Here is an excerpt from last year's Foreign Policy article on the Qatar Crisis:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/0...k-the-next-great-war-saudi-arabia-trump-iran/
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/0...k-the-next-great-war-saudi-arabia-trump-iran/
So what if that one tribesman never revealed the plot and the Saudi-U.A.E. backed Qatar coup/countercoup actually worked? How would the Middle East be different today?Will Qatar’s Diplomatic Exile Spark the Next Great War?
The Sunni Gulf powers have long been spoiling for a fight with Iran. This could be just the excuse they need.
By Simon Henderson | June 5, 2017, 7:42 PM
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Sarajevo 1914, Doha 2017? We could be at a historic moment akin to the assassination of the heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which resulted in what became known as the Great War. This time, though, the possible clash is between a Saudi-United Arab Emirates force and Iran. Washington is going to have to act quickly to stop the march to war, rather than wait for the carnage to begin.
The nominal target of Saudi Arabia and the UAE is Qatar, which has long diverged from the Arab Gulf consensus over Iran. Riyadh and a growing list of Arab countries broke ties Monday with the gas-rich emirate, and Saudi Arabia announced that it had halted permission for Qatari overflights, closed the land border, and banned ships bound for Qatar transiting its waters...
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Although there was an awkward eight-month diplomatic hiatus in 2014, the root of today’s trouble harkens back to 1995, when Emir Tamim’s father, Hamad, ousted his increasingly feckless and absent father from power in Doha. Saudi Arabia and the UAE regarded the family coup as a dangerous precedent to Gulf ruling families and plotted against Hamad. According to a diplomat resident in Doha at the time, the two neighbors organized several hundred tribesmen for a mission to murder Hamad, two of his brothers, as well as the ministers of foreign affairs and energy, and restore the old emir. The UAE even put attack helicopters and fighter aircraft on alert to support the attempt, which never actually happened because one of the tribesmen betrayed the plot hours before it was to take place.