Here’s what the Guardian says.
This is far, far outside my field of expertise. What I’m seeing from experts on my Twitter feed is quite mixed.
1. Saudi-Qatar mess is exactly the kind of under the radar big issue where you need career professionals. Will admin bother to use them? https://t.co/mKDyl62kGx
— Ilan Goldenberg (@ilangoldenberg) June 5, 2017
Mattis and Tillerson are in Australia; very different time zone, hard to coordinate with Trump.
Trump MidEast policy—if we can call it that—deeply problematic. But folks quick to blame him for GCC split. Lets be clear, it’s not him!
— Ariane Tabatabai (@ArianeTabatabai) June 5, 2017
Tabatabai says the tensions were pre-existing.
@DEsfandiary & I have been writing about this for months: https://t.co/Kt1Rd8SFje; https://t.co/EBGAEz2yK1
— Ariane Tabatabai (@ArianeTabatabai) June 5, 2017
More than a sound bite. Trump may not be responsible but US encouragement opened the door to Saudi/UAE action. Not possible if US opposed.
— Gerald M. Feierstein (@j_feierstein) June 5, 2017
Trump’s diplomacy tends to be all-in with his friends. That’s not good diplomacy. Ambiguity is often helpful. A number of people are saying he went all-in with Saudi Arabia, so they thought he was giving them a green light to do what they wanted.
We’ll all be here in the morning. I’m turning in now.
Another Scott
As I posted downstairs, Al Jazeera has much more. Apparently there was some hacking of the Qatari state broadcaster, posting a bunch of (apparently) fake quotes supporting Israel and other seemingly impossible things. The Qatari government denies it all, but the Saudis and others apparently took it as a perfect excuse to cut ties.
Who knows what is going on, but it sounds like it’s spinning out of control very very quickly.
Cheers,
Scott.
Cheryl Rofer
Wag
What will this mean for the Soccer World Cup down the road?
snark.
I really don’t know anything about Qatar, let alone their politics. I only know that they’re employing innumerable indentured servents to build their stadiums. As do the Saudis for their construction projects.
Calouste
I’m reminded of when Saddam Hussein took some words by the American ambassador as a green light to invade Kuwait.
sdhays
Don’t we have a huge military base in Qatar?
Does tRump have a hotel there?
Three guesses as to which question is more important to tRump’s “diplomacy”. And the first two don’t count…
Betty Cracker
Whether Trump’s disastrous tour had anything to do with this or not, the fact is, the world is a dangerous place, and a serious crisis could arise at any moment. And there’s a power vacuum because a bunch of spiteful fuckheads elected a malignant, bumbling, deranged demagogue with an assist from a hostile foreign power. It’s hard to remain optimistic.
Aleta
So F-x will be shrieking about this tomorrow as Comey begins testifying?
Villago Delenda Est
My only response is WTF, over?
It’s obvious that State has no clue about this…all the serious professionals have no voice, those that are left, and as with DOD, the second highest level’s offices are empty because Donald doesn’t think they’re necessary. Because he is an incompetent sack of shit.
Villago Delenda Est
@sdhays: USAF base. USN base in Bahrain, one of the countries that cut Qatar off.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: @Cheryl Rofer: The hacking is an excuse. This is about the Emir of Qatar financing Muslim Brotherhood activities. It has been an ongoing issue throughout the region for several years. One of the largely untold or, perhaps, forgotten stories with all the insanity going on in the Levant was the attempt by the Emir of Qatar to destabilize the Hashemite monarchy of Jordan by financing the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood to try to radicalize Syrian refugees in Jordan, as well as other activities. Things got so bad in 2013-2014 that the Emir of Kuwait brought the Emir of Qatar in several times to try to get him to knock off the bad/unhelpful behavior.
The Saudis see the Muslim Brotherhood as directly competing against them in their attempt to use Islam for political purposes and to establish regional hegemony. Al Sisi in Egypt has his own reasons for wanting them suppressed. Bahrain has been under the Saudi’s thumb in regard to security since the Twelver Shi’a uprising there several years ago where the Saudi’s entered Bahrain to shore up the government as a protective measure. So this isn’t really surprising.
Villago Delenda Est
@Cheryl Rofer: If you’re looking for terrorist assholes, look to Saudi. 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals. Wahhabis are theological terrorists.
Adam L Silverman
@sdhays: Yes, we have a large base in Qatar. It serves as CENTCOM forward.
sm*t cl*de
False-flag pretexts have gone a long way downhill since the Gleiwitz incident.
Another Scott
@Villago Delenda Est: To be fair, bin Laden supposedly (no link handy) decided to put as many Saudis on the 9/11 planes as possible as a FY to the Saudi royal family.
Cheers,
Scott.
Mike G
What we can all be sure about is that Trump have something bombastic, ignorant and stupid to say about it, as soon as Bannon, Fox or Putin spin it to him.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: Most of the Saudis were basically there as hitters. It is still unclear, despite all the investigations and research and analysis whether the guys that weren’t in the cockpits even knew they were part of an airplane borne vehicular IED as opposed to a traditional hijacking.
ETA: The real Saudi collusion and culpability was in various princes and their wives funding bin Laden’s activities, including Bandar’s wife (with bribe money from BAE Systems). As well as providing both the doctrinal support by exporting tawheed through funding schools to teach it, teachers for those schools, and mosques and imams in mosques to perpetuate it through Central and SE Asia.
Bill E Pilgrim
https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/871566439383056384
sm*t cl*de
@Adam L Silverman:
Those were purely peace-keeping tanks that crossed the causeway into Bahrain, to
crush protestsrestore order.Does anyone bother to pretend in the independence of the Bahraini
fuckpuppetsgovernment?Bill E Pilgrim
This is great by the way, people were complaining that Trump’s inane emissions being called “Tweets” was letting him off the hook; these are the President making statements and they should be seen that way. So someone came up with this, if you follow https://twitter.com/RealPressSecBot it posts his Tweets as statements by the President.
Aleta
No need to get excited; despite the understaffed State Dept, Jared’s been working on Middle East peace and Tillerson only needs his two aides.
Keith P.
This sounds like a job for Super Jared.
CaseyL
@Adam L Silverman: But I don’t think there’s any doubt that the Sauds bankroll a lot of terrorist groups, correct? So this seems to be a case of My State-Supported Terrorist Group can beat up your State-Supported Terrorist Group.
Viva BrisVegas
So the problem that the Saudis have with Qatar, is not terrorism but the wrong variety of terrorism.
By the way, am I the only person who gets annoyed at the the use of Q’s instead of K’s or G’s for the English versions of Arabic names? Qoph is not a good reason.
Another Scott
@Adam L Silverman: I thought in the bin Laden boasting tape there was lots of discussion about most of them not knowing what was going to happen (9:25). (If you believe the translation, and if you believe bin Laden there).
Cheers,
Scott.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Adam L Silverman
@CaseyL: There is no doubt. A great deal of the initial funding for ISIS as it reemerged and began to operate within the space created by the Syrian Civil War was from Saudi as part of Bandar’s “clandestine” strategy to use his intelligence operations to prosecute a proxy war for regional and Inter-Islamic hegemony against Iran and to a lesser extent Turkey.
Bill E Pilgrim
By the way just to note that today on Meet the Press I saw a woman actually say this:
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: That is what I’m basing my take on. I both believe the translation and bin Laden.
nightranger
Orange fart sack just signed a 110billion dollar arms deal with Saudi Arabia and you are posting stuff from people saying he’s not part of the problem???
I would settle for you being capable of casual observation.
Another Scott
@Adam L Silverman: So we agree there.
But I still think I read somewhere that someone made the case that bin Laden chose the people that were on the planes and made sure they were overwhelmingly Saudi at least in large part as a FY to the Royal Family. He was probably hoping that we would be furious with SA and help with his desire to crush them. (No doubt we would have taken an attack where 15/19 were Iranian as being evidence that we needed to attack Iran NOW NOW NOW!!! He was probably a little surprised that that didn’t happen…) The way that anger at the attack was deflected from Saudi Arabia (rightly or not) was an amazing bit of damage control by the W administration.
I would say that I’d try to find a linky, but I really don’t have the time. Don’t take it as gospel, but just as something that I read that stuck with me.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I always note that even the dimmest right winger, your Kevin McCarthys, your Michelle Bachmanns, your Mike Pence, they never forget to include the word “state” when describing Iran as The Biggest State Sponsor of Terrorism in the world. I’ve always assumed that’s a nod, conscious or not on their parts, to the line between “royal family” and “government” in SA/the Gulf states.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: It was part of his plan to get the US out of the way. The way to understand the 9-11 attacks is that bin Laden’s real target was to liberate the Holy Sites from the Bayt al Saud and Ahl al Sheikh (the House of Saud and the People/Descendants of Sheikh Abdul Wahhab). To do that he had to get the US out of the Kingdom. This was all in his manifesto. And, as you may recall, we made a decision to reduce our footprint way, way, way down as a concession to the Saudis to allow them to reduce soci-religious pressure that centered around having non Muslim military protecting Saudi Arabia and specifically the monarchy.
Fair Economist
Even the support for the Muslim Brotherhood seems inadequate for this. IIRC Qatar is also thought to be supporting some of the nastier Syrian Islamicists (and that’s saying something since they’re all nasty) and the Libyan Islamicists. Maybe those groups are enough to drive this.
As a side point, it seems like there’s no way for Qatar to escape these sanctions now so they might as well go all-in on supporting groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s a good bet that Qatari-Iranian relations are about to take a sharp turn for the better.
Peale
I wonder if the Russians are flying to Doha as we type to get as much of that money for The sale of Roseneft as possible. Maybe Trump will step in to help them renegotiate that deal.
Adam L Silverman
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: No that wasn’t why. Saudi Arabia is a state regardless of the type of government. What Bachman et all were responding too is the significant lobbying by Saudi’s go to guy in DC Adel al Jubeir. Jubeir is now the Foreign Minister, but before that he was the monarchy’s fixer in DC.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Thanks Obama
Davebo
This is going to seriously isolate Qatar and obviously Al Udeid Air Base as well.
Adam L Silverman
@nightranger: This is my field of expertise. So what can I do for you?
Also, I do agree with the concern about the arms deal. Though it isn’t a done deal as it has to make it through a number of legislative and bureaucratic hoops. That will, at the very least, modify the deal/scale it back and delay it going through.
I think the bigger concern, regardless of that sale, is this analysis:
And Max Fisher’s response to it. I recommend the whole thread:
Adam L Silverman
@Fair Economist: Actually that’s the Saudis. The Emir of Qatar has been funding the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the region and especially in the Levant.
joel hanes
he went all-in with Saudi Arabia, so they thought he was giving them a green light
Shades of April Glaspie
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
2 weeks ago when Trump was in Saudi, MSNBC had on a fiercely pro saudi nationalist who was talking about how great and progressive Saudi is and without being prompted, veered off topic began to tear into Qatar for challenging the hegemonic control of Sunni Arabs.
It wasn’t explained how that was happening. Perhaps they’re challenging the spread of wahhabism. Perhaps the Saudis feel their status threaten simply because Qatar is hosting the World Cup next year (which is a big fucking deal). What ever the reasons, that hardcore Saudi cheerleader was frothing at the mouth pissed at Qatar.
Adam L Silverman
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: The challenge is the Emir of Qatar’s funding for the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the region. Before al Qaeda, before ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood were the major religious threat to Saudi claims to speak for Sunni Muslims. And the significant differences between the Brotherhood’s ideology and theology, which is the original salafism (Islamic fundamentalism) and the Wahhabi doctrine of tawheed, which was rebranded by now Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al Jubeir as (the true) salafism as part of his outreach to evangelicals in the US when he was the Saudi fixer in DC is where the real fight is. My understanding is that the Emir of Qatar also doesn’t play to well with his peers.
Mnemosyne
@Calouste:
You’re not the only one.
jl
@Bill E Pilgrim: Jesus Keerwraist. Nice way to review that moron’s twitter ravings. Has he been emitting offensive and stupid shit about the London terrorist attack all day? Doesn’t he have anything else to do. I thought the ass was golfing.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@Adam L Silverman: yup. from a current reuters’ piece:
It’s a hoot hearing the saudis complain about interfering with neighbours.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Ouch!
Adam L Silverman
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: But notice the phrasing. This is all being done with careful calculation. “Opposition to Trump”, not “opposition to the US”. They’re working very hard to try to communicate that the pushback isn’t and isn’t going to be anti-American. Rather it is anti-Trump. While this won’t matter with the President’s hard core supporters, it is an important strategic communication approach.
Fair Economist
@Adam L Silverman:
The Telegraph is reporting what I remember – Qatar has been supporting the (Libyan) Misrata extremists as well as Ahrar al-Sham in Syria. The Saudis are supporting different groups in Syria. They might be supporting the Misrata extremists as well but I’ve usually seen the Qataris listed as their primary support.
Fair Economist
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch:
Yeah, definitely the pot calling the kettle black since ultimately the worldwide drift to radicalism in Islam is the doing of Saudi Arabia.
Adam L Silverman
@Fair Economist: Thanks for the update. Ahrar al Sham has been funded by Saudi, Turkey, and Qatar. They seem to be an al Qaeda offshoot, but the problem in trying to drill down is that every one of these groups use salafi to describe their doctrine. And it is not always clear if they’re using it the way the brotherhood uses it or the Saudis use it. Or a dozen or so other groups, movements, elites, and/or notables use it.
jl
Thanks for a post on the Saudi-Qatar flare-up. I was wondering what it was all about.
I found this Bloomberg article via Josh Marshall’s twitter feed.
It ticks off a lot of reasons why Saudi Arabia is pissed at Qatar, going back to how the current faction of the Qatari ruling family came to power over 20 years ago.
A lot of stuff packed into this mess. The one explicit Trump angle is that Saudi Arabia is really pissed that al-Jazeera was allowed to broadcast some kind of dissent and controversy in the region and in Saudi Arabia over the Trumpster’s visit. Also, it explains that Qatar shares a huge gas field with Iran, which I did not know.
A normal president, even a goofball like Dub, would have been briefed about this and had some thoughts about it in their head during the visit. Trump? No way. Did he send some signal, wittingly or not, that it would be OK to ramp up the dispute?
Saudi-led Alliance Moves to Blockade Qatar Over Iran Tensions
Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2017-06-05/saudi-led-alliance-cuts-qatar-ties-as-gulf-crisis-escalates
Jim, Foolish Literalist
amk
@CaseyL: Yup. They are all bad actors here including murka. But qatar is more librul than the fucking saudis.
Fair Economist
It just occurred to me that no Qataris in Saudi Arabia means no Qatari on the Hajj. This is sort of the Muslim version of Papal interdict. Which reminds me of one of the other things the Saudis might be ticked off at – Al Jazeeri reporting on the numerous disasters from Saudi mismanagement of the Hajj.
Villago Delenda Est
@Fair Economist: This all goes back to the siege of Mecca in 1979, in which a group of radical Islamists took over the Kaaba and had to be blasted out by the Saudi military. The Bandit House of Saud, in the wake of the siege, basically abandoned all the pro-western trends they’d been fostering and surrendered to the demands of the group that seized the Kaaba, dialing back reforms that were seen as “un-Muslim”, such as the bizarre notion that women, of all people, should be allowed to operate automobiles.
They’ve been pushing a more fundie Muslim line ever since, mostly as a matter of self-preservation.
Villago Delenda Est
@Fair Economist: Many Iranians were killed in a stampede last year at the Hajj, and the Iranians were tres pissed about Saudi crowd mismanagement.
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@Betty Cracker: Yup. The Redneck Gestapo helped install El Presidente and the entire world will soon reap the whirlwind
trollhattan
Say what you will, Qatar has cornered the market for phallic architecture.
jl
@Villago Delenda Est:
This is such a tangent, probably off topic, but your remark on Saudi customs is interesting.
” women, of all people, should be allowed to operate automobiles. ”
Some scholars from Saudi Arabia visiting where I work. They say that the most oppressive and ridiculous Saudi customs are a big city thaang. People who worry about this stuff (religious radicals) tend to be big city people. The religious police that run around enforcing the nonsense tend to be in big city, So you worry about this in Riyadh, Medina and Jeddah. Out in the countryside, if Ms. So-and-So need to get in the car and take some stuff to market or go shopping, no one cares all that much. Well, that is what they say. I have no idea if its true.
Edit: one of them is a woman and she agrees with this. She says she is kind of jealous that women out in the boondocks can get away with things the city people, including her, can’t. Her hubby and the other guys are trying to persuade her to learn to drive while she’s here. But she says it would be a waste of time.
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: That kinda happens when you have like no support staff and are incompetent. Save us Obi Wan McMaster. You are our only hope!
Adam L Silverman
@Villago Delenda Est: I highly recommend David Commins The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia. It is excellent and the most thorough treatment of the development of Wahhabi theology, Saudi political history, and the parasitic relationship between the two.
? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?
@Adam L Silverman: It’s not just Trump that should be opposed. It’s the entire GOP.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: is that the same McMaster who doesn’t know if the Wailing Wall is part of Israel? Oh yes, it is.
Adam L Silverman
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: That wasn’t McMaster. That was someone on the State Department advance team. And the President’s twitter director Scavino.
Adam L Silverman
@? ?? Goku (aka Junior G-Man) ? ?: No argument here.
Adam L Silverman
I’m taking my sinus infection to bed. Ya’ll try not to blow up a significant chunk of the world’s petroleum supply now, y’hear!
jl
@Adam L Silverman: Have you been eating your haggis, young man? Try some of that with Scots whiskey. It’ll fix you right up.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
@Adam L Silverman:
YMMV
?BillinGlendaleCA
@trollhattan: One of their world cup stadiums looks like something else.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@jl: Haggis? You’re one sick puppy, jl.
NotMax
This has been slow-building for quite a while. Only last month the same countries blocked all domestic access to Al Jazeera.
The smaller states have domestic problems off their own as well. Bahrain has been a powder keg pretty much since the uprisings beginning in 2011 and the subsequent crackdowns. Status and simmering discontent of migrant workers in UAE (who make up close to 90% of the population) an ongoing perceived threat to the political power structure there.
NotMax
@jl
Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it. Tasty stuff.
Canned haggis available through Amazon, BTW.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@NotMax: You’re on the list too.
Steeplejack
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Um, a Georgia O’Keeffe painting?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Steeplejack: The Daily Show had a slightly different take.
Amir Khalid
@Villago Delenda Est:
The massive — and still growing — crowds are a serious hazard for Haj pilgrims. Despite the billions the Kingdom has invested in crowd-safety measures, Mecca is simply too small for the many millions who come each year for what is by far the world’s biggest religious gathering. (If you have the wealth and the health, you are duty-bound to go.) Saudi Arabia needs to drastically reduce national Haj visa quotas, which would cost it a lot of goodwill from a lot of countries as well as from Muslims abroad who have spent a lifetime saving up for the Haj as it is.
Uncle Cosmo
@?BillinGlendaleCA: And over in the sidebar next to that stadium photo is a shot of a young woman in a hijab with the caption “Meet Muslim Singles”….oy, oy, oy….
Amir Khalid
@Adam L Silverman:
Your President has a Twitter director? That person needs to say “Cut!” more often than they say “Action!”
?BillinGlendaleCA
@?BillinGlendaleCA: (Link).
TenguPhule
@Villago Delenda Est:
How has our non-existent State Dept failed us today?
TenguPhule
@Adam L Silverman:
Trump plans to sell it for pennies on the dollar first.
Then buy it back from Russia for three times the price.
And I’m only half-kidding.
??? Martin
@Adam L Silverman: Why not? Exxon will make a killing.
TenguPhule
@Adam L Silverman:
So in other words, this:
TenguPhule
@amk:
That’s a really low bar to hurdle.
TenguPhule
@Bill E Pilgrim:
2001 wasn’t exactly that long ago.
Keith P.
Qatar’s still hosting some future Olympic Games, right?
Davebo
@Keith P.: World Cup
Steeplejack (phone)
@Keith P.:
World Cup soccer in 2022.
amk
@TenguPhule: No, not really.
sm*t cl*de
@NotMax:
My local butcher makes his own. Along with three flavours of gourmet black pudding.
Davebo
@sm*t cl*de: I do love some black pudding!
sm*t cl*de
@Davebo:
Paua-flavoured, or walnut & raisin, or pure hemoglobin.