Saturday, March 26, 2011

The king, the emir and the Gulf

The current situation in the Arab world is not the Europe of the Congress of Vienna, when the Austrian Metternich, once defeated Napoleon, designed a map with no street ultraconservative could make life difficult. But the Gulf monarchies to allow some parallelism. Saudi Arabia to Bahrain has sent troops to save the king Sunni who commands a Shiite majority country.

And because Bahrain has sought help from its partners in the Gulf Cooperation Council, a Sunni alliance created in 1981 for fear of the Shiite revolution in Iran. Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich's Europe expanded in 1815 a royalist alliance in order to ensure continuity of absolute order and suppress any attempt liberal or revolutionary.

The enemy is now different, but the Gulf Cooperation Council, comprising Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates (Abu Dhabi, Achman, Dubai, Fuyairah, Ras al Khaimah, and Umm al Qaiuain Sharyah), Bahrain, Oman and Qatar has the same objective as the alliance was not so holy: to defend absolutism to the street and Shiism.

The press release said that the Qatar Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani is another Metternich, realistic hero Henry Kissinger, for his diplomatic calling. With a fortune of 2,000 million euros, the emir, awash in oil money, is five times richer than Queen Elizabeth II, indicating that there are still classes.

And the emirate has not sent troops to crush the Shia uprising in Bahrain, but participates with arms and baggage, in the international mission against Muammar Gaddafi. The king of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah, speaks at Bahrain, but has not offered military support to international operations against Qaddafi.

The emir would seek to imitate the Metternich who built a diplomatic system that ensured peace in Europe, the Saudi king imitates Metternich who never wanted the street. Qatar is a unique case. Maintains good relations with Saudi Arabia after a border incident in 1992 took him two dead, but also understood the Damascus regime, which is the bete noire of Riyadh.

Has signed defense pacts with the United States, Britain and France, but has refused to toughen sanctions against Iran. Gave money to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, but has funded Hamas. And its geography, though small (11,400 km2), goes a long way: it contains the U.S. military base at Al Udeid key from the 1990's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, "is home to the television channel Al Jazeera and hosts an Israeli trade mission and a residence owned by Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas, which, according to The New York Times, might become a neighbor of the Israelis.

Qatar was a piece of land with little more than 40,000 inhabitants, mostly fishermen, and not a single school in 1952, when he was born Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani. Now, the emirate's inhabitants enjoy a per capita income of 80,000 dollars annually, which puts them in first place in the globalized world, over Luxembourg.

And that Qatar also unique because only one in five of its little more than nine hundred thousand inhabitants is Qatar can afford to invest 300 million euros to capitalize on some Spanish savings banks and to pay another fortune to start Barca shirt logo of a foundation. The petrodollars have made the emirate a mediator in the Middle East.

But now painted staves, and Qatar participated militarily in the international mission to protect the Libyan population. The Arab League has paved the way when asked to create a no-fly zone in Libya, but Qatar has gone much further: it participates with four aircraft, two of them in combat.

This is not, however, the greatest contribution Qatar. The emir is comfortable when called Metternich, but unlike the Austrian, who did not believe in the European street, the television channel Al Jazeera urges the Libyan rebels from a constitutional monarchy that you want but that does not tolerate parties politicians.

Qatar is the founder and financier of Al Jazeera, which now supports the Arab revolt against the autocracy. And the emir, who no one coughs on their land, supported the revolt of the Libyans, taken out of their boxes to Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who closed the facilities of the station when it seems in the past, and these very scrambled delivered a speech by Hasan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader.

Metternich considered perhaps not very realistic. Does it?

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