Watching cartoons and Trump in Arabia

In New York City last Saturday-Sunday, I followed President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia while simultaneously scanning assorted Saturday and Sunday cartoon shows on television — and at times it was very difficult to tell the difference between the two.

The American president’s proven capacity to live in a make-believe world of distinctly good and bad guys reached another peak, which portends rough days ahead for the people of the Middle East.

Trump swallowed whole the Saudi (and Israeli) view that Iran is a major menace to the region and it must be fought relentlessly.

In fact, the Saudis have been trying to fight Iran politically in half a dozen places around the Middle East, and largely have failed.

Iran’s allies have beaten Saudi Arabia’s allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Yemen and other lands, either politically or militarily.

It is no wonder that Saudi Arabia — with its proven weak statecraft across the Middle East — has pulled out all the stops in enticing the Trump administration to side with it against Iran and rescue it from a predicament of its own making.

For Trump now to wage fierce political battle against Iran puts the US in a situation where to a large extent it is fighting an imaginary enemy, on the basis of exaggerated or false threats, using tactics and strategy that proved ineffective in the past.

Rarely has an American president moved so quickly to verify his total ineptitude in grasping the realities of the Middle East, and to craft a policy response whose nature and magnitude bring together degrees of political immaturity that only make the US a laughing stock globally.

The economic gains for the American economy from the agreements with Saudi Arabia will be significant, if they are all implemented over the coming decade.

That seems to have been the main motivation for the American side.

Yet the political stresses and likely new forms of conflict and sectarian tensions we can expect across much of the Middle East will only amplify the foundation of failed policies that the US-Saudi combine has just relaunched in a new format.

Aggressive American militarism combined with Arab arms and money in the pursuit of political stability is the policy of delusional politicians, not sensible statesmen and women.

The emphasis on US strategic cooperation with Arab conservative governments in order to fight Iran and the separate threat of Daesh will not succeed, because it was tried and did not succeed in the past.

Yemen, Syria and Daesh are the three main reasons to believe this. It is hard to think of a more lopsided military equation than the power of Saudi, Emirati, American, British and other military capabilities against the much weaker Yemeni forces they attacked over two years ago — and still have not vanquished.

Syria shows that political determination — even of cruel dictators and their powerful allies — can withstand for years the military assaults of rebels funded and armed by the US, Saudi Arabia and other countries.

The consequences of a destroyed Syria, with its multiple militant jihadist armed movements, have revealed themselves in recent years, to the chagrin and new threats felt by many countries.

The Daesh threat is the most frightening example of why a US-Saudi military alliance, or even the more hare-brained wider Arab-Islamic-American alliance Trump speaks of, will not easily remove the threat of Daesh, Al Qaeda or other smaller movements like them.

The sorry tale of Daesh in the Arab world has three main elements that Trump and his advisers clearly ignored, as they seem to ignore most realities in the Middle East.

The first was the birth of Daesh from deep within the belly of Arab societies during the past few decades, especially given that most of the key leaders of Daesh (and Al Qaeda and other such militant movements) were radicalised in part in Arab jails, in countries the US supported strongly.

The second phase was the birth and launch of Daesh in mid-2014 in Syria and Iraq.

The Arab countries were immobilised by this, and were totally unable or unwilling to push back Daesh. They had to rely on American and other foreign militaries to halt Daesh’s expansion.

The battle to defeat Daesh militarily only gained momentum when several non-Arab armies came to the rescue, including American, British, Kurdish, Turkish, Iranian, Russian and Lebanese Hizbollah forces.

The Iraqi armed forces finally showed their capabilities in the past year, but only with considerable and direct US assistance.

The third phase of the Arabs’ encounter with Daesh is now taking shape before our eyes, in the form of a grandiose alliance of Arab, Islamic and Western armies that will work together to rid us of evil.

This is a worthy and necessary goal. It remains unclear, though, how such forces that helped give birth to Daesh, and then could not defend their own countries when Daesh expanded in their midst, will be able to do a better job, in view of one critical elephant in the room that all the gatherings of these parties continue to ignore: the underlying conditions of economic disparities, social stress, political autocracy, civil and regional wars, ravaged environments and corruption that plague most of the Arab countries involved will always generate more new disgruntled and desperate militants than any high-tech weapons can kill.

In the imaginary world of weekend television cartoons, the moral dilemmas facing the protagonists always end well.

In the real world of American strategic relations with assorted Arab and Islamic countries and Israel, the moral dilemmas have no place in the script.

Only repeating the same script with a larger cast of characters, while wars, terror and refugee flows continue apace, strikes me as the epitome of foolhardy and irresponsible leadership.