JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1995, Pages 56, 71

Journey Through the "New Middle East": Fall 1994

Qatar: "Desert Drizzle" Makes a Friendship Bloom

By Richard Curtiss

The Gulf Airways flight from Frankfurt to Abu Dhabi was only a quarter full. The plane I boarded in the United Arab Emirates for the 45-minute onward flight to Qatar had even fewer passengers, although its final destination was Kuwait which, in mid-October, once again was the focus of an airborne U.S. and British military deployment from the West and an overland deployment of Iraqi Republican Guards from the north. Between the converging armies stood the 21,000-man army of Kuwait (numbering barely more than two Iraqi brigades), the first of 6,000 U.S. rapid deployment troops scheduled to arrive, and little else.

Nevertheless, with U.S. military aircraft already thundering over the entire Arabian Gulf as well as the southern Iraq no-fly zone into which the Republican Guards had ventured, news reports said the Iraqis had halted a few miles short of the Kuwait border. The fact that my commercial aircraft was nearly empty therefore indicated only that in times of uncertainty business travel drops, and military units don't travel by Gulf Airways.

Surprisingly, the huge Doha Sheraton, one of the world's grandest and most comfortable hotels, was fully booked. Many of the guests were participants in a Gulf-wide tennis tournament for juniors and Asia-wide football playoffs for national teams composed of players under 16 years of age. There also were family-oriented tour groups from sun-starved Germany and Finland. Crisis or no, the efforts of Qatar's heir apparent, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa, who is the country's minister of sports as well as minister of defense, and the efforts of the Doha Sheraton's ever-smiling, hyper-energetic German manager, who has spent a decade cultivating European tour group operators, both were paying off. And, true to its deserved reputation for efficiency, Qatar, the Gulf's smallest state in terms of population, was not letting its excellent sports facilities or quiet beaches stand idle, regardless of what was or was not happening to the north.

"This Saddam Hussain is ruining us," complained the first government employee I encountered. He is a Palestinian from Jaffa who, after a few years as a 1948 refugee in Gaza, traveled to the Gulf to cast his lot with a fledgling Qatari government then in need of technicians, linguists and other skilled expatriates to help what was, until the petroleum boom that began for Qatar in the 1950s, a society of pearl merchants, pearl divers, fishermen, and descendants of bedouin tribes who, for generations, had roamed the Arabian peninsula, to which the Qatar peninsula is attached.

The Palestinian, one of the fortunate few who now hold Qatari citizenship, was referring to the fact that, although the tiny but prosperous Palestinian communities in the Gulf states did not share the apparent enthusiasm of their compatriots in Jordan for the Iraqi dictator, nevertheless his invasion of Kuwait did, in fact, ruin them all. Yasser Arafat's disastrous decision to give lip service to the Iraqi strongman undermined Palestinian credibility in the very countries that had provided virtually all of the petrodollars that supported the Palestinian cause. Although Qatar traditionally has been hospitable to its Palestinian employees, with a generation of educated Qataris now eager to take the jobs still occupied by Palestinians, those who were not granted Qatari citizenship before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait know that their chances of obtaining citizenship now have been reduced to near zero, and that there no longer is a future for them in the Gulf.

"I believe Saddam is a Zionist agent," the embittered Palestinian continued. "He did exactly what the Israelis, and perhaps the Americans, wanted him to do. He split the Arabs and he split the Muslims and it is only a matter of time before Israel, by directing the use of American power, controls the Middle East. And now his latest crazy move has brought you Americans back into the Gulf to stay, which is what Israel, and perhaps you Americans too, wanted all the time."

If I found little remarkable in this embittered Palestinian's assessment of Saddam's puzzling 1994 feint toward Kuwait, the Palestinian's final comment was one I hadn't heard before.

"You'll see," he prophesied. "The Israelis won't be satisfied with getting diplomatic recognition and opening trade relations with the oil-producing Arabs and Iranians of the Gulf. As soon as they get in, and they will very soon, they'll start working to get you Americans and British out. You think you're back to stay, but they'll replace you. When it happens, remember it was a Palestinian who warned you about the Israelis, because it is we Palestinians who know them."

"By the time that happens, neither you nor I will be around to remember this conversation," I joked.

"You're wrong," he said. "You'll see."

The next conversation, with a highly-placed Qatari official from a long-established Qatari family, was both surprising and frustrating. "Of course we welcome Clinton's decision to send his forces to Kuwait," he said in answer to my first question. "But what else could he do? And what else could the Kuwaitis do but ask?"

Then his voice grew intense. "The situation in Iraq is impossible. Saddam is a monster. You cannot expect the Iraqi people to overthrow him by themselves. If someone is even suspected of disloyalty, not only he but his whole family is killed. There has never before been anything like this among the Arabs. Although I have not been to Iraq, I know the Iraqis from conferences and from meeting them in Europe. They are wonderful people. Now their children are starving and many Iraqis are dying from lack of medicines." His voice broke. "They must be helped!"

"So what would you have Clinton do?" I asked. "Agree to lifting the U.N. sanctions or insist on retaining them?"

"I don't know," he said, his eyes moistening. "Saddam must go. But his people must be helped."

The Qatari official's frustration is justified. His country is producing some 400,000 barrels of oil a day, has a capacity of at least 650,000 barrels a day, and is just bringing a second major offshore oil field into production. Qatar practically floats on two huge bubbles of gas lying partly on shore and partly offshore in Qatari territorial waters. The country's tiny population enjoys all the benefits of the most advanced welfare states in Europe, and more. Their government has invested petroleum revenues in vast production facilities to process Qatar's gas into relatively cheap, clean-burning liquified natural gas that can be transported and sold anywhere in the world.

Qatar even has a working steel mill. At the time the steel mill was begun, cynics implied the project was more a quest for national prestige than an effort to fulfill an actual economic need. Yet now Qatar can sell any of the steel it doesn't need itself to adjacent Saudi Arabia, which also produces steel but can't keep up with the burgeoning needs of its construction industry.

However, despite its own record of unmitigated developmental success, this country of half a million prosperous residents cannot find a way to help 18 million desperate fellow Arabs in nearby Iraq trapped in a political conundrum that has reduced the holders of the second-largest petroleum reserves in the world to semi-starvation.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussain's shadow also falls across Qatar's relations with the United States. "Everything has changed since you served out here," an American diplomat said in commenting on media reports that Qatar, like Kuwait, had agreed to store the vehicles, weapons and ammunition for a U.S. armored brigade so that the next time a threat arises in the Arabian Gulf, site of 65 percent of the world's proven oil reserves, fully armed and equipped American troops can be on the spot in a matter of hours.

"We've never been closer to the Qataris, and there's no going back to the way things were before," the diplomat said. "However, that doesn't mean for one second that the Qataris believe Saddam Hussain has any intention of invading Kuwait for a second time."

What it does mean, apparently, is that both Qataris and Americans are turning a page in a new relationship of mutual dependency. Forgotten are the days when the United States was pressing Qatar to return a highly classified Stinger missile it supposedly had obtained from Afghan rebels. And forgotten are the strategically situated emirate's earlier qualms when in 1990 and 1991 it made its territory available to U.S. aircraft to fly missions to protect the nearby Saudi and Kuwait oilfields.

During the buildup to Desert Storm, there were so many U.S. Air Force men and women stationed in Qatar that the U.S. ambassador had to give a series of receptions to welcome them all to the Emirate. Then, after Desert Storm, they left. In October, when the Iraqi troop movements began, some American military personnel came back. This time, it seemed, when the Iraqi threat disappeared, some of the U.S. service people wouldn't. It takes personnel to maintain a brigade's equipment, and keep airfields ready to accommodate, on a moment's notice, America's varied array of flying weapons platforms.

This time, however, Qataris weren't talking on or off the record about the American presence. Middle-level Qatari officials denied there were any American military personnel in the state at all. Asked to compare the Americans of 1991's Desert Storm with the Americans of 1994's "Desert Drizzle," the media sobriquet for the U.S. military's "Operation Vigilant Warrior," a member of Qatar's ruling family smiled tolerantly at the obvious attempt to beguile him into a statement he had no intention of making.

"Well, we haven't seen much of your military people this time," he said pleasantly, and changed the subject. But, belatedly, I realized why the Doha Sheraton, and perhaps some of Qatar's other hotels, were fully booked. In the dining room, among the lithe young Arab and Asian tennis and football players, the sun-reddened vacationing European families, the French and Italian businessmen and the cheerful U.S. executives and technicians from Mobil and Occidental Petroleum, were other tables of young Americans. They were in sports attire and spoke softly, but when they checked in or checked out, some were wearing desert camouflage uniforms and carrying dusty backpacks or battered flight bags.

Clearly, America of the '90s has a new ally in the Gulf. Equally clearly, for both countries "there's no going back to the way things were before."

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.