The emirate’s role as a back channel between the U.S. and Iran has metastasized into something far more dangerous
BY Lee Smith, TABLET FEBRUARY 06, 2024
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was recently caught on a recording wondering why the Biden White House wasn’t putting more pressure on Qatar to squeeze Hamas and free more than a hundred Israeli, American, and other hostages still left in Gaza. Netanyahu told hostage families that Qatar “is no different in essence than the United Nations … and the Red Cross.” The controversial petro-emirate, he clarified, “is even more problematic.”
That mildly critical assessment of Iran’s bagman offended the Qataris—a Foreign Ministry spokesman complained that the emirate was “appalled” by Netanyahu’s remarks. It seems that in Qatar, calling someone “problematic” is as bad as calling their mother a whore. The Israeli leader’s comments, said the spokesman, are “obstructing and undermining the mediation process, for reasons that appear to serve his political career instead of prioritizing saving innocent lives, including Israeli hostages.”
Qatar says it gets hostage deals done because it doesn’t take sides, like a geopolitical marriage counselor, but that’s not what an impartial mediator is supposed to sound like. No, that sounds like a spin doctor for a political operation designed to turn Israeli opinion against their government during wartime: When Iran’s Palestinian proxy tortures your brothers and sisters held in captivity until they’re dead, blame Bibi. And indeed, Qatar is using the Oct. 7 hostage crisis as a platform for an Iranian information operation weaponized to demoralize the Israeli public and leave Hamas standing.
Supporting Iran’s Qatari-mediated hostage campaign is the Santa Fe-based Richardson Center for Global Engagement, founded by the late former Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson. According to a Jewish Insider report, the Richardson Center advised Oct. 7 hostage families that “pressure on Qatar would be counterproductive because Qatar holds all the leverage.” Curiously, the Richardson Center failed to disclose to the families that Qatar was one of its donors (to the tune of over $2 million between 2019-23).
“The funding provided by Qatar,” said Richardson’s Vice President Mickey Bergman in 2019, “will allow us to expand our team, engage in more on the ground activities, and provide even greater support to families in their darkest hours.” Bergman is an Israeli and former IDF paratrooper. He reportedly told hostage families that “pressure on Qatar would mean making them choose between Hamas and the U.S.”
The Richardson Center’s role is to give Western cover to Iran’s proxy Qatar and wrangle Oct. 7 families. In January, Bergman tweeted, “the deal last month was better than today’s. Unfortunately, it was not taken & several hostages killed since. If your goal is to bring hostages home, you do what you need to, today. If your goal is different, you criticize those who r trying to bring them home.” That is, if Oct. 7 families want to see their loved ones again, they should stop bad-mouthing the Arab state that funds the hostage-takers and houses its leadership, and instead pressure Israel to give in to Iranian demands.
It’s hard to pose as a global superpower while allowing the servicemen and women you put in harm’s way to be killed with impunity.
Qatar answers to Iran, a fact illustrated by what remains perhaps the strangest Middle East hostage story in recent memory. In December 2015, 28 members of Qatar’s royal family were taken hostage while on a hunting trip in Iraq. Two of the hostages were relatives of the current prime minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani. After nearly 16 months, the Qatari government began the process to free the hostages through the mediation of the Iraqi interior minister who knew which group was holding them—the Iranian-backed Iraqi militia Kata’ib Hezbollah.
Doha offered to pay handsomely for its royals, but Iran’s Iraqi and Lebanese proxies made clear to the Qataris that the matter was in Qassem Soleimani’s hands. The then-chief of Iran’s terror unit, the Quds Force, demanded more than just money. In exchange for the hostages, Iran wanted Qatar to fund a transfer of populations between four Syrian villages to reinforce strategic Iranian geography in support of the Bashar Assad regime. After brokering the transfer—during which Sunni terrorists blew up a busload of Shiite villagers, leaving 126 dead—and spending an estimated $1 billion to pay off Kata’ib Hezbollah and other terror groups, the Qataris finally got their royals released in April 2017.
The fact that Qatar’s prime minister couldn’t get the Iranians to free his own relatives for nearly two years shows where Doha stands in the Islamic Republic’s hierarchy. Qatar is neither willing to nor capable of strong-arming Iran’s proxy army in Gaza into releasing hundreds of Jews, including Americans. As the Richardson Center’s Bergman made plain, “the only way to get the hostages out fast is for Israel to give in to Hamas’ demands, which include ending the war and releasing all Palestinian terrorists from prison.”
Israelis are hardly the only ones being held hostage by Iran and its proxies. So are American forces in the Middle East. Last month, Kata’ib Hezbollah launched a drone that killed three U.S. soldiers in Jordan. But President Biden didn’t want to retaliate against Iran for fear of collapsing the pro-Iran policy established by his former boss Barack Obama, so U.S. intelligence officials leaked an assessment to the press that Iran doesn’t control the proxy groups it trains, funds, and arms to kill Americans and U.S. allies in the Middle East.
That got Biden off the hook‚ but it’s hard to pose as a global superpower while allowing the servicemen and women you put in harm’s way to be killed with impunity. Biden considered his options, then announced his intentions to hit targets in Iraq and Syria, which gave the Iranians a week to scatter high-value assets and personnel, after which he bombed meaningless targets in those countries. One U.S. official made sure to tell the Iranians through U.S. media that “there are no indications that members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were killed as part of the operations.” The U.S. president thereby signaled to the Iranians that they are free to continue directing their Arab assets to kill Americans.
Iran’s proxies and cutouts are successful in this sickening game that puts the lives of hostages and servicemen alike at risk only to the extent that officials in the Biden administration are willing to deny and disguise the regime’s active role in targeting Americans. By contrast, when Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 U.S.-Iran agreement that legalized the terror state’s nuclear weapons program, he signaled that unlike his predecessor he didn’t see Tehran as a regional partner to replace Israel and Saudi Arabia. Accordingly, when Iranian proxies killed an American contractor and laid siege to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad in December 2019, Trump cut off the head of Iran’s paramilitary snake by killing Soleimani. The January 2020 drone strike that got the Iranian terror chief also tagged then-leader of Kata’ib Hezbollah, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, thereby underscoring the fact that Iran is directly responsible for the actions of its proxies.
“According to Associated Press and Fox News reports, Mashal bin Hamad Aal Thani hired a former CIA official, Kevin Chalker, and his company, Global Research Associates, to spy on U.S. Senators Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton and Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, as well as on former Congressman Ed Royce who had chaired the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs. The spying initiative, named Project ENDGAME, was aimed at preventing legislation they had initiated against the Muslim Brotherhood, which is Hamas’s parent organization.”
https://www.memri.org/reports/qatari-ambassador-us-was-allegedly-involved-bribing-french-minister-spying-us-lawmakers