El escritor D. Estulin explicaba esta situación en el año
2011. Siria: “La financiación de los rebeldes y de las manifestaciones viene de
Arabia Saudita, a través de Londres con el apoyo no tan sutil de Turquía.” “Turquía
está intentando la reconquista de los territorios de Siria que antes formaban
parte de Imperio Otomán” “Turquía está fortaleciéndose con el dinero procedente
de Arabia Saudita y Qatar por parte de los mismos tipos que también financian
Fundación Qatar que patrocina al FC Barcelona”
The
writer D. Estulin explained
the situation in 2011. Syria: "The
financing of the rebels and the
manifestations comes from Saudi
Arabia, through London with the
support not so subtle of Turkey." "Turkey is trying to
win back the territories of Syria
formerly part of the
Ottoman Empire" "Turkey is strengthened with
money from Saudi Arabia and Qatar by the
same guys who also fund Qatar Foundation which
sponsors FC Barcelona"
Qatar, Sponsor of Islamist Political Movements, Major Ally of America
Qatar and U.S. : Collusion or Conflict of Interest?
Nicola Nasser
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
In his inaugural address on January 21,
U.S. President Barack Obama made the historic announcement that “a
decade of war is ending” and declared his country’s determination to
“show the courage to try and resolve our differences with other nations
peacefully,” but his message will remain words that have yet to be
translated into deeds and has yet to reach some of the U.S. closest
allies in the Middle East who are still beating the drums of war, like
Israel against Iran and Qatar against Syria.
In view of the level of “coordination”
and “cooperation” since bilateral diplomatic relations were established
in 1972 between the U.S. and Qatar , and the concentration of U.S.
military power on this tiny peninsula, it seems impossible that Qatar
could move independently apart, in parallel with, away or on a collision
course with the U.S. strategic and regional plans.
According to the US State department’s
online fact sheet, “bilateral relations are strong,” both countries are
“coordinating” diplomatically and “cooperating” on regional security,
have a “defense pact,” “ Qatar hosts CENTCOM Forward Headquarters,” and
supports NATO and U.S. regional “military operations. Qatar is also an
active participant in the U.S.-led efforts to set up an integrated
missile defense network in the Gulf region. Moreover, it hosts the U.S.
Combined Air Operations Center and three American military bases namely Al Udeid Air Base, Assaliyah Army Base and Doha International Air Base, which are manned by approximately 5,000 U.S. forces.
Qatar, which is bound by such a most
intimate and closest alliance with the United States , has recently
developed into the major sponsor of Islamist political movements. Qatar
appears now to be the major sponsor of the international organization of
the Muslim Brotherhood, which, reportedly, disbanded in Qatar in 1999
because it stopped to view the ruling family as an adversary.
The Qatar/Brotherhood marriage of
convenience has created the natural incubator of Islamist armed
fundamentalists against whom the U.S. , since September 11, 2001, has
been leading what is labeled as the “global war on terrorism.”
The war in the African nation Mali
offers the latest example on how the U.S. and Qatar , seemingly, go on
two separate ways. Whereas US Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, was in
London on January 18 “commending” the French “leadership of the
international effort” in Mali to which his country was pledging
logistical, transportation and intelligence support, Qatar appeared to
risk its special ties with France, which peaked during the NATO-led war
on Libya, and to distrust the U.S. and French judgment.
On January 15, Qatari Prime and Foreign
Minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem al-Thani, told reporters he did not
believe “power will solve the problem,” advised instead that this
problem be “discussed” among the “neighboring countries, the African
Union and the (U.N.) Security Council,” and joined the Doha-based
ideologue for the Muslim Brotherhood and their Qatari sponsors, Yusuf
Abdullah al-Qaradawi – the head of the International Union of Muslim
Scholars who was refused entry visa to U.K. in 2008 and to France last
year – in calling for “dialogue,” “reconciliation” and “peaceful
solution” instead of “military intervention.”
In a relatively older example, according
to WikiLeaks , Somalia ’s former president in 2009, Sharif Ahmed, told a
U.S. diplomat that Qatar was channeling financial assistance to the
al-Qaeda-linked Shabab al-Mujahideen, which the U.S. listed as
“terrorist.”
In Syria, for another example, the
Brotherhood is the leading “fighting” force against the ruling regime
and in alliance with and a culprit in the atrocities of the terrorist
bombings of the al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front, designated by the United
States as a terrorist organization last December; while the
Brotherhood-led and U.S. and Qatar-sponsored Syrian opposition publicly
protested the U.S. designation, the silence of Qatar on the matter could
only be interpreted as in support of the protest against the U.S.
decision.
Recently, Qatar has, for another
example, replaced Syria , which has been on the U.S. list of state
sponsors of terrorism since 1979, as the sponsor of Hamas, whose
leadership relocated from Damascus to Doha , which the U.S. lists as a
“terrorist” group, and which publicly admits being the Palestinian
branch of the Brotherhood.
Qatar, in all these examples, seems
positioning itself to be qualified as a mediator, with the U.S.
blessing, trying to achieve by the country’s financial leverage what the
U.S. could not achieve militarily, or could achieve but with a much
more expensive cost in money and souls.
In the Mali case, the Qatari PM Sheikh
Hamad went on record to declare this ambition: “We will be a part of the
solution, (but) not the sole mediator,” he said. The U.S. blessing
could not be more explicit than President Obama’s approval of opening
the Afghani Taliban office in Doha “to facilitate” a “negotiated peace
in Afghanistan,” according to the Qatari Foreign Ministry on January 16.
However, a unilateral Qatari mediation
failed in Yemen, a Qatar-led Arab mediation in Syria has similarly
proved a failure two years on the Syrian crisis, the “Doha Declaration”
to reconcile Palestinian rival factions is still a paper achievement,
the Qatari mediation in Sudan’s Darfur crisis has yet to deliver, the
Qatari “mediation” in Libya was condemned as intervention in the
country’s internal affairs by the most prominent among the post-Gaddafi
leaders, and in post-“Arab Spring” Egypt Qatar dropped its early
mediation efforts to align itself publicly to the ruling Brotherhood.
But in spite of these failures, Qatar ’s “mediation” efforts were
successful in serving the strategy of its U.S. “ally.”
Hence the U.S. blessing. The Soufan
Group’s intelligence analysts on last December 10 concluded that “Qatar
continues to prove itself to be a pivotal U.S. ally… Qatar is often able
to implement shared U.S.-Qatari objectives that Washington is unable or
unwilling to undertake itself.”
The first term Obama administration,
under the pressure of “fiscal austerity,” blessed the Qatari funding of
arming anti-Gaddafi Islamists in Libya, closed its eyes to Qatar’s
shipment of Gaddafi’s military arsenal to Syrian and non-Syrian
Islamists fighting the regime in Syria, “understood” the visit of
Qatar’s Emir to Gaza last October as “a humanitarian mission,” and
recently approved to arm the Qatar-backed and Brotherhood-led Egypt with
20 F-16 fighter jets and 200 M1A1 Abrams tanks.
This contradiction raises the question
about whether this is a U.S./Qatari mutual collusion or it is really a
conflict of interests; the Obama administration during his second term
has to draw the line which would give an explicit answer.
Seemingly nowadays, Doha and Washington
do not see eye to eye on Islamic and Islamist movements, but on the
battle grounds of the “war on terror” both capitals could hardly argue
that in practice their active roles are not coordinated and do not
complement each other.
Drawing on the historical experience of
an Iranian similar “religious” approach, but on a rival “Shiite”
sectarian basis, this Qatari “Sunni” Islamist” connection will
inevitably fuel sectarian polarization in the region, regional
instability, violence and civil wars.
Given the U.S./Qatar alliance, the
Qatari Islamist connection threatens to embroil the U.S. in more
regional strife, or at least to hold the U.S. responsible for the
resulting strife, and would sustain a deep-seated regional
anti-Americanism, which in turn has become another incubator of
extremism and terrorism and which is exacerbated by the past “decade of
war,” which President Obama in his inaugural address promised to “end.”
Traditionally, Qatar, which stands in
the eye of the storm in the very critical geopolitical volatile Gulf
region, the theatre of three major wars during the last three decades,
did its best to maintain a critical and fragile balance between the two
major powers which determine its survival, namely the decades-old U.S.
military presence in the Gulf and the rising regional power of Iran.
In 1992 it signed a comprehensive
bilateral defense pact with the United States and in 2010 it signed a
military defense agreement with Iran, which explains its warming up to
closer ties with the Iran – supported Islamic anti – Israel resistance
movements of the Hezbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Israeli-occupied
Palestinian territories and explains as well Qatar’s “honey moon” with
Iran’s ally in Syria.
However, since the eruption of the
bloody Syrian crisis two years ago, the Qatari opening up to regional
pro-Iran state and non-state powers was exposed as merely a tactical
maneuver to lure such powers away from Iran. In the Syrian and Hezbullah
cases, the failure of this tactic has led Qatar to embark on a
collision course with both Syria and Iran, which are backed by Russia
and China, and is leading the country to a U-turn shift away from its
long maintained regional balancing act, a shift that Doha seems unaware
of its threat to its very survival under the pressure of the
international and regional conflicting interests as bloodily exposed in
the Syrian crisis.
During the rise of the massive Pan-Arab,
nationalist, socialist and democratic movements in the Arab world early
in the second half of the twentieth century, the conservative
authoritarian Arab monarchies adopted the Brotherhood, other Islamists
and Islamic political ideology and used them against those movements to
survive as allies of the United States, which in turn used both,
spearheaded by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, against the former Soviet Union
and the communist ideology, to their detriment after the collapse of the
bipolar world order.
However history seems to repeat itself
as the U.S.-backed Arab monarchies, spearheaded by Qatar, are resorting
to their old tactic of exploiting the Islamist ideology to undermine and
preempt an Arab anti-authoritarian revolution for the rule of law,
civil society, democratic institutions and social and economic justice
in Arab countries on the periphery of their U.S. protected bastion in
the Arabian peninsula, but they seem unaware they are opening a
Pandora’s box that would unleash a backlash in comparison to which
al-Qaeda’s fall back on the U.S. will prove a minor precedent.
