RNA - It's hard to imagine the leaders of Saudi Arabia and the UAE thought it would go this way. Officials from their governments - as well as junior partners Egypt and Bahrain - described the punitive sanctions they collectively slapped on Qatar in early June as a necessary action, aimed at bringing the Qataris to heel. It was as if Qatar, accused by its neighbors of fomenting extremism near and far, was an unruly child who needed to be disciplined.
But the move failed to achieve its goals. Rather than isolating Qatar, which hosts the United States' largest military base in the Middle East, it deepened Qatari ties with regional powers Iran and Turkey. Mind you, Oman and Kuwait, two other states didn’t join in, which means Riyadh failed to turn Qatar into another Yemen. But the awkwardness facing the Saudi-led blockaders is more than that:
A) According to the US intelligence agencies, the UAE was behind the late-May hack of Qatari government news and media sites that helped trigger the crisis. The hack attributed quotes to Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, that had him celebrating Iran as an ‘Islamic power’ and praising Palestinian resistance group Hamas. Despite Doha's denials, the furor led Saudi Arabia and its junior partners to ban Qatari media, break relations with Doha, and impose trade and diplomatic boycott.
B) Immediately after the blockade began, Qatar’s links with Iran and Turkey strengthened, as they rapidly stepped up to support Doha. Turkey fast-tracked the dispatch of troops to a military base in Qatar, Iran became the alternative source of supplies, and Doha restored full diplomatic ties with Tehran.
C) Thanks to Iran and Turkey, food supplies and other goods are still flowing into Qatar's docks and airports. And no matter the White House's mixed messaging, American diplomats appear to be pushing for conciliation and compromise with Qatar rather than seeking Doha's acquiescence to the Saudi and Emirati demands.
D) The current impasse is an extension of long-running disagreements and tensions with Qatar, which has irritated its neighbors by playing an outsized role on the regional stage. At issue are squabbles over support for different proxies in conflicts from Syria, Yemen and Libya, as well as the work of Qatari news network Al Jazeera, which Riyadh and Abu Dhabi want to see shut down.
E) So far, Qatar has refused to meet Riyadh’s demands, including: to break links with Iran, close a Turkish military base, shut down Al Jazeera, and end support for groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood. What’s more, the blockade served only to rally Qataris behind their leader, Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, while also strengthening the country’s links with Iran and Turkey.
F) Kuwait and Oman did not follow Saudi, Emirati and Bahraini commands to join the blockade and instead kept relations with Qatar. This has placed a major question mark over the future of the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council, which was founded in 1981. This particular failure has delivered some permanent damage to the PGCC, a regional alliance long dominated by Saudi Arabia, to which both the blockaders and Qatar belong.
Summing up, the campaign to isolate Qatar and by extension Iran, building on an increasingly vicious cyber and media war, has put non-Arab Muslim states in a bind, all while testing the degree of Saudi power garnered in decades of massive spending on the propagation of anti-Iranian, anti-Shiite Wahhabi ultra-conservatism.
The campaign is reminiscent of similar failed efforts by the Saudi-led coalition and their Takfiri-Wahhabi terror proxies in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. This fiasco and public relations disaster failed to force non-Arab states, including reluctant Malaysia, Indonesia, and Pakistan, to take sides in the four-decade old face-off between Saudi Arabia and Iran that has escalated in recent years.
As is, this particular manifestation of disrespect to the so-called Saudi leadership is still being expressed by both Arab and non-Arab Muslim states. Like Qatar, they have come to the conclusion that Saudi Arabia is not only pushing away a regional powerhouse and smaller states but is also undermining its own image in the Muslim world. They believe Saudi Arabia's regional policies have been an utter failure and have left it largely isolated.
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