Qatar: Small State, Big Politics (14 page)

As a subordinate state in relation to the United States, some aspects of Qatari foreign and domestic policies fit patterns consistent with other countries in comparable positions. These include, most notably, reduced defense needs, increased open trade, and a willingness to join wartime coalitions. Leaders who perceive their countries to be under security threats are more likely to enter into security hierarchies in which dominant states provide buffers against potential aggression.
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And Qatar certainly feels threatened not so much by possible Iranian or Saudi expansionism but by consequences for its own safety should those giants, or another constellation of regional belligerents, such as Iran and Israel or Iran and the United States, come to blows.

But being subordinated to the United States in economic and security hierarchies has also brought the two into regular friction, at least on the margins, in an ongoing process of dialogue and tension over defining and redefining the scope and contours of their respective positions vis-à-vis one another.
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Released Wikileaks cables show Doha-based American diplomats often perplexed by Qatar’s deviance from the desired US position on various issues, frequently trying to make sense of the country’s seemingly contradictory policy pursuits. A 2009 cable from the US State Department, for example, brands Qatar as “worst in the region” when it comes to cooperation with the United States in counterterrorism efforts.
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Similarly, in reference to relations with Iran, Qatar prefers engaging with the Islamic Republic rather than isolating it, as the US ambassador to Qatar was reminded by the heir apparent in one of their meetings.
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Another case in point is Qatar’s patronage and guarded tolerance of the Egyptian-born cleric Yousef Al-Qaradawi, who is often outspoken in his support for Hamas and his condemnation of American and Israeli policies in the Middle East and elsewhere.
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When in November 2009 the US ambassador to Qatar delivered a letter from the US Treasury Department to the Qatari foreign ministry complaining about Al-Qaradawi’s alleged financial support for the Hamas, his interlocutor responded that “Qaradawi is not working as a terrorist” and balked at putting pressure on him to alter his views and activities.
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Underlying such specific instances of friction is the whole question of Al Jazeera television network, which has long been a subject of criticism and objection by Washington and by the US embassy in Doha.
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In addition to security arrangements, trade and investments form another key pillar of the US-Qatari relationship. Qatar’s currency, the Rial, is pegged to the dollar, and Qatar has consistently refused to de-peg despite occasional falls in the dollar.
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Having signed a Trade and Investment Agreement in 2004, which was meant to create a formal dialogue to promote bilateral trade, by 2008 the US and Qatar were trading $3.5 billion in goods.
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By 2008, American exports to Qatar amounted to $3.1 billion, up 11.6 percent from the previous year, and imports from Qatar were $484 million, up 1.5 percent compared to 2007. In 2008, 9 percent of Qatar’s total imports came from the United States.
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According to the US embassy in Doha, American exports to Qatar surged by 340 percent between 2003 and 2008, to a total of $3.2 billion.
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US foreign direct investment in Qatar has also grown steadily in recent years, amounting to $7.1 billion in 2007, up from $5.4 billion in 2006. According to the US Census Bureau, the volume of trade between Qatar and the US shot up from $838.1 million in 2001 to more than $3.3 billion in 2011.
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For its part, Qatar Investment Authority, the primary investment arm of the country’s sovereign wealth fund, has often considered investing in US banks, although it has shown a preference for the perceived stability of European markets as compared to the United States.
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There is no comparable data on Qatari-Iranian trade, largely because trade and investment between the two countries is negligible. In fact, official trade documents issued by each of the governments fail to register any notable trade of any kind between the Islamic Republic and its southern neighbor, with neither country ranking as a major trading partner for the other one.
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Also, while generally supportive of the idea, Qatar has shown coolness to an Iranian initiative to create a cartel of gas-exporting countries modeled after OPEC.
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In addition to placing itself firmly under the protection of the American security umbrella and having quite extensive commercial and trade relations with the United States, Qatar has also embarked on a massive, concerted effort to embrace and to import—or, more aptly, to incorporate within itself—a number of American educational institutions and cultural practices. In 2003, the Santa Monica-based Rand Corporation was invited to open a branch office in Qatar—the Rand-Qatar Policy Institute—in order to advise the Qatar Foundation more systematically on a host of demographic and social issues, including wide-ranging reforms in the country’s K-12 educational system.
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Based on a Rand study conducted in 2001, the following year the emir declared the establishment of “Independent” primary and secondary schools based on the US charter school model.
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In addition to English becoming the language of instruction across the K-12 curriculum, except for courses on Arabic language and literature, American-style curricula and pedagogy are steadily becoming the norm in all Qatari primary and secondary schools.

The Rand-Qatar Policy Institute also recommended major reforms at the postsecondary level, as a result of which from 2003 to 2007 Qatar University underwent a comprehensive restructuring process.
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At the same time, the Qatar Foundation invited a series of American universities to open branch campuses in Qatar and to bring American-style higher education to the country. In less than ten years, six US universities set up campuses in Qatar and were admitting students in specific fields of study: Virginia Commonwealth University (1998) in design; Weill Cornell Medical College (2002) in medicine; Texas A&M University (2003) in engineering; Carnegie Mellon University (2004) in computer science and business; Georgetown University (2005) in international politics and economics; and Northwestern University (2007) in journalism and communication. In 2012, the Foundation announced plans for the establishment of a joint graduate law program with the Harvard Law School. As of 2012, Sheikha Moza, the chairperson of the Qatar Foundation, had received honorary doctorates from Virginia Commonwealth, Texas A&M, Carnegie Mellon, and Georgetown universities.

The guiding principles behind these reform initiatives were outlined in the
Qatar National Vision 2030
, which the emir unveiled in 2008. The document, which “aims at transforming Qatar into an advanced country by 2030,”
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pays particular attention to the role of education in the country’s future economic development. It calls for the creation of “a world-class educational system that equips citizens to achieve their aspirations and to meet the needs of Qatar’s society.”
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This will in turn lead to the development of “a knowledge-based economy characterized by innovation; entrepreneurship; excellence in education; a world-class infrastructural backbone; the efficient delivery of public services; and transparent and accountable government.”
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There have been a number of other state-sponsored or state-supported cultural initiatives with strong normative implications. Such cultural initiatives invariably pay homage to a broadly defined “Arab culture,” but most also have highly pronounced Western and American underpinnings. For example, the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra, established in 2008, mounts performances that are much more firmly rooted in the Western musical tradition than anything resembling Qatari culture and heritage.
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For its part, the Doha Tribeca Film Festival, established in 2009 by one of the emir’s daughters, has sought to “create bridges between the past and present, East and West”
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by featuring both Arab and Western independent films. But, as of 2013, there is not even a nascent Qatari film industry. The Washington-based Brookings Institution, through its Doha office, has also been sponsoring an annual US-Islamic World Forum since 2004 in the Qatari capital, bringing together a number of regional political leaders and prominent American policymakers, diplomats, and artists.
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The Forum’s stated goal has been to foster dialogue and mutual understanding. But its strong American character and flavor are lost on few who are familiar with it.

Intentions aside, the Qatari state has emerged as a major proponent of spreading Western and especially American cultural norms and practices. This is as evident in the arts as it is in the educational arena. In fact, despite the
National Vision
’s promise to strike a balance between “modernization and preservation of traditions,”
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the widespread encouragement of Westernization—and more specifically Americanization—of the cultural arena is palpable. This is in marked contrast to the lack of any official sanction or support given to promoting aspects of Iranian culture. In fact, Qatari authorities keep a deliberate, careful distance from most things Iranian. For example, they have consistently refused permission to the one Iranian bank operating in Qatar, Bank-e Saderat-e Iran, to have more than one branch office in Doha. Iranian citizens cannot acquire tourist visas to Qatar without formal invitation by a Qatari entity, and many Iranian restaurants in Doha complain about their inability to bring chefs from Iran to help run their restaurants. These and other similar restrictions are largely a product of official sensitivity to the ethnic background and the historical connections of many Qataris to Iran.
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What Qatar-Iranian relations lack in military, commercial, educational, and cultural dimensions they more than make up in personal and “fraternal” relations between the leaders of the two countries. The traffic between Doha and Tehran, only an hour and a half apart by airplane, features frequent trips by high-ranking officials calling on one another for the expressed purpose of strengthening ties. As
table 3.1
indicates, in the twenty-four months between February 2008 and February 2010, the international press reported no less than seventeen official visits between the two countries, among them two visits to Tehran by the emir, one visit by the heir apparent, one visit to Doha by President Ahmadinejad, and other visits involving the Iranian foreign and defense Ministers as well as the Qatari chief of staff, information minister, and others. Each visit has been rich in symbolism, entailing much pomp and ceremony, and has been accompanied by grand declarations of enduring friendship and fraternal ties.

The United States is not unaware of the superficial nature of Qatari-Iranian relations. In a classified memo penned in December 2009, the US ambassador to Qatar assessed the sheikhdom’s relations with the Islamic Republic as follows:

Close consultations with Iran are necessary since Qatar shares a mammoth natural gas field with Iran. As a result, Qatar carefully maintains with Iran a high tempo of top-level contacts, which have increased since the protests following Iranian presidential elections in (June 2009). Qatar does this because it is convinced that such a close relationship with Iran is a key to safeguarding trillions of dollars in potential wealth. We are convinced that Qatar will not be dissuaded from maintaining those ties…. That said, Qatar’s leaders—while careful not to say it publicly—do not trust Iran; and Qatar does not want Iran to have nuclear weapons.
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The cable was written for the benefit of the State Department in advance of Prime Minister Hamad Ben Jassim’s visit to Washington in early 2010. In a separate cable, the prime minister is shown to be significantly blunter about Qatar’s approach to his country’s relations with Iran. The Iranians, he is reported to have said, “frequently press the Qataris to have dialogue on their shared natural gas field and attempt to expand dialogue to include other subjects.” But the Qataris “are always throwing cold water on their ideas.” The PM is quoted as having summarized Qatar’s relations with Iran as ones premised on less than trust: “They lie to us, and we lie to them.”
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In a similar vein, according to another released US embassy cable, when the heir apparent paid a highly publicized visit to President Ahmadinejad in Tehran in February 2010, he limited his visit to only half a day and declined Iranian offers to visit cultural sights outside the capital.
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TABLE 3.1.
Qatar-Iran relations (January 2008–April 2010)