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Why Qatar Is in the Naughty Corner

June 6, 2017 New York Times

In the opaque world of Arab diplomacy, things are never quite as they seem. On the surface, the reason Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt cut air, land and sea travel to the small peninsula state of Qatar this week was straightforward enough: The gulf states accused their emirate neighbor of giving succor to Islamist extremism, including the so-called Islamic State.

President Donald Trump has since endorsed this view via Twitter, adding that he discussed the “funding of radical ideology” during his recent visit to the Middle East. The gulf leaders he met with were all “pointing to Qatar,” he said when attributing blame.

Despite the convenience of this narrative, there are other forces at play. In reality, Qatar has been ostracized by its “brotherly” neighbors, as the language of regional diplomacy has it, for not kowtowing to the collective vision for the Middle East now largely shared by the United States, Saudi Arabia and Israel.

There is no doubt that the al-Thani clan, which rules the emirate from its capital, Doha, has funded militants fighting the regime of president Bashar al-Assad in Syria and meddled in the internal affairs of other Arab nations through its support of the Muslim Brotherhood, notably in Egypt. But these are relative sideshows in a broader regional game. Even allowing for the seeming hypocrisyof Saudi Arabia’s making such accusations, given its history of backing Sunni militant groups in Syria and its military interventionin Yemen, the allegations are so well known as to be tired at this point.

Emir of Qatar stand ups to Saudi Arabia boycott
Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, at the Arab League summit in Jordan in March. Credit…Jordan Pix/Getty Images

The more heinous sin for which Doha is being punished is its willingness to acknowledge that Iran occupies a position as an important regional power and that political Islamists like Hamas and Hezbollah have a role to play in determining the future of the Middle East. To put it bluntly, Qatar is being penalized for refusing to accept the status quo of the past 40 years, and for daring to challenge the conventional wisdom in the gulf that bashing Tehran, buttressing military strongmen and suppressing political Islamism are the right path for the region.

For the governments in Saudi Arabia, United States and Israel, such divergent thinking is not merely undesirable but heretical. While these three powers pay lip service to the idea of peace in the Middle East, narrow self-interest increasingly drives their thinking. And this shortsighted calculation underpins their unlikely-seeming alliance.

This is not to paint Qatar as an innocent party that deserves no criticism. Doha’s posture since the Arab Spring as a champion of political reform stands in marked contrast to the near-feudal nature of its own system of governance, whereby the ruling al-Thani family and some 200,000 Qataris hold sway over a population of about two million foreign residents.

The grim plight of the migrants working on construction projects for the 2022 World Cup has received wide coverage, but there is a history of other abuses that have received less publicity. In one case, more than 5,000 members of one clan have since 2004 had their citizenship revoked by the government amid allegations that some family members had been involved in a Saudi-based plot to overthrow the current emir’s father in 1996.

To justify this latest severing of diplomatic ties with Doha, Saudi Arabia cited recent comments praising Iran that were attributed to the Qatari emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani. Qatar has dismissed these allegations as “fake news” and part of a wider hacking attack on its national news service.

These tensions are not new. Qatar’s views on Iran and groups like Hamas and Hezbollah are not the result of a sudden conversion. To some extent, Qatar — which is home to some 10,000 American troops at the Al Udeid Air Base — took a lead from the Obama doctrine of engagement with Iran, which led to the nuclear deal concluded in 2015. This diplomatic alignment and the presence of the strategically important air base meant that Doha enjoyed a measure of American protection as it pursued its own regional agenda.

That has changed with the arrival of a new and very different administration in Washington. Since Mr. Trump has surrounded himself with a coterie of advisers obsessed with the twin threats of Iranian influence and “radical Islamic terror,” it makes sense that the Saudis decided this was the moment to act. Punishing Qatar and isolating Iran also fit with the Israeli government’s assessment of its strategic interests, as it confronts Hezbollah forces to its north and Hamas in Gaza on its south-western border.

Caught out by the United States’ new orientation, Doha is learning there is a price to pay for questioning the established orthodoxy.

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Violent backlash against US foreign policy

by Raymond Barrett

The killing of the US ambassador to Libya coupled with an eruption of anti-American protests in Middle East capitals indicates that Washington has unleashed forces it cannot control by supporting revolutionaries across the region.

Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans men died after a consulate in Libya’s second city of Benghazi came under rocket and gun attack on Tuesday evening during a protest over a US-made film deemed insulting to the prophet Mohammed.

Ansar al Sharia, a militant group involved in the overthrow of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, has been linked to the attack.

The events in Benghazi were followed by a wave of unrest that saw protestors killed in Yemen, Sudan, Tunisia, and Lebanon outside US embassies, schools and businesses as US Marines were deployed to the region to protect potential targets. In Cairo, demonstrators scaled the walls of the embassy and tore down a US flag before being driven back by security forces.

In Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula bordering Israel, a UN peacekeeping force under US command also was attacked by a group of over 50 men. The unrest even spread as far as Australia last Friday, when several hundred people who were protesting outside the US Consulate in Sydney, clashed with police. Officers used pepper spray to fend off protestors, who were reportedly throwing rocks and bottles, and there were eight arrests.

While the “anti-Islamic” film, reportedly produced by an Egyptian Christian living in California, was blamed for the violence, the scale of the protests hints that US foreign policy towards the entire Middle East region may need drastic revision.

Protesters destroy an American flag pulled down from the US embassy in Cairo last Tuesday. Photo: Getty

Libya after Gaddafi

When the Arab Spring finally reached Gaddafi’s Libya in February 2011, France, the UK and the US provided air-support to the rebels as they fought from their base in Benghazi to seize the capitol – Tripoli.

However, there was an elephant in the room that the Obama administration and its allies strenuously ignored: many foreign jihadis who went to Iraq to fight the “US occupiers” after the 2003 invasion came from Benghazi.

Thus, the fact that some of these militants eventually turned their ire towards the US has an air of inevitability.

Isobel Coleman, a Middle East specialist with the Council on Foreign Relations, described the killing of the ambassador as a “well-planned attack – weeks in the planning” and its coinciding with the 9/11 anniversary as no accident.

Furthermore, al-Qaeda’s leader Ayman al-Zawahiri had called for revenge after a senior Libyan member of the group, Abu Yahya al-Libi, was killed in a CIA drone strike in Pakistan in June.

According to Coleman, the different groups that ousted Gaddafi “have not coalesced into a national government.”

And now the US finds itself in the middle of a conflict between Islamists and a nascent secular government each of whom have differing views on what a 21st century Islamic nation should look like.

Groups such as Ansar al Sharia, who take a literal reading of the Koran and are referred to as “Salafis”, have been linked to the destruction of a Sufi Muslim shrines they deemed idolatrous and an attack on the British ambassador in June.

“We have to deal with these militias because some of them have nothing to do with the revolution,” Libyan Prime Minister Mustafa Abu Shagour said this week.

But this puts Islamists on a collision course with both the Libyan government and its American allies.

“There’s always the potential for violence – It’ll get worse before it gets better,” Coleman said, who described these events as “a wake-up call to the [Libyan] government.”

Regional implications

Despite the severity of the incident in Benghazi, Libya is only a microcosm of a much larger problem. With Libya relatively isolated from the more cancerous geo-politics of the Middle East, a surge in anti-American sentiment in Egypt, Yemen and Syria would have far greater ramifications, especially for their immediate neighbours – Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Lebanon – and US strategic objectives.

Whereas similar protests occurred over incidents such as Danish newspapers showing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005, the regional strongmen supported by the US in the past like Hosni Mubarak are no longer in place to keep restive populations in check.

But it is in Syria where the US has chosen some of its strangest bedfellows. To oust president Bashar al-Assad, the Obama administration has authorized CIA support to Syrian rebel factions (comprised mainly of Sunnis) despite the local Christian and Shia population fearing such groups seizing power.

As the Syrian conflict has progressed, the jihadi element to the opposition (including Libyans) has intensified and Middle East specialists have identified sectarian killings and slogans such as “Christians to Beirut, Alawites to the tomb” as a worrying portent.

Despite the short-term gains of supporting militants to topple dictators, the long-term efficacy of this strategy for the US is still unclear. Despite receiving support from the US, the Free Syrian Army will look unfavorably on Washington’s support of Israel given the latter’s occupation of the Golan Heights.

US domestic reaction

Yet such considerations largely have been absent from the political discourse in the US. But the killings in Benghazi have given foreign policy concerns a greater public profile in a presidential campaign focused on the domestic economy.

As the protests spread, some Republican Congressmen called for aid to Egypt and Libya to be cut, especially after Egypt’s president Mohammed Mursi appeared lukewarm in his condemnation of attacks on the US embassy.

In response, Obama described Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood government in unusually tepid terms, describing the country it gives $1.3 billion in military aid annually as neither an ally nor an enemy.

The current unrest also was an opportunity for Republican nominee Mitt Romney to score some foreign policy points against Obama, who has been bolstered on this front by the killing of Osama Bin Laden in May 2011.

Romney criticized the president for kowtowing to the Muslim world, while the Obama hit back by accusing his opponent of “a tendency to shoot first and aim later.”

Yet few US politicians will admit that the Islamist groups Obama is now befriending bear an uneasy likeliness to the militants president Ronald Reagan supported in Afghanistan in the 1980s, who would eventually return to haunt the US to such a devastating effect.

Raymond Barrett is the author of Dubai Dreams: Inside the Kingdom of Bling

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