Sponsor terrorism, Blinken will visit you
Secretary of State visits Doha despite reports that Qatar funds terrorist groups
Secretary of State Anthony Blinken chose Doha to be the second country from the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to visit, after having visited Kuwait last month. Blinken’s visit included meeting with the Emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad. The visit will boost the status of the Qatari sovereign among his Gulf peers and send a signal that Doha must have done something right to win America’s attention and praise.
Blinken’s visit to Qatar is a prize for Doha’s role as an alternative capital for the Afghani Taliban. Over the past decades, Qatar has funded several groups that feature prominently on the Department of State’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, including the Taliban, Hamas, and — according to most recent reports — the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
But Blinken not only rewarded Doha, his department put out a statement that said that “Qatar has demonstrated its commitment to combating the financing of terrorism through efforts to comply with US and international sanctions, as well as its participation in multilateral fora.”
Characteristic of Democratic administrations, America’s enemies and global troublemakers always win Washington’s attention, while America’s friends get continuously lectured. Blinken has yet to visit Washington’s biggest ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, or one of America’s biggest trade partners, the United Arab Emirates. When Blinken visited Israel, he did not visit the Jewish state as one of America’s top allies in the world, but did so in the context of trying to bring the Gaza War to an end, and therefore, Blinken visited both Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
The reasoning behind the twisted Democratic logic in rewarding foes and punishing friends is that friends should be in our image, in terms of human rights and other issues. Enemies, however, have only to pretend to be nice.
Democrats, like Senator Chris Murphy, also think that friends are too reliant on the US, and therefore we can strong arm them, suspend arms sales to them and condition aid. Enemies, however, are independent of America, and — again per America’s Democrats — are powerful and if we make them angry, there might be war with them, and America cannot fight because it is tired of wars, weak and broke.
So while Blinken has yet to visit Riyadh, the Biden administration has declassified all kinds of intel reports — such as on the Khashoggi murder and soon on 9/11 — that make Saudi Arabia look bad. And while the Biden administration delists the Yemeni Houthi militia, which attacked Saudi oil facilities only last week, Blinken visits Doha and praises the role its rulers play in maintaining strong ties with Taliban, Hamas and the IRGC.
The foreign policy of the Democrats is the work of bizarro world.