The NYTimes writes:
Related Posts:Friendly to Iran even as it serves as a base for the American military, Qatar has long had one of the most creative foreign policies in this unstable region. ......A week ago, Qatar became the first Arab country to grant political recognition to the Libyan rebels, and its six Mirage fighter jets flying with Western coalition partners are giving the United States and European allies political cover in a region long suspicious of outside intervention.
Qatari officials say they are discussing ways to market Libyan oil from any ports they might hold in the future, to give the rebels crucial financial support, and they are looking for ways to support them with food and medical supplies. Qatar ... is also helping the Libyan opposition create a television station using a French satellite, to offset the state-controlled media.
Experts who follow Qatar say the current policies are consistent with two long-held objectives: to emerge as a world player despite its tiny size, and to play off its stronger neighbors, particularly Saudi Arabia and Iran, to protect its sovereignty and natural gas wealth....For the past decade or so, Qatar has skillfully straddled the competing groups of allies in the region — Egypt and Saudi Arabia versus Iran and Syria — achieving a status of neutrality that has allowed it to broker political deals in Lebanon, Sudan and Yemen. At the same time, Al Jazeera has given a voice to dissidents, has rankled autocrats across the region, and been both blamed and praised as a driving force behind the current “Arab Spring.”...The key to Qatar’s power and political strategies, but also its vulnerability, lies in its abundance of natural gas. It has almost 14 percent of total world gas reserves, but most of it comes from a field that it shares with Iran. Regional experts say that Qatar’s principal security concern is that Iran may one day try to exert full control over the field....But while Qatar calls for democracy outside its borders, democracy here is provisional at best. While there are municipal elections, and women can vote in them, the country has a Parliament building but no Parliament — or any other political institution, for that matter — that can challenge the royal family’s grip on power. The nation’s undisputed leader, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, belongs to a family that has dominated Qatar since the 18th century, and he came to power in a coup against his father in 1995.
And at the same time Qatar is sending warplanes over Libya, it has sent troops to nearby Bahrain as part of the Saudi-led Gulf alliance force seeking to reinforce a minority Sunni-dominated government resisting a rebellious Shiite majority.
Qatari authorities say the Bahrain operation is an obligation to a local alliance ...
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