Qatar's dangerous gamble

By Olivier Guitta

I just wrote a piece for the Middle East Times on Qatar's diplomatic strategy.
You can read the whole piece here.
Here is an excerpt:

Two major projects that were undertaken at the start of the reign of the new sheik were the TV channel al-Jazeera (launched in 1996) and Qatar Airways (really started in 1997). In just a few years, al-Jazeera has become a household name. Qatar Airways is now a huge multinational with 12,000 employees, 58 planes and 70 destinations and it just ordered 80 Airbus A350s and five A3BOs - incidentally, a Qatari investment fund was just authorized by French authorities to invest in the European consortium EADS (European Aeronautic Defense and Space) that manufactures Airbus planes - and 22 Boeing 777s. Doha has the goal of welcoming 50 million passengers by 2015.

The emir's main ambition for his country is to become a diplomatic superpower.

That is why for example Qatar has been heavily financing the reconstruction of southern Lebanon, mediating at one point between the Palestinian Hamas and Fatah, and also doing the same between the al-Huthi rebels (supported by Iran) and the Yemeni regime.

Qatar is sometimes in a paradoxical situation, befriending enemies such as, for example, Israel and Hamas (its leader Khaled Meshaal is a regular in Doha), or Fatah and Hamas. Right after Hamas' coup in Gaza, Muhammad Dahlan, Fatah's ex-security chief accused: "Qatar also gave Hamas $400 million that was used to slaughter Palestinians."

Also Qatar is at the same time home to many ex-Iraqi Baathists and Saddam Hussein's widow, Sajida, and the largest U.S. base in the Middle East.

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