A year after the start of Arab Spring, in which Qatar played one of the lead roles, official Doha continues to even more actively gain geopolitical weight in the Islamic world. The downfall of regimes in Egypt and Libya and also protracted disorder in Syria have reduced competition in the Arab world to a minimum leaving the emirate one on one against Saudi Arabia in the fight for influence. This competition could become the basis for continuing substantial transformation of the Arab world this year
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| PHÎÒÎ: AP |
How Qatar will conquer Syria
Qatar was very actively involved in overthrowing the regime of Muammar Qaddafi and several days ago its leadership announced plans of intervention into Syria. On January 14, Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani in an interview for CBS announced that the troops of Arab countries must be sent there to stop the bloodshed that has persisted for the past 10 months.
Qatar’s initiative looks practically impossible, since Syria’s neighbors will not participate in such an affair and the League of Arab States does not have the forces for naval or air operations. Without NATO’s participation, any armed invasion of Syria using only the forces of Arab states loses its sense.
That is why the statement of Al Thani should be perceived rather as a demonstration of a tough position with respect to Damascus, coordinated with the West, and through it a certain challenge to Iran, for which Bashar al-Assad’s regime is the only ally in the confrontation with Arab countries.
On the other hand, the challenge to al-Assad, representative of the Alawi minority, should strengthen Qatar’s positions among Sunni Muslims who are the majority in Syria.
After toppling the Syrian regime, Damascus will also lose claims to leadership in the regions and the title of “the heart of Arab world”, which in its turn will allow Doha to increase its potential.
Al Jazeera as the engine of progress
The expansion of Qatar’s influence is taking place not only in the Middle East and Northern Africa, but also in Central Asia. Earlier, the radical Afghan movement Taliban received permission from the emirate’s authorities to open a representative office in the capital. According to this idea, the office in Doha will be used for holding negotiations on seizing military actions in Afghanistan. The talk about opening a “diplomatic mission” of Taliban began at the end of last year. Initially it was assumed that the office would be opened in Saudi Arabia or Turkey, but the choice in favor of Qatar indicates that the West is placing its hopes on the new partner in the Persian Gulf region.
The fact that Afghanistan’s president Hamid Karzai approved of this step under the pressure of official Washington only speaks in its favor. The role of an intermediary that Qatar receives in this way is an indicator of the country’s increasing geopolitical weight and deals a blow to the position of Saudi Arabia.
At the same time, Washington’s aspiration to increase competition between Doha and Riyadh is quite evident, because Qatar expresses interests of the same Wahhabis, but only their pragmatic wing. This will not likely give grounds for considering the emirate a safe and comfortable partner for the West, particularly since by agreeing to strengthen the positions of Qatar in Central Asia, the U.S. automatically expands the influence of that country on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
It is worth noting that there is certain inertia in the actions of the U.S. Qatar started to turn into a large regional player at the start of 2000. Being a traditional ally of the U.S., Doha sensitively reacted to the changes in the rules of the geopolitical game after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and activated contacts with local opposition leaders – commanders of insurgent and political movements in the Middle East and Central Asia.
At the same time, the TV company Al Jazeera created in 1996 upon the order of the Emir began quickly gaining authority for Qatar offering “Western-style objective, but a pro-Arab” view on the Iraqi and Afghani wars. Later, it became the platform for groups of political and religious oppositions in Arab countries that in the end turned out to be one of the key instruments of the Arab Spring.
Meanwhile, Qatar has not forgotten about the traditional methods of big politics. During the civil war in Libya, the soldiers of the emir trained the rebels and Doha was one of the key arms suppliers for the opposition forces.
Elites are leaving
The success of Qatar’s policy lies in timely understanding of the process of change of elites in the Middle East. The Emirate most effectively used the ideological demand for transformations taking place in the Islamic world – transition from authoritarian dictatorship to “authoritarian democracy” and change of Islamic radicals to “soft Islamism”. In the West, this process is not fully understood and mistakenly taken as a triumph of democratic changes.
The presence of demand for a new ideology ensures for Qatar not only leadership in a part of the Islamic world, but also strengthens confrontation with Saudi Arabia, where the Royal House of Al-Waleed bin Talal is extremely conservative and has no intention of changing. That is why it can be assumed that Qatar’s foreign policy sooner or later will lead to destabilization in Saudi Arabia and the downfall of the ruling regime in the country.
The emirate, third in the world in terms of natural gas reserves and first in terms of per capita GDP, has practically unlimited resources for financing any operations it initiates, thus strengthening its geopolitical positions. Only a large-scale war with Iran could spoil Qatar’s plans.
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