By Henry Srebrnik, [Saint John, N.B.] Telegraph-Journal
I’m guessing many millions of Canadian had never heard of Qatar before now. But the small Persian Gulf state has changed all that, by hosting one of the planet’s great sports spectacles: the World Cup of Soccer.
The tournament, which lasts a month, is taking place in Doha. For a country with fewer than 400,000 citizens, it is the culmination of 12 years of preparation and more than $200 billion in infrastructure spending.
The discovery in 1971 of the world’s largest gas field led to the transformation of Qatar, turning it into one of the wealthiest countries in the world and emboldening its leaders to see their nation not just as an appendage of its wealthier Persian Gulf neighbours.
Qatar wants to increase its international footprint, particularly in the Middle East. For example, it funds the influential Al Jazeera television network, founded in 1996, which broadcasts worldwide. The bid to host the World Cup was another step in this quest.
Qatar is a peninsula with much larger regional powers on either side. “It’s carving out space for itself outside the shadow of neighbours like Saudi Arabia and Iran. And it’s done this in part by investing in large-scale development projects, as well as media, popular culture, education, medicine,” according to Abdullah al-Arian, a professor of history at the Georgetown University campus in Qatar and the editor of Football in the Middle East: State, Society, and the Beautiful Game.
Qatar has had its share of conflicts with its fellow Gulf states. It endured a blockade starting in 2017 that lasted nearly four years, imposed by, among others, Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
They severed diplomatic relations with the country and banned Qatar-registered planes and ships from utilizing their airspace and sea routes, along with Saudi Arabia blocking Qatar’s only land crossing.
Their anger stemmed from Qatar’s support for Islamist groups across the region and its sponsorship of Al Jazeera. They sought to isolate Qatar over its backing of the Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Islamist organization that most of the other Gulf States saw as their leading internal security threat. The feud ended last year, with Qatar refusing to comply with a list of demands made by the Saudi-led bloc, but the tensions persist.
Doha subsidizes Hamas, the Gazan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, to the tune of $360 million to $480 million a year. With one third of that money, Qatar buys Egyptian fuel that Cairo then ships into Gaza, where Hamas sells it and pockets its revenue. Another third goes to impoverished Gazan families, while the last third pays the salaries of the Hamas bureaucracy.
Qatari spending in Gaza might look humanitarian, but in reality, Doha is funding Hamas’s coffers through oil sales. Doha is also bankrolling Hamas’s social services, the main vehicle of the organization’s rentier network that helps Hamas maintain support among Palestinians, in Gaza as well as across the West Bank and Jerusalem.
Without Qatari money, Hamas’s governorship of Gaza would have become untenable and its popularity among Palestinians would have collapsed.
But Qatar also wants to remain in Washington’s good graces, and the emirate’s American strategy involves media and policy outreach. Its influence-buying is a textbook example of how to transform cash into “soft” power, through indirect investments in U.S. political culture.
The emirate gave millions of dollars to the arch-establishment Brookings Institution, which opened a centre in Doha in 2007. The Qatari government announced in a 2012 news release that the centre’s role included “reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones,” according to a New York Times report that showed Qatar had given Brookings $14.4 million in donations over a four-year span.
This past June Richard Olson, a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates, pleaded guilty to illegal lobbying on behalf of Qatar, while Brookings placed its president, retired four-star Marine Gen. John Allen, on administrative leave amid a federal investigation into his role in the lobbying campaign.
Over an eight-year period from 2009-2017, the Qatar Foundation, where, according to its website, centres and programs focused on education, research and innovation, and community development intertwine for the benefit of Qatar and the world, gave $30.6 million to dozens of American high schools.
That was small potatoes compared to the more than one billion dollars donated to U.S. universities between 2011-2017, making it “the largest foreign funder by far” of American academia according to the nonpartisan watchdog group Project on Government Oversight (POGO).
Jamaal Khashoggi, who was murdered by Saudi agents in 2018, wrote critical columns about Riyadh in the Washington Post which were shaped by a consultant for the Qatar Foundation, former U.S. foreign service officer Maggie Mitchell Salem.
The Qataris want to protect themselves and make themselves indispensable. They do that by also making Qatar a convening venue. For instance, when the United States wanted to deal with the Taliban, they went through Doha.
“The ideal scenario for Qatar moving forward will be one where it can balance between its international foreign policy ambitions, while avoiding another breakdown in regional relations with its neighbors,” remarked Elham Fakhro, a research fellow at the Centre for Gulf Studies at the University of Exeter in England.
The World Cup extravaganza helps.
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