Qatar savors role as go-between Top envoy charms and spends his way across the Mideast

DOHA, Qatar -- In the past month, after Qatari diplomats brokered a landmark peace deal in Lebanon, this tiny Gulf emirate has enjoyed a moment of giddy celebrity.
Editorialists praised the Qatari emir for his diplomatic skills. Huge billboards went up on the road to the Beirut airport, proclaiming, ''We all say: Thank you Qatar.'' An ice cream shop in central Beirut put out a sign offering a ''Doha Agreement Cone.''
But the Qataris did not linger over their diplomatic triumph. They were too busy trying to solve every other conflict in the Middle East.
In the past year alone, the Qatari foreign minister, Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr al-Thani, widely known as ''HBJ,'' has flown his jet everywhere from Morocco to Libya to Yemen, using charm, guile and large amounts of money to settle disputes, with varying success.
This work has not always earned him gratitude. In an increasingly divided Arab world, the Qataris have fashioned a reputation for themselves as independent-minded mediators who will cozy up to anyone - Iran, Israel, Chechen separatists - in pursuit of leverage at the bargaining table.
''We don't have an agenda, and we don't keep all our eggs in one basket,'' said Hassan al-Ansari, director of Gulf studies at Qatar University.
That is putting it mildly.
Qatar has close ties with Iran, yet it also is host to the region's biggest American military base. It is home to both Israeli officials and hard-line Islamists who advocate Israel's destruction. Al Jazeera, the controversial satellite television station, is based there, as is Saddam Hussein's widow. Saudi Arabia is a trusted ally, but so is Saudi Arabia's nemesis Syria - whose president, Bashar al-Assad, received an Airbus jet as a personal gift from the Qatari emir this year.
''They really put all the contradictions of the Middle East in one box,'' said Mustafa Alani, a security analyst at the Gulf Research Center in Dubai.
The Qataris also back their diplomacy with some eclectic investments. Many Americans know about the emir's gift of $100 million to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, but Qatar is also building a $1.5 billion oil refinery in Zimbabwe, a huge residential complex in Sudan and a $350 million tourist project in Syria.
Some call Qatar's policy contradictory. The Qataris prefer to think of it as useful. Blessed with enormous oil and natural gas reserves, Qatar is surrounded by large and ambitious neighbors: Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Diplomacy has become a way for Qatar to protect itself and its riches, both by forming alliances and by trying to stabilize the region.
''The idea is to try to keep everybody happy - or if we can't, to keep everybody reasonably unhappy,'' said a former Qatari official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the subject. ''If that makes the Americans or the Russians a little cross, well, tough luck.''
It does make them cross. American officials have been quietly furious about Qatar's assistance to Iran and Syria, which includes substantial financial support as well as votes against sanctions on Iran during Qatar's tenure on the United Nations Security Council.
The Americans are also angry about Qatar's hefty financial aid to Hamas after the militant Palestinian group won elections in 2006.
''Their relationship with us has been complex, bordering on one of animosity,'' said a high-level State Department official, adding that Qatar's support for Hamas had been a ''very vexatious problem.''
The Russians have complaints, too.
Qatar provided sanctuary to a Chechen rebel leader, Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, until two Russian secret agents killed him by detonating a bomb in his car as he left a mosque in Doha in February 2004. The agents were captured by Qatari authorities and convicted of murder, but later extradited at Russia's request.
Various Arab governments have also at times lost patience with Qatar, mainly because Al Jazeera, which the Qatari emir founded, aired criticisms of them. Saudi Arabia broke diplomatic relations with Qatar over this issue in 2002 and they were restored only in 2007 after Qatar promised to rein in coverage of the kingdom.
Some of Qatar's recent diplomatic adventures - which range from negotiations with rebels in Yemen and Morocco to efforts to free the Bulgarian nurses accused of spreading AIDS in Libya - have backfired.
There is also some anger among Arabs about the warm welcomes received by Israeli officials in Doha, where Israel also maintains a trade mission (located, as it happens, not far from a villa owned by Khaled Meshal, the leader of Hamas).
At times, Qatar's multifaceted approach to the world has bordered on comedy.
In February 2003, Qatar played host to a meeting of the Islamic Conference aimed at forestalling the American invasion of Iraq, even as preparations for that invasion were taking place a few kilometers away at the U.S. military base. As the final communiqués were being read, military cargo planes could be heard soaring overhead.
Jabr, the foreign minister, who also holds the position of prime minister, has been coy about the details of Qatar's unusual diplomacy, although he has given some interviews in which he says Qatar wants ''good relations with everyone'' and defends his country's relationship with Israel. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
Qatar's policy was born in 1995, when the current emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, carried out a bloodless coup against his father, who was on vacation in Switzerland.
The new emir instantly began transforming Qatar from an inward-turned backwater into a dynamic new state. At home, he began an ambitious remodeling of the emirate's education policies with the help of his wife, Sheika Mozah bint Nasser al-Missned. Abroad, the emir and his cousin, Jabr, began building a bold new way to engage with the world while maintaining their country's independence.
In some ways it makes perfect sense. A thumb-shaped peninsula just east of Saudi Arabia, Qatar is a natural interlocutor precisely because it is so small and harmless, with just 200,000 citizens - there are about three times as many foreigners in the country.
''They are not a threat to anyone, and there is no strategic interest behind their diplomacy aside from the moral gain,'' said Alani, the Dubai analyst.
Qatar also has an absolute monarchy and virtually no domestic dissent. It is therefore free, unlike almost every other country in the world, to pursue iconoclastic policies abroad without worrying about how they play at home.
The fact that Qatar also has the world's highest per capita gross domestic product, at more than $80,000, probably helps to keep things quiet.
But despite the occasional bumps and frequent complaints, Qatar's policy seems to have worked, catapulting the country to new levels of recognition throughout the globe.
The Lebanon agreement, reached in late May, is by far its biggest diplomatic success.
Every major power with an interest in Lebanon had tried to resolve the country's 18-month political crisis. They failed, in part because all were seen as favoring a particular group within Lebanon's political mosaic. Qatar, with its all-encompassing approach, was the obvious choice for a mediator when the violence grew worse in May.