donald Trump to propose that again was his illusion of victory in the Islamic-American meeting held in Riyadh in 2017.
 
It would be better if this thought does not receive welcome by other countries because the US is not concerned over interests of other nations and regional and that domestic intervention of the US will be seriously rejected by these nations since it would guarantee nothing but interests of Washington and Tel Aviv.
 
An Egyptian journalist has rightly defined,” Ordinary people in the Arab world are aware that to force some Arab countries for a massive military and religious confrontation with Iran will only materialize US objectives and not demands of the Arab nations, among them an increase in American weaponry, Arab states will face huge loans and humiliation of their rulers plus astonishing disintegration of the Arab nations while strategic capabilities of Israel in confrontation with Arab and Islamic countries will increase. These are the apparent objectives of the US-Zionist coalition, clearly with no relation to interests of the Arab countries. If all Arab nations understand these issues, national leaders would not be concerned since they would know protecting the sovereignty and honor of their countries as their major mission.
 
Such projects highlight necessity of proximity among Islamic denominations as to confront the most dangerous plots in the world, which aim destruction of the whole region, is the main responsibility of Islamic proximity. We hope that all orthodox people understand the importance of the issue in a bid to rise for aiding the objective of proximity and confront intrigues for division.