The American military presence in the Middle East ... profit and loss accounts

Mohammed Al-Minshawi-Washington

US President Donald Trump's statements about the Saudi government depositing a billion dollars in exchange for sending American forces to it, came after the tension in the region over the liquidation of Washington by Iranian General Qassem Soleimani to shed light on the cost of the presence of American forces abroad.

President Trump has indicated on several occasions that Saudi Arabia will pay four hundred billion dollars in new deals with his country, but many experts considered that he (Trump) exaggerated the size of deals with Riyadh.

Former CIA analyst Bruce Riddle, who now works at the Brookings Institution in Washington, says the deals Trump has talked about are a bunch of non-binding messages and reflect wishes for future arms deals.

And Saudi Arabia's purchase of weapons from the United States was not very different from what it was during the rule of former President Barack Obama, as Riyadh bought $ 112 billion in weapons.

Cost and spread
The United States has deployed nearly two hundred thousand American soldiers in hundreds of military bases in many countries around the world, despite President Trump's repeated expression of his desire to bring American soldiers home.

In contrast to Trump's call for the withdrawal of his country’s forces from the Middle East wars that he sees endlessly, American forces in the Middle East have known significant increases in their numbers since Trump came to power three years ago.

A study by the Watson Institute for International Affairs at Brown University indicated that US taxpayers had borne the burden of spending $ 6.4 trillion on the wars of the Middle East and Asia since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The study indicated that 801 thousand people were killed as a result of wars in the Middle East countries, including 335 thousand civilians, and 21 million people were forced from their cities and villages due to the violence.

And that cost is not limited to the Department of Defense expenditures, but includes all other US government agencies such as the State Department, intelligence services, and others.

According to the US Central Command - which is based in Tampa, Florida, as the center of operations that extend from Egypt to Afghanistan - there are between sixty and seventy thousand American soldiers in the Middle East at the present time.

Coverage and conditions
"Many countries are responsible for covering the bulk of the cost of American forces, as is the case in the case of South Korea, Japan, and some countries in the Middle East," the former US intelligence official and professor at Boston University Glen Carl said on the island.

On Iraq, Carl said, "It is not clear that the Iraqi government will cover the cost of American forces there."

President Trump had stipulated that the Iraqi wisdom pay billions of dollars his country invested in building the bases from which the Iraqi parliament voted to remove its forces.

The same official stated that he "cannot imagine that his country's forces will withdraw from Iraq and the rest of the Middle East anytime soon, unless President Trump is so weird."

The developments in the situation in Iraq that witnessed Washington's implementation of the attacks that resulted in the killing of General Qassem Soleimani and a number of senior leaders of the PMF militia, prompted the Iraqi parliament to vote to remove foreign forces from Iraqi territory.

Pay first
The American president relied in his election campaign on a speech that guaranteed that the countries of the Middle East and NATO countries exploit the United States, and pledged to withdraw his country's forces from the Middle East conflicts, which is not supported by the Republican and Democratic parties.

Trump's decision to deploy more American forces in Saudi Arabia has added to the confusion of observers toward the positions, decisions, and goals of Washington and Trump.

Trump's goal is to say that "Arab countries should start paying for providing umbrellas and security protection for their countries," says David Des Roch, a military expert at the Center for Near East and South Asia at the US National Defense University.

Roche told Al Jazeera Net that "the United States is losing a lot of money as a result of the presence of its forces in the Middle East, and the process of sending troops to the region is very expensive, and no country in the world can do this except the United States."

"We are no longer importing oil from the Middle East, and our fleet is costing us a lot of money as a result of its missions in the Gulf to secure the passage of the global gas and oil trade to ensure access to China and Japan. Our mission supports the interests of our strategic allies and does not count them with profit and loss equations," Roche added.

Roche says that Trump does not want to pay Washington three times in the same case; we paid when we invaded Iraq, and when we returned in 2014 we paid to fight the Islamic State, and Trump does not want to pay for the third time being a businessman in the event that we have to return to Iraq after our withdrawal if the state returns . Trump is promoting the need to stop US spending to protect the people of other countries.