How Qatar's careful plans for security failed | If You're Listening

My supervising producer Cara Jensen -McKinnon has coined a phrase that I think I'm going to start using.The phrase is, jungle times.As in, we now live in the jungle times.

You know the ones.Soldiers boarding container ships with rifles drawn.Streets littered with cars torched in the intense bombardment.Delta Force commandos seized Venezuela's president.

Russia has unleashed its deadliest attack so far this year on Ukraine.The sound of several gunshots sent the president ducking.

This show is generally about looking at historical moments that either led to current events or help us better understand current events.We find historical precedents.And taken individually, all the things happening right now do have a precedent.From oil shocks to wars in the Middle East, we have been talking about these precedents for weeks.

In the 80s, in Sydney, I remember petrol rationing was done by state governments.

We all know from Iraq, from Afghanistan, a war that's one month, that becomes six months, that becomes six years, that becomes a decade.

But I think that in one very important way, what we're watching now is different.And it's because all of these things are happening at once.And every day, things just seem to get more and more chaotic.

We have a plan where every bridge in Iran will be decimated.Where every power plant in Iran will be out of business.I mean, complete demolition.We're watching the world change in a way that will be with us for a long time.

I think the best example of what I mean by this is found not in Iran, Israel, the US or Lebanon, but in Qatar.Qatar, where the world's biggest gas plant is.Qatar has spent the last 50 years meticulously planning, scheming and plotting to make theimmune to global instability.

To make sure that something like this...Iran targeted Qatari gas infrastructure in retaliation to a strike on its major gas field.Can never happen.

And yet, it has.Why?Well, because unfortunately for Qatar, we're no longer in the stable times, we're in the jungle times.And meticulous planning doesn't count for anything in the jungle.Today, the story of the elaborate, decades -long, trillion -dollar scheme that Qatar hoped would protect them.And what its failure tells us about what we are about to face.

I'm Matt Bevan.This is If You're Listening.Welcome to the Jungle Times.I love old atlases.If you've got one you're trying to unload, send it to me. I'll take it.This one I've got here is from 1961, and it's not only full of extremely dated maps, but it's got fascinating statistical information about every country in the world.

For example, in 1961, there was significantly more cars in Australia alone than there was in all of Asia combined.That's a fun fact.I went looking through the atlas for fun facts about Qatar and there is none.Qatar is drawn on a map of the Middle East, but apart from its roughly sketched border, the fun facts are very much lacking.Apparently, Encyclopedia Britannica knew nothing about it, not even its population.And that's because...

It was essentially famous for not being famous.

Perhaps more than any Gulf state, Qatar's history is shrouded in obscurity.

And look, to a certain extent, that is understandable.Qatar is a barren, flat, horrifically hot, windswept peninsula on the edge of Saudi Arabia.It had very little connection with the outside world.In fact, in one of the country's museums, it's noted that it wasn't until the 1960s that football was first introduced to the country.If Britannica had checked, they'd have found that Qatar's population in 1961 was just 36 ,000.And yet it had its own royal family.

There's no question that Sheikh Khalifa and his family rule the Emirate in every respect.

Now, usually royal families are ripe for scandal and intrigue.But the royal family of Qatar, the Altanis, are almost bizarrely boring.Apart from the fact that they have a fondness for conducting coups, while the emir, the leader of the country, is on holiday.

The former emir made the grave mistake of going on holiday to Iran.

And while he was away, his cousin Khalifa changed the locks and bingo bango, he became the new emir.Now, why pull a sneaky coup to take charge of a barren peninsula populated by fishermen?They'd found something under their feet.

Its oil reserves are not large by the standards of its bigger neighbours, but it has got gas to exploit for the next 500 years.

So, 500 years worth of gas and a very tiny population.The Altanis decided to use that gas to make their population incredibly rich.

Today Qatari nationals are provided with a free home for every family, a free car.They pay no taxes, no rent, no utility charges.no telephone bills.Education for Qatari nationals is free, whether it's at home or at the most exclusive and expensive college abroad.Healthcare is unlimited.Qataris can fly to any specialist anywhere in the world, and the government will pick up the airfares, the doctor's bill, and the family's luxury hotel bill for as long as they're abroad.

Now this sounds like an incredibly sweet deal.And if you were one of the 40 ,000 -odd Qataris, it really was.Work was pretty much optional.

We encountered an elderly and delightful man working as an occasional government car driver, although he was a dollar millionaire twice over.

But this decadent lifestyle had a couple of pretty dark clouds hanging over it.For one thing, because Qataris didn't really need to work, they imported basically their entire labour force.Most of the actual work in Qatar was done by migrant labourers and indentured servants.By the 80s, the labourers outnumbered Qataris 3 to 1 and lived as a virtual underclass with almost none of the rights Qatari citizens had.

Menial tasks are reserved almost exclusively for non -Qataris.

They definitely didn't get free cars and unlimited health care.It wasn't a particularly sweet deal for them.The other dark cloud hanging over it all was Saudi Arabia.

Big Brother is Saudi Arabia, with which Qatar shares its only and unmarked land border.

Khalifa and his people live like kings, but only in the material sense.They were reliant on Big Brother for security.And when push came to shove, it was the Saudis who were really calling the shots.Qatar could have just lived with that reality.It's what their fellow emirs in Bahrain andUnited Arab Emirates decided to do.

Basically accept that they were all a big happy family of Sunni Arabs and that there was more that united them than divided them.Just let the Saudis run the show.Don't rock the boat.Just sit there quietly and be rich.But in 1995, Khalifa did something that no Qatari emir should ever do and went on holiday to Switzerland.His son, Hamad, saw an opportunity to take a leaf out of his dad's book.

Sheikh Hamid bin Khalifa al -Thani seized power from his father in a palace coup.

The thing was, the new emir, Hamad, wanted to exercise more autonomy over Qatar's foreign affairs than his father had.This displeased Qatar's big brother.

And in case you've forgotten, big brother is Saudi Arabia.

The new emir wasn't willing to accept Saudi Arabia's role as the regional superpower.So Saudi Arabia tried to get rid of him.The Saudi countercoup failed, potentially because Hamad refused to go on holiday, but left him in a tricky position.wedged between a pushy big brother to the south and something even scarier to the north.

The only real threat to the development programs of the ruling family would appear to be Islamic fundamentalism along the lines of the Iran model.

Iran.While Saudi Arabia might see the Qataris as a little brother, they were at least from the same family.Iran is extremely different in almost every way.Different ethnicity, different language, different religion.Shia instead of Sunni Islam.And a totally different regime.

A fundamentalist theocracy that had overthrown their monarch in a violent revolution.Qatar would need to find a bigger, scarier friend.And so they went to the biggest and scariest friend there is.I'm pretty sure George W. Bush just called him the Emir of gutter, but anyway.To secure this new friendship, Hamad agreed to host an enormous American air base in his country.

It's one of the most state of the art ones that you'll find in the region.

And to say thanks, the US moved its regional base of operations to Qatar ahead of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

This is CENTCOM, the US military's central command.Airlifted from Florida, air conditioned against the blinding desert heat.

As a result, Qatar became the epicentre of the US military's operations.in the Middle East.

We're here with permission of the Cutters and we're doing our best to be good guests.

Luring the Americans gave his tiny country a powerful protector against at times aggressive neighbours.

But it wasn't just about demonstrating military strength and bringing in guys with big guns.Hamad wanted to show that Qatar was allied to the West in ideological ways as well.

So he started democratic reforms, then spent millions setting up Al Jazeera.

By advocating for a freer press in a region where that's not really a thing, Al Jazeera became both a thorn in the side of authoritarian regimes and the most important platform for those regimes to communicate with the wider world.

Just about every government in the region has, for a time, closed Al Jazeera's bureau.Some have withdrawn ambassadors from Qatar in protest.But today, even the toughest Arab leaders have to deal with

So Qatar has become the region's US military base and centre of information.But for Hamad, that wasn't enough.

flight of over 80 destinations on board one of the world's youngest fleets.Qatar Airways, world's five star airline.

He dumped investment into Qatar Airways, hoping to turn the Qatari capital, Doha, into a global business travel hub.

Halfway to anywhere with plenty of time to spare.The Qatar Airways premium terminal in Doha.Five star service for first and business class passengers.

And he spent money trying to get people to actually leave the airport and see the country instead of just flying through.

The winner to organise the 2022 FIFA World Cup is Qatar.

Hamad basically bought the FIFA World Cup only 50 years after football was first seen in his country.Then he spent more money on it than every other World Cup in history combined.

Qatar, which is not even a fifth of the size of Tasmania, is about to become the first Middle Eastern nation to host a World Cup.

But hosting the World Cup wasn't just about football.Qatar wanted to be the place where the world gathered, where people with nothing in common could come together.During the tournament, Iran played against its greatest enemy, the United States.

Whenever these two teams play anywhere in any competition, it brings with it history, it brings with it culture, it brings with it politics.

We talked in last week's episode about how important it is to build trust and credibility when you're trying to negotiate with your enemies.Qatar decided to try and be the place where that trust was brokered.

Senior Taliban leaders are in Qatar for peace talks with US officials.

Qatar welcomed not only the US military to its territory, but the Taliban.

We are prepared to engage the Taliban through a negotiations office in Doha.

With implicit Western backing, Qatar hosted officers of the Taliban, financiers of al -Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and rebel factions from all over Africa.All of this just a few kilometres from the regional headquarters of US Central Command.It is a very small country after all.Now, not everyone was a fan of this, it's a small world style politics and Qatar was publicly criticized for trying to bring these groups together, particularly by Israel and its supporters.

It is quite strange that the Emir of Qatar should take sides with Hamas.

I blame Qatar, that very rich emirate that's been pouring money into the hands of Hamas.

publicly disagreeing with what Qatar was doing.Behind the scenes, the Israeli government under Benjamin Netanyahu was supportive of it.

Netanyahu allowed Qatar to give massive amounts of cash to Hamas in Gaza.Qatar electronically transfers cash to Israel.That cash is then physically carried over the border by UN officials and by Israeli officials into Gaza.

It was a divide and conquer strategy with Netanyahu hoping Hamas would weaken the more moderate Palestinian Authority.

We did everything in order to make sure that Hamas will go on controlling Gaza and Palestinian Authority will control the West Bank so they will fight each other.

So there's money flowing in all sorts of directions for all sorts of reasons and Qatar wanted to be at the centre of it.Having a diplomatic and financial relationship with everybody means nobody will want to attack you.Simple.Over the last 50 years Qatar has grown frombeing a strange barren peninsula with no fun facts, to being home to the richest citizen population on earth, to being the center of an enormous intricate spiderweb which stretched into the business, economic, journalistic, tourism, cultural, energy and political worlds.But Hamad, and after his abdication in 2013, his son Tamim, didn't do all this for fun, or for ego, or for glory.

It was a long -term strategy of making Qatar a significant player in world affairs.If they were at the centre of the web, they would be too important to mess with.It was a rational strategy, formed during an era where rational people ran the world.Their refusal to just sit there and be rich may have made Saudi Arabia grumpy, But what was Saudi Arabia going to do about it?Qatar had made itself too important.The strategy was all working very well until around May 2017 when there were hints that the era of rational strategy may be coming to an end.

From bagpipes to men on horseback, Saudi Arabia turned up the pomp for Donald Trump's first foreign visit.

The new US President Donald Trump was invited to the Saudi capital Riyadh to dance with swords and join the Saudi King Salman in laying his hands upon a glowing orb.It was a surprising destination for Trump's first foreign trip as president.

Donald Trump has been welcomed to Saudi Arabia with open arms despite his campaign rhetoric depicting the Saudis as women hating gay killers and promising a ban on Muslim travel.

Before he left, the Saudis agreed to a massive trade and weapons deal.

Around $147 billion in US arms sales to Saudi Arabia and $270 billion in other trade.

Two weeks after Trump's visit, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered an extraordinary military operation against Qatar.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain imposed an aggressive blockade on Qatar.

Land, air and sea routes in and out of Qatar were blocked.

The four blockade countries allege Qatar used its wealth to fund extremist groups linked to Iran.

They demanded that Qatar Decreased their diplomatic and military engagement with Iran and Turkey.And they kicked terrorist groups out of their country.And...The closure of its government -funded broadcaster Al Jazeera.The US military and state department were shocked.

The US has 10 ,000 troops at a critical air base in Qatar.American diplomats rushed to stop any fallout.

While the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations had seen Qatar as an ally, this time around the vibe from the White House was very different.

The US president even took credit for the crackdown on Qatar.tweeting, perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism.

I've heard reports that President Trump didn't even realise that the United States had a base within Qatar, which is pretty alarming.

It turns out hosting a US military headquarters isn't a great insurance policy if the US president doesn't know it exists.Thankfully, Trump had some people in his cabinet who were aware of the significance of Qatar.

We call on the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt to ease the blockade against Qatar.

A group of Trump cabinet officials informally referred to as the Axis of Adults basically ignored his instructions and shored up the relationship with Qatar.

The blockade is also impairing US and other international business activities.in the region.The blockade is hindering US military actions in the region and the campaign against ISIS.

Eventually the blockade was eased and officially ended in the early months of the Biden administration.Qatar didn't cave in to any of the Saudi demands.They survived the blockade with their strategy intact, and their importance as a location for resolving disputes between enemies only increased.Following the October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel, Qatar was the only mediator able to get both sides to the table for ceasefire and hostage release negotiations.

With officials in Doha insisting talks can continue if both Israel and Hamas show a willingness to negotiate in good faith.

In a world ruled by rational people, you need a safe place for those people to be able to talk to each other while they sort out key differences.Somewhere bitter enemies can come and sit at a table and try and find common ground without worrying they're going to get poisoned or stabbed in the middle of the night.Qatar was that place.But then Donald Trump returned to the White House and things started changing.

A brazen attack in Qatar's capital.Israeli forces targeting Hamas's political headquarters in a residential area of Doha.

decades spent shoring up their position as an important ally of the West had failed to protect Qatar from Israeli airstrikes.

Hamas's political leadership had reportedly gathered in Doha to discuss the latest US proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza.

It wasn't the first time that Hamas's leadership had been in Qatar to talk with the Americans and Israelis.But Bibi Netanyahu saw an opportunity this time to strike without any fear of ramifications.

These are the same terrorists who planned terrorist chiefs.who planned, launched, and built.celebrated the horrific massacres of October 7th.

The Qatari government called it state terrorism.Any other US president would have been furious.Donald Trump, though...

Well, I'm not thrilled.

I'm not thrilled about it.Not jazzed.Not psyched about it.

There was no condemnation of Israel, no axis of adults to give Israel a rap on the knuckles and tell them to stop.In fact, when Netanyahu suggested just a few months later that it might be a good idea to attack Iran during peace negotiations with the US, Trump joined in.

The Israeli -US joint strikes began in broad daylight, hitting multiple Iranian cities, including the capital.

Iran responded with fury, firing missiles at anyone within reach.

For hours, missiles crisscrossed Middle Eastern skies.As warning sirens blared, Israelis ran for cover.Missiles were also fired towards Qatar.In Doha, Qatar's military has been intercepting missiles aimed at a US airbase and the international airport.

Iran targeted Qatari gas infrastructure in retaliation to a strike on its major gas field, wiping out 17 % of capacity for up to five years.

Decades of planning, investment and diplomacy by the Qataris went up in smoke.

The Qatari government has labelled the strike a flagrant breach of international law.

The trouble is international law doesn't really apply during the jungle times.Qatar has always been incredibly vulnerable geographically.So it spent decades building strategic security.It played the game better than most.But that game is over now.Alliances don't matter.

The people with the power don't think about consequences.In the jungle times, strength is the only thing that matters.And Trump, Netanyahu and Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia have the strength.Qatar will survive this crisis.They're still rich and they still have the US military on their side.They will not feel nearly as secure.

Will people continue to choose Qatar as a place for negotiating if they're worried about Israeli airstrikes?Will people invest and travel there if Iran might bomb them at any moment?Is the relationship with America secure if the US president doesn't even know that Qatar is home to the most important American military base in the world's most volatile region?Qatar was under the impression it had solved the problem of being a small country in a scary neighborhood.It hasn't.This is The Jungle Times.

If you're not big and scary, you need to find a tree to hide in.