In recent weeks, Arab countries, as well as Iran and Turkey have all been working out how they can move forward and get along with each other, all due to “sleepy Joe” Biden being asleep at the wheel. Where’s all this heading?

Barely a year in office and what has Joe Biden done in the Middle East? Could it be an after dinner game, like what Europhiles in Brussels play (‘Name five famous Belgians’)? Name five decisions Biden has made in the Middle East?

U.S. presidents can be bold. And they can be wrong. But the worst type are those who are neither bold nor decisive in anything they do. Joe Biden, under the microscope, appears to be a U.S. president asleep at the wheel on so many domestic issues but when we look at the Middle East, it’s almost as though he’s in a coma. And it’s starting to affect how the region operates and how its countries interact with one another.

During Trump’s early days in office, he made a point of doing nothing on the international circuit until the Saudis were ready to accept him as his first official international trip to mark his presidency. The background to this was a strong relationship between Jared Kuchner and Mohamed Bin Salman – the latter installed as Crown Prince by the Trump administration on the condition that a recognition was made of Israel. But the Saudis wanted more. One of the reasons why it took six whole months before Trump made it to Riyadh and ingratiated himself with the cultural histrionics of sword dancing and looking at best ridiculous, was that a second dirty deal was being carved about how the White House would go through with a particularly mendacious ruse against Qatar – which transpired quickly as a blockade on the tiny energy rich state and statements from Trump condemning them for supporting terrorism. In fact, there was even a plan on the table crafted by a middleman working for Blackwater chief Erik Prince, to draw Trump into a plan which would involve a private army overthrowing the Royal Family in Qatar.

The last part of this didn’t transpire as Trump smelled a rat and got nervous at the last moment and the middleman involved, George Nader, soon found himself caught in a CIA trap which landed him in prison and his blueprint for the Qatar invasion scrapped, as part of the Mueller investigation.

For the Saudis, it was nirvana since the day Trump arrived and danced to their tune, even though Kushner was soon to try and capitalize on the situation to harangue the Qataris to invest in his failed New York City real estate endeavours. For MbS in particular nothing could go wrong and the years of fretting over the Obama years seemed well behind them. Finally a U.S. president who is going to show us some respect and give us a much better deal. Indeed, it was rarely pointed out by journalists in the U.S. that the so called amazing arms deal that Trump claimed to have pulled off, was in fact, as Trump likes to put it himself “fake news”. Not only was the figure grossly inflated but it was also not explained to the press that the terms of payment were on the “never never” which gave the Saudis the flexibility to reduce the speed of the purchases and even pull out.

And then everything changed with the Khashoggi murder for Trump and MbS. The Saudi Crown prince was seriously underwhelmed by the Trump response which was barely supportive by any stretch of the imagination.

At this point, relations between Washington and KSA began to sour and in so many ways, what we are witnessing today are rooted here.

Joe Biden came into office huffing and puffing about the Saudis and the Khashoggi murder and how the Saudis would have to pay a price for what was conveniently dubbed a hideous human rights abuse against almost a U.S. citizen.

But the reality is that Biden hasn’t done anything of the sort. In fact, in many ways he has shown that all the ranting and remonstrating about Khashoggi was actually just fake news being created to hit the Trump administration. What we see now is a weak, ineffective and, at times, moronic U.S. president who can barely even remember his own tepid rhetoric on Saudi Arabia and their horrendous, barbarous attacks on Yemenis, even to this day. Just recently, he found himself on the back legs on a deal he signed off to allow more arms sales to the Saudis, despite Congress resisting the deal.

Given the confusion and the dead-dead slow negotiations between the U.S. and Iran, the Saudis are now lost and confused. They can’t take Biden seriously and are almost certainly betting on him not being around for a second term. Bearing in mind that they couldn’t take Trump seriously to help them in their hour of need, amidst talk to possible plots to overthrow MbS, it is hardly surprising that they think of Biden as a fool, who is not worth the time of day.

And so, the recent news that the Kingdom has turned to China to help it develop ballistic missiles really shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone given the backdrop of the regime’s worries both domestically and regionally. There have been plenty of warning signs since Khashoggi that the Saudis were shopping around and warming to both China and the Russians as the deal that they had struck with the Americans was very expensive and brought little advantages politically. With China as a partner now, there is leverage towards Iran which, in itself, actually works as a lightning rod to defuse tensions rather than exacerbate them. In fact, relations in the region are generally improving between old rivalries on a grand scale due to Biden’s dithering, as we have just seen a new page turned with Turkey which now is beefing up relations with its old foes in the region like the UAE and Egypt. The fact that Abu Dhabi orchestrated the attempted coup d’etat against Erdogan in 2016 and earlier in 2013 masterminded the successful overthrow of Muslim Brotherhood icon Morsi in Egypt shows security concerns, COVID, domestic woes, Iran’s growth are enough to smash heads together and work out how enemies can seek a workable peace with one another.

Who knows where this all heading, but a peace deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran is not as far fetched as it sounds. Who needs the Americans?

By As`ad ABUKHALIL

The launch of the Aljazeera television network 25 years ago this month in 1996 was a monumental event in the contemporary history of Arab media. One can easily compare it to the rise of Voice of the Arabs, the Egyptian radio broadcast founded by Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt in 1953.

Voice of the Arabs was available on shortwave radio throughout the Arab world, spreading Nasser’s message. No book on that era is complete without a reference to that radio service. It had a tremendous impact on the formation of Arab public opinion for decades until its demise after 1967, when Egyptian media was caught lying to the Arab people about the reality of defeat during the early days of the Arab-Israeli war.

The radio station that articulated the hopes of the Arab nation suddenly stood as a symbol of its incompetence and deception. No media replaced the Voice of the Arabs at the pan-Arab level until the rise of Aljazeera in 1996. Similarity between the two services ends there.

Aljazeera came into existence at a time of regional political instability in the Arabian peninsula. The then emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, came to power in 1995, having overthrown his father. That family coup so disturbed the Saudi royal family that they tried to overthrow al-Thani a year later. Riyadh felt that any deviation from the established line of succession would amount to a betrayal of centuries-old traditions that have been key to stable political succession.

(Of course, Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman has violated those norms and the lines of succession to make himself the sole successor to his father, King Salman).

Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani blamed Saudi Arabia for the 1996 counter-coup attempt and began to chart new foreign and defense policies that were directed at the Saudi threat (he justified his invitation to host U.S. troops as a protection against his powerful neighbor).

Aljazeera, which is owned by the Qatari government, was launched with a wide parameter of expression not seen in Arab media before. To be sure, there were red lines: not much was said about oil and gas policies, nor about the monopolies of royal families and the internal politics of Qatar.

As a guest on Aljazeera many times I can attest that the network does not accommodate views that are critical of the Qatari royal family. (My last appearance a decade ago was after I challenged the network on live TV about its preferential treatment of American officials and its attempt to suppress criticisms of Qatari foreign policy.)

No Competitors

Aljazeera was a huge success and it had no competitors at the time. There was the Saudi-owned media empire, MBC, which was started in London in 1991 by a brother-in-law of King Fahd as the first Arab satellite channel. It was aimed at drawing Arab audiences with silly entertainment and sports shows and with less emphasis on politics: whatever news that was allowed was strictly within the parameters of Saudi foreign policy.

Even TV serials on MBC carry blatant political agendas: either an anti-Shiite message (Al-Faruq, on caliph `Umar Ibn Al-Khattab, for example) or a blatant Zionist message in the serial Um Harun, for example. The latter was the first TV entertainment show to disseminate the Zionist agenda into Arab homes.

Aljazeera gave Arab audiences what they had been waiting for for decades: an Arabic chat and news political channel. A debate show, which brought two opposite political views (Al-Ittijah Al-Mu’akis), was an instant hit. The show was 90-minutes long (Arab audiences don’t suffer from American short attention spans). The presenters became instant celebrities.

Most Arab homes were tuned in to Aljazeera especially when there was a breaking story; the only alternatives to Aljazeera were regime-owned TV stations that were dogmatically propagandistic. It is not that Aljazeera was not serving a propaganda interest of the Qatari regime; but it also provided a wide margin of expression never seen before by Arab audiences.

There was much emphasis in those early years on Saudi Arabia and the channel highlighted human rights abuses there. Not all countries were treated equally, as allies of Qatar received better coverage. But the early managers and editors of the network were secular Arab nationalists and that appealed to many Arabs throughout the world. Even Arab-Americans subscribed to the Dish Network in order to receive Aljazeera broadcasts.

My first appearance on the network in 2001 was to speak about Saudi Arabia. The channel mixed political talk shows and very serious round-ups of news. Experienced and talented correspondents were hired and offices were established around the world. The Arab media scene had never experienced something similar, and themes about Arab unity and nationalism galvanized the audience.

But many Arabs had complaints about the coverage:

• the network hosted a weekly religious show with Yusuf Qardawi, a former Muslim Brotherhood preacher with very conservative views. His version of Islam was appealing to conservative Arab regimes who opposed Nasser—the man who successfully marginalized the Muslim Brotherhood around the Arab world;
• the network was the first to host Israeli guests; officials of the Israeli government and military were regulars on political shows (they did receive tough treatment—unlike on Western shows—but the precedent was appalling to many Arabs whose sensibilities were offended in the extreme);
• the network was increasingly getting defensive about the U.S. government and it gave ample platforms for U.S. officials to spew their propaganda. But the network’s championing of the Palestinian cause and its critical coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 pleased Arab audiences (although the U.S. military responded by simply bombing Aljazeera’s office in Baghdad, which killed their chief correspondent).

U.S. bombing of Aljazeera‘s Baghdad office. (Aljazeera footage in the film Control Room)

The U.S. government and Arab regimes became alarmed over the increasingly important role of Aljazeera. Offices were banned, but the channel’s broadcasts were hard to censor. Saudi Arabia was most concerned because Saudi dissidents (like Sa`d Al-Faqih) would appear on the channel and call for protests on certain days (surprisingly, there were people who responded to such calls under the repressive regime).

The U.S. (in Congress and the media) became more vocal in their attacks on Aljazeera with journalists and politicians calling for its ban from U.S. cable carriers (the U.S. government routinely bans “undesirable” channels from the U.S. without much opposition from U.S. media).

Saudis Respond

The Saudi government quickly scrambled to produce its own political propaganda news channel and in March 2003 – just in time to provide favorable coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq — Al-Arabiya TV channel was launched to serve Saudi and U.S. interests. The network had a much narrower margin of coverage and only hosted opposition figures form countries that were not aligned with the U.S. and Saudi Arabia.

Aljazeera remained the leading channel although Al-Arabiya gained ground. The U.S. government was very pleased with the new Saudi channel and senior U.S. officials (including president George W. Bush) were made available for interviews, while many U.S. officials boycotted Aljazeera outright.

It was in 2011 that the story of the decline of Aljazeera began. Prior to that in 2008, the Qatari and Saudi governments reconciled and that resulted in much tamer coverage of Saudi Arabia by the network. The Saudi government requested that Saudi opposition figures not be allowed on the network (The Emir of Qatar in 2010 informed me that the Saudi king asked him to ban me from the network).

But the biggest change in the network’s coverage occurred in 2011, when the channel fell under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood and their affiliates. All secular Arab nationalists were pushed out of the station and new religious-oriented staff was brought in. With the beginning of the Arab uprising that year the network dropped all professional pretenses and adopted a more overtly propaganda line in calling for the overthrow of governments where change was favorable to the Muslim Brotherhood (such as in Egypt and Tunisia).

The channel passionately urged the toppling of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, but refrained from advocating the overthrow of the King of Bahrain next door. If anything, the network supported the Saudi invasion of Bahrain to crush its rebellion.

Reasons for Decline

It was around that time that Arabs started to abandon the channel in droves.

There are no reliable figures to document the decline of Aljazeera and the channel still claims to have a leading position among Arab media. But many factors have brought about the decline of Aljazeera:

• the control by the Muslim Brotherhood of the network drastically undermined its professionalism;
• U.S. pressure on Qatar softened the coverage of the U.S. The director-general of Aljazeera told me how the U.S. embassy in Doha submitted regular critical reports about the coverage of Aljazeera demanding that changes be made. In 2009, Haim Saban, the Israeli-American media mogul, tried to purchase the channel.
• the use of Aljazeera either to first offend and then appease Saudi Arabia turned the network away from journalism and towards propaganda.
• the rise of local channels in Arab countries damaged the ratings of all pan-Arab channels, like Al-Arabiya, Aljazeera and MBC.
• the resort to sectarian agitation by some personalities on Aljazeera, and the pro-Taliban, pro-al-Qa`ida sympathies of some Aljazeera correspondents (like Ahmad Zaidan), hurt the image of the network with the larger Arab audience and narrowed the appeal and audience share of the channel.

Aljazeera was one of the most interesting cases of a new Arab media in the 21^st century; it promised a break from traditional stale and rigid Arab news broadcasts but eventually failed in its mission. The early years of the network showed more professionalism in news than is seen on U.S. TV networks.

But the Qatari government’s control of the channel would inevitably cause a conflict between its professional mission and its propaganda role. Propaganda won and the Arab public is the worse for it.

consortiumnews.com

United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken is visiting the Middle East and Europe this week in an effort to repair the damage to Washington’s standing with its allies following the disastrous retreat from Afghanistan.

The top U.S. diplomat first goes to Qatar, the Persian Gulf state which has served as a forward – and now backward – operating base for the Pentagon during its military occupation of Afghanistan. Blinken then travels to the giant U.S. airbase at Ramstein, Germany, which was also a vital logistics hub for prosecuting America’s “longest war” – a war that ended in spectacular failure last month. There he will meet German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas ahead of a virtual conference with other European officials on the challenges posed by postwar Afghanistan.

Blinken’s itinerary will overlap with that of the U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin who is also visiting Qatar and the other Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain.

Washington’s whirlwind outreach is evidently an effort to shore up confidence among U.S. allies in American defense commitments. The dramatic and hasty pullout from Afghanistan by the Biden administration has left allies wondering if their American patron can be trusted when the chips are down.

The sense of disappointment has perhaps been most keenly felt in Europe. A conference last week in Slovenia of European defense ministers expressed the anger and dismay of the “fiasco” caused by the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. European allies were not even consulted by the Biden administration about the evacuation plan that concluded on August 31. European partners were left scrambling to get their remaining diplomats and troops out of Kabul because of Washington’s unilateral decision-making. Appeals to President Biden for a delay in the evacuation were pointedly ignored.

Attending the conference in Slovenia last week was the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell. There were bitter recrimininations among the EU members towards the United States for being left in the lurch and appearing to be impotent.

Borrell said: “Afghanistan has shown that the deficiency in our strategic autonomy [from the United States] comes with a price.”

Put in plainer language, Borrell was admitting that the EU’s subservience to the U.S. makes it look foolish and helpless.

In reaction to the Afghanistan debacle, there are now renewed calls for an independent European military force to carry out overseas missions separately from Washington. A European army has long been advocated by the EU’s big members Germany and France. However, certain inertia in the proposal stems from sensitivity to criticism of such a force being a throwback to European imperialism. Germany in particular with its Nazi past has to tread gingerly on the subject.

However, the scale of disgrace over defeat in Afghanistan for the U.S. and its NATO allies is so poignant that the debate on European “autonomy” is being propelled forward.

The problem for Europe is two-fold. The deployment of a proposed rapid reaction force for dealing with an overseas crisis is contradicted by Brussels’ bureaucracy and the principle of unanimity among the EU’s 27 member states. How can a force be a “rapid reaction” one when its deployment must require the inevitable comprehensive debate beforehand? That problem is being addressed by moves to form “coalitions of the willing” for deployment. So, for example, if Berlin and Paris deem a joint military expedition necessary to some conflict zone, then that would be sufficient for its authorization. That still is politically tricky because it can be criticized for the perceived hijacking of the EU bloc by a minority of, albeit powerful, members. That again smacks of the EU being forged into a Neo-imperialist vehicle.

A second problem is European military autonomy from Washington could undermine the NATO alliance. This was explicitly stated by the Norwegian civilian head of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, following the proposals touted at the conference in Slovenia. Stoltenberg warned that moves for European military actions independent of Washington would not be viable. He said that NATO was the only way to defend Europe and that any shift from the transatlantic alliance would split Europe.

Of course, Stoltenberg would say that. His lucrative job depends on promoting NATO.

Nevertheless, there is an emerging division in Europe. There are those voices in Germany, France, Spain and Italy who would like to see more independence from Washington in decision-making. This position is bolstered by the Afghanistan travesty and the shame felt by European leaders with their pretensions of global importance.

On the other hand, the eastern members of the EU, Poland and the Baltic states, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, are more predisposed to NATO as the primary military force. This is because of their desire to keep Washington close owing to their irrational Russophobia.

In any case, what the fallout from Afghanistan shows is that the transatlantic alliance between the U.S. and Europe and its Middle Eastern allies is badly shaken due to Washington’s impetuousness to act in its own interests. The irony is that Joe Biden was supposed to restore relations between the United States and its allies which had been ruffled under Donald Trump and his boorish “America First” braggadocio.

Now Biden’s top aides are left with the task of calming allies who have been spooked by Washington’s new iteration of what has always been a constant, never-changing policy of America First. The really damaging thing though, which may have become irreparable, is that Biden’s trust-building among allies is now seen for what it is: a cynical pile of lies.

It was a bare-knuckle brawl of the first order. It took place in Washington, D.C., and it resulted in a KO. The winners? Lobbyists and the defense industry. The losers? Us. And odds on, you didn’t even know that it happened. Few Americans did, which is why it’s worth telling the story of how Saudi, Emirati, and Qatari money flooded the nation’s capital and, in the process, American policy went down for the count.

The fight began three years ago this month. Sure, the pugilists hadn’t really liked each other that much before then, but what happened in 2017 was the foreign-policy equivalent of a sucker punch. On the morning of June 5th, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, and Bahrain announced that they were severing diplomatic ties with Qatar, the small but wealthy emirate in the Persian Gulf, and establishing a land, air, and sea blockade of their regional rival, purportedly because of its ties to terrorism.

The move stunned the Qataris, who responded in ways that would later become familiar during the Covid-19 pandemic — by emptying supermarket shelves and hoarding essentials they worried would quickly run out. Their initial fears were not unwarranted, as their neighbors, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, were even reported to be planning to launch a military invasion of Qatar in the weeks to come (one that would be thwarted only by the strong objections of Donald Trump’s then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson).

To make sense of this now three-year-old conflict, which turned aspects of American policy in the Middle East ranging from the war in Yemen to the more than 10,000 American military personnel stationed in Qatar into political footballs, means refocusing on Washington and the extraordinary influence operations the Saudis, Emiratis, and Qataris ran there. That, in turn, means analyzing Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) documents filed by firms representing all three countries since the spat began. Do that and you’ll come across a no-punches-barred bout of lobbying in the U.S. capital that would have made Rocky envious.

The Saudis Come Out Swinging

The stage had been set for the blockade of Qatar seven months before it began when Donald Trump was elected president. Just as his victory shocked the American public, so it caught many foreign governments off guard. In response, they quickly sought out the services of anyone with ties to the incoming administration and the Republican-controlled Congress. The Saudis and Emiratis were no exception. In 2016, both countries had reportedspending a little more than $10 million on FARA registered lobbying firms. By the end of 2017, UAE spending had nearly doubled to $19.5 million, while the Saudi’s had soared to $27.3 million.

In the months following Donald Trump’s November triumph, the Saudis, for instance, added several firms with ties to him or the Republicans to an already sizeable list of companies registered under FARA as representing their interests. For example, they brought on the CGCN Group whose president and chief policy officer, Michael Catanzaro, was on Trump’s transition team and then served in his administration. To court the Republican Congress, they hired the McKeon Group, run by former Republican Representative Buck McKeon, who had previously served as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.

And that was just registered foreign agents. A number of actors who had not registered under FARA were actively pushing the Saudi and Emirati agendas, chief among them Elliott Broidy and George Nader. Broidy, a top fundraiser for Trump’s campaign, and Nader, his business partner, already had a wide range of interests in both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. To help secure them, the two men embarked on a campaign to turn the new president and the Republican establishment against Qatar. One result was a Broidy-inspired, UAE-funded anti-Qatar conference hosted in May 2017 by a prominent Washington think tank, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. It conveniently offered Representative Ed Royce (R-CA) a platform to discuss his plans to introduce a bill, HR 2712, that would label Qatar a state sponsor of terrorism. It was to be introduced in the House of Representatives just two days after the conference ended.

Qatar, mind you, had been a U.S. ally in the Middle East and was the home of Al Udeid Air Base, where more than 10,000 American soldiers are still stationed. So that bill represented a striking development in American-Qatari relations and was a clearly traceable result of Saudi and UAE lobbying efforts.

The unregistered influence of players like Broidy and Nader was evidently backed by other FARA-registered Saudi and UAE foreign agents actively pushing the bill. For example, Qorvis Communications, a long-time public relations mouthpiece for the Saudis, circulated a document titled “Qatar’s History of Funding Terrorism and Extremism,” claiming that country was funding Al-Nusra, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and other groups. (Not surprisingly, it included a supportive quote from David Weinberg, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.)

While that anti-Qatar crusade was ramping up in Washington, the president himself was being wooed by the Saudi royals in Riyadh on his first official trip abroad. They gave him the literal royal treatment and their efforts appeared to pay off when, just a day after the blockade began, Trump tweeted, “During my recent trip to the Middle East I stated that there can no longer be funding of Radical Ideology. Leaders pointed to Qatar — look!”

A week after the imposition of the blockade, the Emirati ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for Al Udeid Air Base to be moved to the UAE, a development the Qataris feared could open the door for an eventual invasion of their country.

However, this Saudi and Emirati onslaught did not go unanswered.

Qatar Strikes Back

Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, the emir of Qatar, was caught flat-footed by the influence operations of the Saudis and the United Arab Emirates. The year before Donald Trump became president, the Qataris had spent just $2.7 million on lobbying and public relations firms, less than a third of what the Saudis and UAE paid out, according to FARA records. But they now moved swiftly to shore up their country’s image as a crucial American ally. They went on an instant hiring spree, scooping up lobbying and public-relations firms with close ties to Trump and congressional Republicans. Just two days after the blockade began, for instance, they inked a deal with the law firm of former Attorney General John Ashcroft, paying $2.5 million for just its first 90 days of work.

They also quickly obtained the services of Stonington Strategies. Headed by Nick Muzin, who had worked on Trump’s election campaign, the firm promptly set out to court 250 Trump “influencers,” as Julie Bykowicz of theWall Street Journal reported. Among others, Stonington’s campaign sought to woo prominent Fox News personalities Trump paid special attention to like former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. He was paid $50,000 to travel to Qatar just months later.

In September 2017, the Qataris also hired Bluefront Strategies to craft a comprehensive multimedia operation, which was to include commercials on all the major news networks, as well as digital and printed ads in an array of prominent publications, and a “Lift the Blockade” campaign on social media. Meanwhile, ads on Google and YouTube were to highlight the illegality of the blockade and the country’s contributions to fighting terrorism. Bluefront Strategies was to influence public opinion before the next session of the U.N. General Assembly that month. Qatar and its proxies then used the campaign“to target key decision-makers attending the General Assembly, including Trump” to gain support on that most global of stages.

Its agents weren’t just playing defense, either. They actively attacked the Saudi lobby. For example, Barry Bennett of Avenue Strategies, a PR firm they hired, sent a letter to the assistant attorney general for national security accusing Saudi Arabia and the Saudi American Public Relation Affairs Committee (SAPRAC) of FARA violations in their funding of an expensive media campaign meant to connect Qatar’s leaders with violent extremism and acts of terror.

Such counterpunches proved remarkably successful. SAPRAC eventually felt obliged to register with FARA. Meanwhile, Huckabee tweeted, “Just back from a few days in surprisingly beautiful, modern, and hospitable Doha, Qatar.” Finally, at that U.N. meeting, President Trump actually sat down with Emir al-Thani of Qatar and said, “We’ve been friends a long time… I have a very strong feeling [the Qatar diplomatic crisis] will be solved quickly.” They both then emphasized the “tremendous” and “strong” relationship between their countries.

The Qataris next mounted a concerted defense against HR 2712. Lobbying firms they hired, particularly Avenue Strategies and Husch Blackwell, launched a multifaceted campaign to prevent that legislation from passing. Elliott Broidy even claimed in a lawsuit that the Qatari government and several of its lobbyists had hacked his email account and distributed private emails of his to members of Congress in an attempt to discredit his work for the Saudis.

In November 2017, Barry Bennett from Avenue Strategies went on the attack, using a powerful weapon in Washington politics: Israel. He distributed a letter to members of Congress written by a former high-ranking official in the Israeli national security establishment explicitly stating that Qatar had not provided military support to Hamas, as HR 2712 claimed it had.

Three months later, Husch Blackwell all but threatened Congress and the Trump administration with the cancellation of a $6.2 billion Boeing contract to sell F-15 fighters to the Qatari military (and the potential loss of thousands of associated jobs) if the bill passed and sanctions were imposed on that country. All of this was linked to a concerted effort by Qatari agents to contact “nearly two dozen House offices, including then House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy,” to prevent the bill’s passage, according to a report by the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy where we work. Ultimately, HR 2712 died a slow death in Congress and never became law.

The Saudi Bloc’s Battle for the War in Yemen

Just as Qatar started to turn the tide in the fight for influence in Washington, the Saudis and their allies faced another problem: Congress began moving to sever support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen. On February 28, 2018, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a joint resolution to withdraw U.S. support for that war. According to FARA filings, Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, LLP, representing the Saudi ministry of foreign affairs, contacted several members of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, particularly Democrats, presumably to persuade them to vote against the measure.

That March, the firm sent out dozens of emails to members of Congress inviting them to a gala dinner with the key Saudi royal, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself. According to the invitation from the CGCN Group, another FARA-registered firm representing the Saudis, the “KSA [Kingdom of Saudi Arabia]-USA Partnership Gala Dinner” was to emphasize the “enduring defense and counter-terrorism cooperation” and “historic alliance” between the two countries. It would end up taking place just two days after the Senate voted to table Sanders’s bill.

Emirati lobbyists similarly reached out to Congress to maintain support for their role in that war. Hagir Elawad & Associates, for example, distributed an op-ed written by the UAE minister of state for foreign affairs justifying the war, as well as a letter written by that country’s ambassador, Yousef al-Otaiba, to 50 congressional contacts defending the Saudi-led coalition’s efforts to avoid civilian casualties and arguing that “the United States has a clear stake in the coalition’s success in Yemen.”

When that conflict began, Qatar was still a member of the coalition, but the imposition of the blockade led it to withdraw its forces from Yemen. Qatari officials then used the country’s media empire, centered on the broadcaster Al Jazeera, to highlight the disastrous aspects of the ongoing war. In doing so, they provided the Saudis and Emiratis with yet another reason to focus their own influence machines on both Qatar’s and Al Jazeera’s destruction. (That network’s closure was, in fact, one of the original 13 demands the Saudis and Emiratis had made for lifting the blockade.)

From the moment it was founded in 1996, Al Jazeera had been an instrument of Qatari soft power, so it was hardly surprising that the UAE had long pressured members of Congress to force the network to register under FARA as a foreign agent. And Emirati lobbying efforts were not in vain. In early March 2018, 19 members of Congress signed and sent a letter to then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions urging the Justice Department to demand that Al Jazeera be registered under FARA. Another such letter sent to the Justice Department in June 2019 by six senators and two representatives asked “why Al Jazeera and its employees have not been required to register.” According to FARA filings, all but one of those representatives had either received campaign contributions from or been contacted by a Saudi or Emirati lobbying firm. Al Jazeera, however, has yet to register.

The Murder of Jamal Khashoggi

Despite the efforts of Saudi and Emirati lobbyists in the early months of 2018, the emir of Qatar still managed to land an invitation to the Oval Office. At their meeting that April 10th, President Trump again described al-Thani as a “friend” and a “great gentleman” as well. The emir, in turn, thanked the president for “supporting us during this blockade.”

If Trump’s cozying up to him was a setback for the Saudis, the murder of critic and Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi nearly did in the Saudi lobbying juggernaut as well. The CIA later confirmed that the crown prince himself had ordered that Saudi citizen’s assassination at the country’s consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.

As a result, some lobbying firms cut ties with the kingdom and its influence on Capitol Hill waned, as did positive public opinion about Saudi Arabia. In December 2018, the Senate passed the Sanders bill to end support for the war in Yemen. Both houses of Congress also passed a War Powers resolution to end involvement in that conflict, a historic congressional move in this century, even if later vetoed by President Trump (as were a series of attempts to block his treasured arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates).

Given the president’s unyielding support for the Saudis and Emiratis as especially lucrative customers for this country’s defense industry, the Qataris have clearly decided to crib the Saudi playbook. In May, that country purchased 24 Apache helicopters for $3 billion and, a few months later, agreed to pay for and manage a $1.8 billion expansion of Al Udeid Air Base to ensure the American military’s continued presence for the foreseeable future. In doing so, Qatar was visibly at work coopting two of the most powerful lobbies in Washington: the military and the weapons makers.

And the Winners Are…

Though Qatar faced a near-existential threat to its survival when the blockade began, three years later it’s not only surviving, but thriving thanks significantly to its influence operations in Washington. They have helped immeasurably to deepen economic, diplomatic, and military relations between the two countries.

Meanwhile, the emir’s rivals in Riyadh not only failed to make their blockade a success, but saw their influence wane appreciably in the U.S. as they stumbled from one public relations fiasco to the next. Even their staunchest defender, Donald Trump, recently threatened to sever U.S. military support for the Kingdom if the Saudi royals didn’t end their oil war with Russia (which they promptly did).

In truth, however, the real loser in this struggle for influence hasn’t been Saudi Arabia or the Emiratis, it’s been America. After all, the efforts of both sides to deepen their ties with the military-industrial complex (reinforcing the hyper-militarization of U.S. foreign policy) and increase their sway in Congress have ensured that the real interests of this country played second fiddle to those of Middle Eastern despots. Certainly, their acts helped ensure near historic levels of arms sales to the region, while prolonging the wars in Yemen and Syria, and so contributing to death and devastation on an almost unimaginable scale.

None of this had anything to do with the real interests of Americans, unless you mean the arms industry and K Street lobbyists who have been the only clear American winners in this never-ending PR war in Washington. In the process, those three Persian Gulf states have delivered a genuine knockout blow to the very idea that U.S. foreign policy should be driven by national — not special — interests.

counterpunch.org

Libya’s long-running civil war has taken a new turn in recent weeks after the Turkish-backed Government of National Accord launched an offensive against would-be strongman Khalifa Haftar, pushing him and his Libyan National Army out of Tripoli and a number of near-by strongholds. But anyone who thinks that peace is at hand after nine years of anarchy and collapse should think again. Odds are all but certain that all it will do is introduce new chaos into a country that has already seen more than its fair share.

But before we speculate about the future, let’s pause for a moment to consider the past and how the craziness began. When historians conduct their post-mortem analyses, chance are good that they’ll zero in on one date in particular – Apr. 13, 2011. That’s the day Barack Obama welcomed Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, emir of Qatar, to the White House. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had just spent weeks lining up support for the effort to topple Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi in the wake of the Arab Spring. But in mid-March, she decided that the coalition was too western, too Euro-centric, for delicate post-colonial sensibilities, and so she set out to woo energy-rich Qatar as well. When Al-Thani at last agreed to come on board, his reward was an audience with His Coolness himself, the U.S. president.

But Obama should have paused before leaping into the unknown. Although Qatar enjoys a benign reputation thanks to its extensive economic and cultural ties with the west, its political profile has long been strangely bifurcated – liberal in some respects, increasingly Islamist in others. By the late 1990s, it was making a name for itself as a center for the ultra-austere branch of Islam known as Salafism. By 2003, reports were growing that local charities were funneling money to Al-Qaeda. But Washington paid little attention. How could such reports be true if Qatar was helping to depose the Gaddafi, long a thorn in the side of American imperialism? If he was working in behalf of U.S. hegemony, which is to say the ultimate good, didn’t that mean that he had to be good as well?

Such is the cartoonish mindset that prevails in Washington. After privately conferring with Al-Thani, Obama then paraded him before the press. “I expressed to him my appreciation of the leadership that the emir has shown when it comes to democracy in the Middle East,” he told reporters, “and, in particular, the work that they have done in trying to promote a peaceful transition in Libya.… He’s motivated by a belief that the Libyan people should have the rights and freedoms of all people. And as a consequence, Qatar is not only supportive diplomatically but is also supportive militarily.”

At which point, some emperor-has-no-clothes type might have popped up to ask: how can an absolute autocrat like Al-Thani care about rights and freedoms in Libya when it denies such privileges to his own people at home? A few hours later, Obama offered a few comments at a Democratic fundraiser in Chicago that were picked up by na open mike.

“Pretty influential guy,” he said of Al-Thani. “He is a big booster, big promoter of democracy all throughout the Middle East. Reform, reform, reform – you’re seeing it on Al Jazeera.”

Then he added: “Now, he himself is not reforming significantly. There’s no big move towards democracy in Qatar. But you know part of the reason is that the per-capita income of Qatar is $145,000 a year. That will dampen a lot of conflict.”

Immense energy wealth – adjusted for inflation, oil prices at the time were pushing $130 a barrel – evidently means that Qatar gets a free pass when it comes to democratic niceties that other countries are expected to observe.

But Obama was wrong about what all that money would do. Rather than tamping down conflict, it fanned it. Using his position in the U.S.-led alliance serving for political and diplomatic cover, Al-Thani seized the opportunity to distribute an estimated $400 million to Libyan Salafist rebels in the form of machineguns, automatic rifles, and ammo. Within months, insurgents were hoisting the maroon-and-white Qatari flag over Gaddafi’s once-impregnable presidential complex in Tripoli.

The result was bedlam. Even though Libya would eventually elect a national parliament, gunmen flush with Persian Gulf cash forced it to adopt a host of Islamist “reforms” – burkhas, gender segregation, compulsory hijabs at universities, the works. Islamists went on a rampage, killing U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens in September 2012, kidnapping Prime Minister Ali Zeidan in October 2013, kidnapping a group of Egyptian diplomats the following January, and then storming the national parliament two months later, shooting and injuring two lawmakers. The Obama administration thought of punishing Qatar by holding off military assistance and the like. But after objections from both the Pentagon and the State Department, and the administration held its tongue. A Libyan politician named Mohammed Ali Abdallah would later say of the Americans:

“They created the monsters we are dealing with today, which is these militias that are so empowered they will never subordinate themselves to any government.”

Quite right – and those monsters have only grown bigger and more vicious as the years have passed. So why did the U.S. allow a close ally to overturn the apple cart? One reason is incompetence, but another is America’s longstanding alliance with Sunni extremism. Remember – rather than merely cooperating with such elements, America helped call them into existence by partnering with the Saudis to create an anti-Soviet holy war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Even though the effort left Afghanistan in ruins, the pattern has repeated itself again and again in Bosnia, Syria, Yemen, and Libya as well. Whenever Americans intervene in the Muslim world, Sunni jihadis backed by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and other Persian Gulf oil monarchies invariably follow. Despite occasional blowback in the form of 9/11 and other such incidents, the U.S.-jihadi alliance has continued without major interruption.

The result in the case of Libya is a black hole where a more or less functional state used to be. Since geopolitics abhor a vacuum, outside powers can’t resist throwing themselves into the fray. But not only are Islamists on the GNA side – they are increasingly prominent in the Haftar camp as well. Since such elements are ultimately loyal only to their paymasters in the gulf, deepening chaos can be the only result.

Keep that in mind as the anarchy in Libya intensifies and spreads, leading in the worst-case scenario to a military blow-up between Turkey and Russia, which is among Haftar’s prime supporters. While no one knows how far the process will go, we have a good idea of how the breakdown began – with Barack Obama’s belief that money would buy peace. This is how corrupt oligarchies think. But it made no sense then, and it makes even less now that energy prices are crashing through the floor and the region is sliding deeper and deeper into ruin.

They should have known from the recent example of Qatar that when faced with existential threats, countries resist injustice and aggression with all the national comprehensive power at their command.

The gyre of the US-Iran standoff is only widening by the day. What was thought to be a localised affair is acquiring international dimensions. America’s Arab allies no longer have a say in the mutation of the US-Iran standoff. Meanwhile, Britain has appeared on the scene to navigate the US project.

The Saudi and Emirati role from now on narrows down to bankrolling the Anglo-American project on Iran and to allow the western bases on their territories to be used as launching pads for belligerent acts aimed at provoking the leadership in Tehran into retaliatory moves. In sum, there is growing danger that the might get sucked into the Anglo-American project unwittingly.

The Gulf states lack “strategic depth” vis-a-vis Iran and are sure to find themselves on the frontline of any military conflagration. Conceivably, neither Saudi Arabia nor the UAE bargained for such an eventuality. Thus, belatedly though, the Saudis and Emiratis have taken out the abacus and are doing the sums afresh.

It is possible to discern amidst the welter of interpretations given to the abrupt, unceremonious “partial” pullout of the UAE forces from the war in Yemen, Abu Dhabi’s calculation that safeguarding homeland security comes first, way above any imperial agenda.

That sobering thought has prompted the UAE to make some overtures to Tehran. The UAE has taken a nuanced stance that no country could be held responsible for the attacks on oil tankers in the Gulf in June. Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed Al-Nahyan said “clear and convincing evidence” is needed regarding the attacks that targeted four vessels off the UAE coast, including two Saudi oil tankers.

In essence he distanced UAE from the US National Security Adviser John Bolton’s finding that the attacks on oil tankers were the work of “naval mines almost certainly from Iran”. Significantly, Al-Nahyan made the remark at a joint press conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov during a visit to Moscow in late June, which from all indications focused on the efforts to bring the war in Yemen to an end and on a possible Russian initiative to moderate UAE’s tensions with Iran. Interestingly, within the week after Al-Nahyan’s visit in late June, Moscow also hosted the Secretary-General of the Organisation of Islamic Conference and the UN special envoy on Yemen.

It is entirely conceivable that Russia is doing what it can behind the scenes to lower the tensions between Iran and the UAE and in the Persian Gulf region as a whole. Moscow has lately rebooted its proposal for a collective security system for the Persian Gulf. In fact, on July 30, the Russian concept of collective security in the Persian Gulf has been distributed as an official document approved by the UN.

The Russian document envisages an initiative group to prepare an international conference on security and cooperation in the Persian Gulf, which would later lead to establishing an organisation on security and cooperation in this region. China has welcomed the Russian initiative and offered to contribute to its success — “We would also like to boost cooperation, coordination and communication with all the corresponding parties.” Of course, this is going to be long haul since the US and Britain will only see any such regional security architecture as heralding the end of the western hegemony in the Middle East.

What makes the Russian concept of collective security in the Persian Gulf highly topical is that it is couched in an initiative in immediate terms to establish demilitarised zones in the region, which in turn would obviate the need for any permanent deployment of squads of non-regional states and instead seek the establishment of hot lines between the militaries involved to communicate and resolve emergent contingencies from time to time.

Clearly, the Russian proposal flies in the face of the Anglo-American plot to create a western naval armada led by the US to take control of the 19000 nautical miles in and around the Strait of Hormuz that will put the West effectively as the moderator of the world oil market — with all the implications that go with it for international politics — and literally reduce the oil-rich Persian Gulf countries to de facto pumping stations. The Anglo-American strategy is to prey upon the deep concerns of the oil-consuming countries of Europe and Asia over energy security against the backdrop of the rising US-Iran tensions. No doubt, the Trump administration, with the help of BoJo’s UK, hopes to mitigate Washington’s international isolation ensuing out of its exit from the JCPOA last year in May.

Nonetheless, the time may have come for the Russian initiative to gain traction. The Iran-UAE joint meeting to address littoral security cooperation in Tehran on July 30 is a tell-tale sign that the Persian Gulf states may have begun to realise that the endemic insecurities of the region ultimately require a regional solution although the predatorial Western governments—and their military-industrial complexes — who exploit the Gulf divisions to secure lucrative arms sales running into tens of billions of dollars annually, will not easily retrench from the region.

It must have come as a shocking reality-check for Saudi Arabi and the UAE that Trump who had a marvellous “war dance” with King Salman hardly two years ago in Riyadh and has locked in the two counties to the standoff with Iran, has lately switched attention to their bête noire, Qatar, “to share a history of friendship based on common efforts and mutual respect”, as the joint statement issued recently after the first official visit by Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani to the White House puts it.

The joint statement unabashedly summed up the outcome of the emir’s visit:

The Qatar Airways purchase of five Boeing 777 Freighters.

The Qatar Airways commitment to purchase large-cabin aircraft from Gulfstream.

The Chevron-Phillips Chemical Company LLC and Qatar Petroleum agreement to pursue the development, construction, and operation of a petrochemicals complex in Qatar.

The Qatar Ministry of Defense’s commitment to acquire Raytheon’s NASAM and Patriot Systems.

The selection by Qatar Airways of GE jet engines and services to power its 787 and 777 Aircraft.

Trump was beside himself with joy in his remarks effusively praising the Qatary emir. It cannot be lost on the UAE and Saudi Arabia that Trump is making suckers out of them.

In fact, what we know now is that Trump agreed to go along with the ruse in May and June of 2017 because he had just received a cash gift of 2.5m dollars from the UAE leader, via his chief fundraiser Elliot Broidy and Middle East fixer George Nader.

The recent Mueller report in America exposed the Lebanese businessman’s dirty work, commissioned by Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan (MBZ) to send the money to the US president in return for a number of policy decisions in the region; Qatar blockade was one, which he claimed just a few days after returning from the summit in Riyadh with King Salman in May of 2017, was in fact his own brainchild. Others include special arms deals to the Saudis being unblocked including nukes to the Saudis and – possibly – even the decision to launch strikes against Iran after the drone incident, which Trump came very close to doing.

But the Qatar blockade, which most blamed the Saudis for as a decision based on rank stupidity, was actually Trump’s which is why Riyadh had the unsettling confidence to do it, in the first place.

Since the arrest of George Nader on June 3 in New York relating to child porn offences – and his story being unearthed by investigative journalists – we are witnessing a wising up of Trump. We can only speculate how much money has been funnelled to him from MBZ and MBS in Saudi Arabia (for sure it’s far more than merely 2.5m USD) but what is clearer is that on June 21^st when he pulled back from launching retaliatory strikes against Iran, he realised he was about to fall into a trap – perhaps created by the neocons (to go ahead with a war with Iran) and possibly even Saudi Arabia and UAE, who would dearly love the US to war with Iran, while they both keep a safe distance.

The objectives of that entire cabal, was for Trump to lose his re-election bid in 2020.

But the Qatar blockade is interesting and was seen as a major victory of a middle eastern leader to pull off such a stunt whereby a US president would accommodate whoever was paying, with a policy decision.

Quite apart from the stunt massively backfiring on so many levels, in particular against Saudi Arabia geopolitically (but also to some extent financially the UAE), what we are witnessing now is a new significance and importance to Trump and his administration of this tiny gas-rich country.

Trump does not need warmongers in the Middle East but peace brokers who can pull him out of a hole and win him votes in 2020. Where the UAE and Saudi Arabia patently can’t do that, the bandwidth is taken up by Qatar who is showing sterling signs that it punches above its weight in the region.

In July 2018 Trump instructed his advisors in Afghanistan to pull out all the stops and begin talks with the Taliban, which, quite apart from having an office in Qatar since 2013, is connected in many ways with the country’s rulers. Indeed, Qatar (as well as Germany) has been playing an important role of back channel communicator for quite a while and the Emir’s arrival in Washington on July 8^th, to be welcomed by Trump personally at a black tie dinner, gives a lucid clue to onlookers who seek to identify any logic to Trump’s tumultuous attempts at off-the-hoof-diplomacy in the region. Trump has had his fingers burnt by the MBZ/MBS experience which may have filled his coffers with re-election funding but came at a very high price indeed, almost costing him the presidency as he came within a whisker of pressing the Iran war button. Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani is a cool player who prefers peace in the region rather than escalated tensions as a business model. He may well just be Trump’s new partner in the Middle East as if he can give a face saving exit in Afghanistan then Trump will certainly look to him to find a solution in Iran too, which Al Thani is even better placed to do.

The move is but the latest in a series of efforts by the Trump administration to mobilize Arab allies into a more aggressive military stance towards Iran. It follows recent visits to the region by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton, both of whom have been urging a more organized military front led by the US to confront Iran.

The latest naval coalition proposed by General Dunford will be charged with escorting oil tankers as they pass through the Strait of Hormuz exiting the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean, and also through the Bab al Mandab entrance to the Red Sea on the Western side of the Arabian Peninsula. The former conduit serves oil supply to Asia, while the latter position between Yemen and Eritrea leads shipping to the Suez Canal on the way to the Mediterranean and Europe. Both narrow sea passages are strategic chokepoints in global oil trade, with some 20-30 per cent of all daily shipped crude passing through them.

The apparently chivalrous motives of the US to “guarantee freedom of navigation” sounds suspiciously like a pretext for Washington to assert crucial military control over international oil trade. That is one paramount reason for objecting to this American proposal.

Secondly, the very idea of sending more military vessels to the Persian Gulf under Pentagon command at this time of incendiary tensions between the US and Iran is a reckless provocation too far.

In the same week that the Pentagon called for a naval coalition, the US and Britain were blaming Iranian forces for trying to block a British oil tanker near the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has dismissed the allegations that its naval vessels interfered in any way with the British tanker. Both London and Washington claimed that a British Royal Navy frigate had to intervene to ward off the Iranian vessels. Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif dismissed the accusations as “worthless”.

The latest incident follows a string of sabotage attacks against oil tankers in the Persian Gulf by unidentified assailants. The US has blamed Iran. Iran has vehemently denied any involvement. Tehran has countered by saying that tensions are being inflamed by “malicious conspiracies”.

One can easily foresee in this already supercharged geopolitical context in the Persian Gulf and the wider region how any additional military forces would be potentially disastrous, either from miscalculation, misunderstanding or more malign motive.

Furthermore, media reports indicate a heightened wariness among some Gulf Arab states about being pushed into confrontation with their neighbor Iran. US policy is recklessly fomenting regional tensions against the better judgement of proximate countries.

The Washington Post reported this week: “The escalating tensions in the Persian Gulf have exposed differences between the United States and its regional allies, in part over how aggressively the Trump administration should confront Iran… With these countries likely to find themselves on the front lines of any military conflict with Iran, some of the smaller states are hesitant to support the more combative stance of the United States and regional heavyweights Saudi Arabia and the UAE.”

The report goes on: “The more-assertive approach championed by Saudi Arabia — and in particular by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — puts the kingdom at odds with some of the smaller US allies in the region, which want to see the crisis settled through negotiations. Kuwait and Oman, which have pursued bilateral relations with Iran, have long resented Saudi attempts to pressure them to adopt a more confrontational foreign policy, analysts say.”

Qatar is another important regional player which is bound to have misgivings about the growing tensions. The gas-rich emirate has been roughed up by Saudi Arabia and the UAE with a two-year blockade on trade and political links. While Qatar is a US ally and a Sunni Arab neighbor traditionally aligned with Saudi Arabia, the country also shares the region’s close historical trading ties with Shia Iran to the North. Centuries of overlapping cultural ties belie the attempt by the US and its Saudi and UAE allies of trying to polarize the region into an anti-Iran axis.

Aware of the danger of a catastrophic war erupting, several regional states are right to be even more alarmed by the latest proposition of a naval coalition led by the US. Washington is arrogantly over-stepping its presumption to control global oil trade, and it is pushing tensions in the region with a provocation too far. Hopefully, reckless US-led antagonism will be rebuffed by wiser regional states who stand to lose much more than Generals and warmongers sitting comfortably in Washington.

Moreover, the correct way to calm and resolve tensions in the region is for the Trump administration to halt its aggression towards Iran and to respect the 2015 international nuclear accord which it unilaterally trashed last year. Remove sanctions and warships from the region and – for a fundamental change – respect international law, diplomacy and peaceful negotiations.

The GCC, like NATO, on which it is modeled, also began fishing for new members far outside its geographical area. At first, the GCC was interested in enlisting as members the remaining two Arab monarchies, Jordan and Morocco. In 2011, there was interest in having Egypt join the GCC. Yemen’s civil war and the presence in Iraq of a large pro-Iranian Shi’a population have prevented the GCC from accepting either two as members.

However, cracks between Qatar and the Saudis began emerging in 1995, when Qatar’s new emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, decided that Qatar should have a foreign policy independent from that of the Saudis. An early rupture in relations occurred in 2002, when the Saudis withdrew their ambassador from Doha, the Qatari capital, as a way to punish Qatar for its independent streak. Qatar was able to flex its muscles against the Saudis by brandishing its Al-Udeid Airbase, America’s largest military base in the Middle East and the home to the regional headquarters of the US Central Command (CENTCOM).

In 2014, a major crack developed within the GCC. Qatar was accused by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Bahrain of supporting groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Lebanese Hezbollah. The Saudis and Emiratis were also upset about the reporting of the so-called “Arab Spring” by Qatar’s state-funded Al Jazeera satellite news network. During a GCC summit, the Saudis, Emiratis, and Bahrainis recalled their ambassadors in Doha.

After Donald Trump’s inauguration as president in Washington, the Saudis and Emiratis, sensing their illegal contributions to the Trump campaign and presidential inauguration should pay some dividends, decided to wage a drastic economic and political war against Qatar. Working against Qatar on behalf of the UAE and Saudis was a lobbying cabal headed by the co-chair of the Republican Party’s Finance Committee and Trump friend, Elliott Broidy, and adviser to the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi George Nader. It was later discovered that the UAE ambassador in Washington, Yousef Al-Otaiba, was working in concert with the neo-conservative and Israel Lobby-linked Foundation for the Defense of Democracies – once known as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) – to whip up anti-Qatar fervor within the Trump administration and Congress. PNAC was the neo-con contrivance that helped lie the United States into war with Iraq.

Meanwhile, Abu Dhabi-based hackers linked to Erik Prince, the founder of the US mercenary company, Blackwater, began waging a cyber war targeting Qatar computer networks. One target was the Qatar News Agency (QNA) that saw its system hacked. QNA began distributing hacker-written stories falsely attributing remarks by Qatar’s Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. The emir was falsely painted as favoring Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and, ironically, Israel. These bogus QNA wire stories were reported as true by Abu Dhabi-based Sky News Arabia and Dubai-based and Saudi-owned Al Arabiya.

On June 5, 2017, a month after the Saudis hosted Trump at the Riyadh Summit of Muslim nations, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt severed diplomatic ties with Qatar. The GCC members also instituted a ban on direct flights between GCC nations and Qatar and Qataris and their businesses were banned from operating within the GCC. Saudi and UAE ports refused docking privileges for Qatari merchant vessels. Qatar’s sole land border, its frontier with Saudi Arabia, was closed. Saudi banks refused to handle Qatari riyals and the UAE cut postal service with Qatar. Qataris were also banned from visiting GCC countries unless they had a spouse as legal residents in the other member states.

The Saudis also began backing a pretender to the Qatari throne as a sign it wanted nothing less than “regime change” in Doha. Qatar has its own “Game of Thrones” cards to play in the UAE, where a growing rivalry separates UAE president-in-waiting, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed (MBZ), and UAE Vice President and Dubai Ruler, Emir Mohammed Rashid bin Maktoum. In June 2018, there was a meeting in Abu Dhabi of the Saudi-UAE Joint Coordination Council. All of the top members of the Saudi and Abu Dhabi royal clans were present, including Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS). Absent was the Dubai emir, a royal slap in MBZ’s face that did not go unnoticed in either Doha or Tehran.

Eventually, the Saudi-UAE axis, with the quiet encouragement of Israel, convinced Jordan; Mauritania; Djibouti; Senegal; Maldives; Comoros; the Tobruk-based government of General Khalifa Haftar in Libya; Saudi Arabia’s puppet regime in Yemen; and the semi-autonomous Somali regions of Puntland, Hirshabelle, and Galmudug to sever diplomatic relations with Qatar.

Ironically, the Saudis and Emiratis accused Qatar of backing the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), when, in fact, ISIL received more backing from the Saudis and Emiratis than Qatar.

Through the efforts of US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, the attempt to foment a rupture in US-Qatari relations was forestalled.

Qatar appears to be defending itself against UAE cyber-warfare operations. The UAE’s patronization of cyber-warfare operations involving Broidy’s Virginia-based Circinus LLC, which maintains an operation in Abu Dhabi involving Arabic-, Farsi-, and Hebrew-speaking information operations analysts, and an Abu Dhabi company called DarkMatter, which recruits intelligence analysts from the US National Security Agency (NSA) for cyber-operations contracts in Abu Dhabi. Broidy’s paranoia concerning his operations on behalf of the UAE have grown to the point where his legal representative falsely accused this author of being a covert agent for the government of Qatar.

The diplomatic warfare between the Saudi-UAE axis and Qatar had some farcical moments. In June 2017, the Saudi state media erroneously reported that Mauritius had severed relations with Qatar. In fact, the Saudis had mistaken Mauritius for Mauritania. It was Mauritania, an Arab League member, that broke relations with Qatar. The Mauritius government was forced to issue a demarche refuting the Saudi claim and pointed out its relations with Qatar were unaffected. Pakistan, likewise, refuted claims by Saudi media that it planned on cutting relations with Qatar.

On the diplomatic front, Qatar regained diplomatic ties with countries the Saudis had encouraged to sever relations with Doha. These included Chad, Maldives, and Senegal. Qatar restored ties with the Somali federal administration in Mogadishu after the UAE was ordered to withdraw its personnel from the country. Qatar also managed to establish close military ties with Mali and Burkina Faso, despite Saudi-UAE efforts to curtail such relations. Qatar continues to back the Tripoli-based government of Fayez al-Sarraj, the Chairman of the Presidential Council of Libya, against the forces of the Tobruk-based Haftar government. A similar stand-off exists in Khartoum between the Saudi-backed military government that took over from Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir after his recent ouster in a coup and a Qatar-backed anti-Saudi/Emirati opposition bloc. Qatar is also holding its own in a diplomatic battle for influence against the UAE in Madagascar, Algeria, Tunisia, Kenya, and Ethiopia.

In November 2017, the UAE was widely ridiculed after its chief of security called for the Saudi-UAE axis to bomb Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha. The last person to call for the bombing of Al Jazeera’s Doha headquarters was George W. Bush, who discussed the idea with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on April 16, 2004. Blair talked Bush out of the idea.

The Saudi-UAE multi-front war against Qatar has faltered since 2017. Turkey, Iran, and Oman have helped limit the effects of the axis’s sea, land, and air blockade of Qatar. The Saudi and UAE ban on receiving Al Jazeera broadcasts have been defeated by satellite dishes that directly receive Al Jazeera signals in defiance of the law. HSBC and Goldman Sachs have defied Saudi and UAE warnings to curtail their financial services with Qatar. Qatar Petroleum has concluded lucrative deals with oil-producing Angola and Nigeria, edging out Saudi Aramco competition.

Turkey established a military base in Qatar, which was construed as a direct warning to the Saudis and Emiratis not to think about any military action against Qatar. France delivered 26 Rafale jet fighters to Qatar despite warnings to Paris from the Saudis.

To emphasize the point that Qatar is far from being vanquished by the Saudis, its lobbyists in Paris have lobbied the Parisian municipal government to name a street in the French capital for the late Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was brutally tortured, murdered, and dismembered in the Saudi Consulate-General in Istanbul in October 2018. For the Qataris, a “rue Jamal Khashoggi” in Paris would deal to the Saudi-UAE axis what the French call a “coup de grâce.”