The Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has announced that the United States will allow Qatar to build an Air Force facility located at the Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho to host Qatari F-15 fighter jets. This facility will also be home to train the Qatari pilots alongside the American troops.
Qatar is a non-NATO Arab ally that Israel had bombed several days prior to Trump’s executive order for the United States to guarantee the security of Qatar. Does this have anything to do with the $400 million jet that Qatar gifted to Donald Trump? This jet is being fitted to become Trump’s private Air Force One at the cost of the taxpayers. The problem is, this aircraft will not remain in Washington. It will leave DC when Trump does. Trump has called “the gift from Qatar a great gesture” that he would be stupid to turn down. Perhaps the stupid thing is accepting a gift that is against the Constitution to accept from a foreign government without the approval from Congress.
What kind of dangers to the American people risk at of having Qatar join our Air Force in Idaho? Is this a case of deja vu? During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedin in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. This proved to be a huge blunder in judgment when the Reagan administration’s role in financing, arming, and training what was destined to become America’s worst enemy in the Middle East and Asia led to America’s role in Afghanistan, which led to the rise of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda.
The U.S. routed all of its support for the anti-Soviet resistance through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The ISI played the main role in distributing weapons and training, where Bin Laden’s allies received U.S. weapons: Bin Laden and his associates benefited from the overall U.S.-supported effort. His key allies, like Jalaluddin Haqqani, were major beneficiaries of the CIA’s program. In some instances, money and weapons meant for the mujahideen did make it to the “Afghan Arabs” that bin Laden recruited. When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, bin Laden transformed his network into the al-Qaeda organization. When bin Laden was later expelled, he went to Sudan and then back to Afghanistan, where he established a new base with the support of the Taliban. The jihadis who had supported the United States in driving out the Soviets then went over to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda.
In view of the fact that Qatar has a history of funding Hamas and other Islamist groups, allowing Qatar to have a large-scale presence within the United States could be inviting unnecessary risks. Qatar appears to have bought itself a very sweet deal in Trumpworld. Not only with the jet, but Qatar just months ago made a deal with Trump to build a Trump-branded golf course and a beachside project as part of a $5.5 billion development project. Those transactions began to pay off earlier this month, when Trump signed an executive order that pledged to give Qatar the same level of protection from the United States as some of America’s most powerful allies.
Is Qatar playing both sides? Qatar’s relationships with both the United States and our adversaries, like Iran, illustrate a transactional and self-serving foreign policy. Critics refer to this as a “firefighter and arsonist” strategy, where Qatar builds influence by funding groups it can later mediate with. Qatar has invested billions of dollars in lobbying and donations to Western educational institutions. Some have raised concerns about the potential for this spending to influence policy and promote ideologies hostile to the United States’ interests. The state-funded Al Jazeera media network is seen by some as a powerful tool for Qatar. It has been criticized for promoting Islamist ideologies, and Israel has moved to ban its operations within the country. If Qatar is indeed funding Hamas, what was Trump thinking when he made this deal? Oh, of course. His golf course and beachside project. What else?
Didn’t we learn anything from Reagan?