Autocrats vs Despots

Great read from Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Steve Coll writing at the NewYorker. He has a good grip on the politics of the Middle East ....if you read only one article in it's entirety today, make it this one.

Early on during the NATO intervention in Libya, air-traffic controllers in Cyprus received an unexpected call from two armed fighter jets. The pilots reported that they were out of gas and needed to land. Reluctantly, the Cypriots granted permission, according to military officers who described the incident to me late last year. A pair of Mirage 2000 fighters from Qatar, loaded with weaponry, soon landed at Cyprus’s main civilian airport and taxied to a parking spot amid commercial airliners full of beach tourists. The Qatari pilots, it turned out, were on their way to Italy to join the air war against former Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi. This was their first military mission; the officers did not know how to seek clearances for warplanes, and they had miscalculated how much fuel they would need.

Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan all participated in the air campaign over Libya. (Jordan did not publicize its action.) They joined an international coalition led by France and Britain, and supported by the United States and the United Nations, that justified its intervention on humanitarian grounds, based upon a “duty to protect” civilians that has evolved as a principle of international law.

Qatar is a Sunni Muslim monarchy whose emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, asserts a divine right to rule. It seems safe to assume, as Hugh Eakin has described, that the expansion of global democratic rights was not among its motivations in the Libyan campaign. The country’s chief of the armed forces, General Hamad bin Ali al-Attiyah, outfitted himself in a C-17 and jetted around the war zone like a swashbuckler, handing out money to rebel factions, including to some Islamists with disturbing agendas. For Qatar, the Libyan intervention seemed akin to its successful bid to host the World Cup in 2022, or its construction of a Formula One racetrack: it was a fun thing for wealthy people to do with their money, certainly better than sitting around in air-conditioned diwans watching the Arab Spring on Al Jazeera. (Al Jazeera is also a disruptive Qatari creation......



h/t: Irene