My supervising producer, Kara 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 that way
as a swarm of officers surrounded. >> This show is generally
about looking at historical moments that either lead 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, the 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 itself
immune 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,
and 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 were significantly more cars
in Australia alone than there were 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 Encyclopaedia Britannica knew
nothing about it, not even its population.
And that's because:
>> The sheikhdom of Qatar is geographically prominent
but otherwise one of the least-known of the Arab Gulf states.
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 Al Thanis, 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.
>> Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad Al Thani,
who's just celebrated ten years as ruler
after deposing his cousin in a bloodless royal coup.
>> 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?
Well, 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 Al Thanis used the 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 three to one, 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 healthcare —
not 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 lived 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 and the United 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 Hamad 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 counter-coup failed, potentially because Hamad refused to go on holiday,
but it 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.
>> They would need to find
a bigger, scarier friend.
And so they went to the biggest and scariest friend there is.
>> It's my honour to welcome
the Emir of Qatar to the Oval Office.
>> I'm pretty sure George W. Bush just called him the Emir of Gutter,
but anyway.
>> Your Highness, it's such an honour to have you here.
And I welcome you.
And I want to thank you for your friendship.
>> 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.
As a result, Qatar became the epicentre of US military operations in the Middle East.
>> We're here with permission of the Qataris, 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.
>> Welcome to the world news from Al Jazeera,
and the very first program live from our Doha news
headquarters here in the heart of the Middle East.
>> 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 Al Jazeera, because it speaks to the people.
>> So, Qatar has become the region's US military
base and centre of information.
But for Hamad, that wasn't enough.
>> Fly to over 80 destinations onboard 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.
At 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.
>> 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.
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 offices 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.
Not everyone was a fan of this.
It's a small-world style of politics, and Qatar was publicly criticised
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.
>> Despite 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 the 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 from being
a strange, barren peninsula with no fun facts
to being home to the richest citizen population on earth,
to being the centre 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 woman-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, the 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 alleged Qatar used its wealth to fund extremist
groups linked to Iran. >> They demanded that Qatar decrease
its diplomatic and military engagement with Iran and Turkey,
kick terrorist groups out of the country,
and shut down 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 terrorist chiefs who planned,
launched and celebrated the massacres of October 7.
>> 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.
>> 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. 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 air base 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,
but 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 neighbourhood.
It hasn't.
This is the Jungle Times.
If you're not big and scary, you need to find a tree to hide in.