Foreign relations of Qatar*

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia -- Qatar achieved full independence on September 3, 1971 in an atmosphere of cooperation with the United Kingdom, the United States of America and friendship with neighboring states.

Most Arab states were also among the first countries to recognize Qatar, and the state promptly gained admittance to the United Nations and the Arab League.

Qatar established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, and Communist China in 1988. Qatar was also an early member of OPEC and a founding member of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

The Emir of Qatar since 1995, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, has lately been going on an expansive boost to promote Qatar as a foreign player. The first major move in this regard was the founding of Al-Jazeera.

In addition to revolutionizing the free media in the Middle East and indeed the rest of the world, the Qatar funded Qatar Airways has gone on an aggressive expansion, which also competes with nearby Emirates Airline, to reach more destinations and serve more passengers.

The hosting of the Asian games in Doha was also another boost to the state which, like the Asian games in Delhi, helped infrastructure, as well as boosting the state's profile.

Furthermore, the signing of major international sports stars like Gabriel Batistuta have helped give Qatar an image boost. Players like Sebastián Soria and Márcio Emerson Passos have been granted Qatari citizenship to boost their soccer team.

The first big coup for the Qatari government was hosting a major round of trade talks that resulted in what is referred to as the Doha Round. Although it was just a preliminary measure it has got the name of the state out, much like a marketing gimmick.

The major coup for the Qatari government was solving the Lebanese political crisis. The meeting ended with the Doha Agreement. This was a major breakthrough as more than a year of political wrangling could not yield an agreement despite pressure from the West and the collective Arab League.

Qatar hosted peace talks between Jem and the Khartoum government announced an agreement on confidence-building measures. "There has been great progress ... and we now have an agreement," Sheikh Hamad bin Jassem Al-Thani, the Qatari prime minister, said.

Of late, the Emirate has been tremendously active in the global realm. The Sudanese government and the strongest Darfur rebel group, the Justice and Equality Movement, also signed an agreement in Doha.

While Doha also took a tough stand in the reaction to the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Following this reaction and apparent closeness with Iran the 2009 Arab League summit in Doha was met with further controversy although Qatar was seen as emerging further with the follow up Arab-Latin American (Latam) summit.

On May 4, 2009, the Qatari Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Ahmad Abdullah al-Mahmud said that Chad and Sudan had agreed to end hostilities against each other and to normalize relations Qatari mediated talks in Doha.

Having been selected to host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, Qatar will be the first Middle Eastern country to host the FIFA World Cup.

The territorial dispute with Bahrain over the Hawar Islands and the maritime boundary dispute with Bahrain were solved by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague.

In the June 2001 decision, Bahrain kept the Hawar Islands and Qit'at Jaradah but dropped claims to Janan Island and Zubarah on mainland Qatar, while Qatar retained significant maritime areas and their resources.

The agreement has furthered the goal of definitively establishing the border with Saudi Arabia and Saudi-led mediation efforts continue.

Qatar established trade relations with the State of Israel in 1996. In January 2008 Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak met with former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Khalifa al-Thani in Switzerland, at the Davos Economic Forum. The existence of the surreptitious talks has so far been kept secretive by Israel.

Alongside Barak's momentous encounter, some sources have said that a senior figure from Qatar paid a visit to Israel in mid-January 2008 and met with Israeli leaders to discuss the situation in Gaza and the possibility of jump starting stagnant negotiations over the release of Gilad Shalit.

Despite Qatar's support of Hamas and its good relations with Hizbullah, Israeli leaders have maintained direct contact with the emirate. In January 2007, in his last months as vice premier, current President Shimon Peres paid a high-profile visit to the capital city of Doha.

Peres also visited Qatar in 1996, when he launched the new Israeli trade bureau there.

Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni also met with the Qatari Emir at a UN conference last year. In April 2008, she visited Qatar where she attended a conference and met the Emir, the Prime Minister and the Minister of Oil and Gas.

However, following the 2008–2009 Israel–Gaza conflict, Qatar hosted an emergency conference of Arab states and Iran to discuss the conflict.

The Hamas administration in Gaza, as opposed to the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, represented the Palestinians, undermining support for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbass.

Khalid Meshaal, the leader of Hamas, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, and President Ahmadinejad of Iran urged all Arab states with remaining ties to Israel to cut them.

In effect, Qatar, along with Mauritania, cut all remaining ties with Israel. The conference showed the rising Arab support for Hamas over Fatah as well as the influence of anti-Israeli leaders like al-Assad of Syria and Ahmadinejad of Iran.

In 2010, Qatar twice offered to restore trade relations with Israel and allow the reinstatement of the Israeli mission in Doha, on condition that Israel allow Qatar to send building materials and money to Gaza to help rehabilitate infrastructure, and that Israel make a public statement expressing appreciation for Qatar's role and acknowledging its standing in the Middle East.

Israel refused, on the grounds that Qatari supplies could be used by Hamas to build bunkers and reinforced positions from which to fire rockets at Israeli cities and towns, and that Israel did not want to get involved in the competition between Qatar and Egypt over the Middle East mediation.

In September 1992, tensions arose with Saudi Arabia when Saudi forces allegedly attacked a Qatari border post, resulting in two deaths. Since the event relations have improved.

A joint commission has been set up to demarcate the border as agreed between the two governments. Most, but not all, of the border issues have now been resolved.

In 2010, the Emir became the first Arab leader to tour South Lebanon and view the various projects it funded following the 2006 Lebanon War.

He also inaugurated a hospital in Bint Jbeil and a nearby mosque and church, while accompanied by Lebanon's President Michel Sleiman and Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri.
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*Pronounced like guitar, the instrument.
This information is from Wikipedia, not the Encyclopædia Britannica.
While you would probably get credit for your questions on Jeopardy, I’m not sure where else this information would fly. There is no credit and none of it will be on the test. Please keep this in mind as you dazzle your friends with your knowledge.

Options to Balance Social Security Funds Over the Next 75 Years

By Virginia P. Reno & Joni Lavery*

Social Security is in excellent financial shape over the next decade; it is running surpluses while the rest of the federal government is running deficits.

If the Trustees’ “best estimates” for the next 75 years hold true, Social Security funds will fall short of benefit costs in about 2042.

In that year, taxes coming in will be sufficient to pay 73 percent of benefits promised under current law. Many options are possible to ensure that all legislated benefits can be paid.

This brief explores a variety of changes that eliminate all or part of the shortfall.

Removing the cap on wages subject to Social Security taxes -- now $90,000 -- would bring in enough new money to eliminate the deficit. Price-indexing the benefit formula would reduce benefits enough to erase the deficit.

Many combinations of changes would remedy the projected shortfall for 75 years and beyond. The brief also notes how proposals to create individual Social Security accounts differ from plans to bring about long-term solvency.

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*Virginia P. Reno is Vice President for Income Security at the National Academy of Social Insurance.
*Joni Lavery is Income Security Research Associate at the National Academy of Social Insurance.

© National Academy of Social Insurance, 2005.

Obama's test for Arab interventions

By Gregg Carlstrom

The US president's speech on Libya implicitly addressed the criticism that recent policies have been hypocritical.

Obama dealt mostly with the operational criticisms of the Libya campaign, that it has been too slow or too much.

Barack Obama's election was supposed to usher in an era of hard-headed realism for US foreign policy, but his idealistic side was on display during Monday night's speech about Libya.

The speech was in many ways a classic Obama argument: The president portrayed his Libya policy as a reasonable centrist path, a third option between the "false choice" of unilateral regime change and isolationism. It had echoes of his December 2009 speech announcing a new Afghanistan strategy, which used a similar frame: there was complete withdrawal, and there was open-ended war, and in between the two was Obama's strategy.

Obama did not try to sell US intervention in Libya as a key national interest (probably an impossible task anyway, since his own defence secretary said over the weekend that it wasn't). Instead he appealed to morality - to idealism - calling a failure to act in Libya morally unacceptable.

"It is true that America cannot use our military wherever repression occurs. And given the costs and risks of intervention, we must always measure our interests against the need for action," Obama said. "But that cannot be an argument for never acting."

And while Obama did not articulate a grand strategy for US policy in a rapidly-changing Arab world, he did implicitly address the accusations that America's responses have been hypocritical.

Too slow, too much?

Much of the speech, though, focused on the operational criticisms of the bombing campaign in Libya; he dwelled at length on the specific circumstances in Libya, describing it as an extraordinary situation which merited an extraordinary response.

Some accused the US of dragging its feet, waiting to act until Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi pushed the rebels back to the gates of Benghazi. Obama contrasted the international reaction with the response to the Bosnian genocide of the 1990s, when it took the United Nations a full year to approve a no-fly zone.

Others reached the opposite conclusion: that the US rushed into Libya without a clear strategy for getting out. Obama, as he did with his Afghanistan strategy, sought to portray himself as a "reluctant warrior"; indeed, he spent the beginning of Monday's speech outlining what the US did to avoid military action.

"We froze more than $33bn of the Gaddafi regime's assets... we broadened our sanctions, imposed an arms embargo, and enabled Gaddafi and those around him to be held accountable for their crimes," he said. "I made it clear that Gaddafi had lost the confidence of his people and the legitimacy to lead."

Similarly, Obama has faced criticism that Western policy in Libya both goes too far (by bombing Gaddafi's military positions, not simply enforcing a no-fly zone) and does not go far enough (by not explicitly calling for regime change).

He argued against the former by warning of the threat Gaddafi's army poses to civilians; he argued against the latter by invoking America's disastrous experiment with regime change in Iraq.

A difference of degree

Then there is the question of double standards - whether the US action in Libya is based on the same set of principles that have guided its response to other Arab uprisings.

"Wherever people long to be free, they will find a friend in the United States," Obama said, a line that surely rings hollow in places like Egypt, where the US initially stood by former president Hosni Mubarak even as pro-democracy activists battled for his ouster.

He also stressed America's "opposition to violence directed against one's own citizens"; yet in US allies like Yemen and Bahrain, where governments have deployed lethal force against unarmed protesters, American opposition has been limited to mild rhetorical condemnation.

Obama did not directly address that contradiction. But he did, implicitly, draw a line between the Libyan uprising and those in other Arab countries.

"Gaddafi declared that he would show 'no mercy' to his own people," Obama noted. "He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment... [Benghazi] could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world."

Yemen's president deployed snipers against his own people, and the Bahraini government sent security forces to open fire on funerals. But neither threatened bloody reprisals against the population of a major city; nor do they have a history, as Gaddafi does, of executing thousands of political prisoners in a single day.

Obama did not articulate a broader vision for America's response to the Arab revolts. But on the narrow question of whether the US would intervene militarily, his speech suggested the answer would be "no"; and that the test would not be whether a government brutally cracks down on its own people, but the degree to which it does.

Source: Al Jazeera

And this, my friends, is how the United States looks to the Arab world.