Imagine if you will a scenario taking place in the mid-1930’s in which the U.S. considers Nazi Germany an ally. The Nazis are investing in the U.S. and elected politicians in the U.S. are facilitating the activity with the help of lobbyists. As the Nazis are slaughtering Jews, U.S. politicians are looking the other way and consider the Nazis an ally despite the latter’s genocide and crimes against humanity. In some cases, politicians themselves are engaged in the business deals. Imagine if Germany was an oil-rich state that the U.S. relied upon as domestic oil production was being regulated away.
In one example, a former U.S. presidential candidate sold his media company to the Nazis for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Any objections to what the Nazis were doing are met with calls for pragmatism; breaking such an alliance would be political suicide and bad for the U.S. Besides, the Nazis and the Russians are increasingly becoming enemies. That reality can assuredly provide the U.S. with leverage against the Russians, right?
If that scenario were posed to all of the 535 members of the U.S. Congress today and each was asked to endorse or condemn the behavior of such a hypothetical pre-World War II United States, how would each respond? Even with the vacancy of conscience among the majority of politicians, the condemnation would likely be close to unanimous.
It wouldn’t matter the consequences; the U.S. should have broken ties with the Nazis.
Fast forward to 2014; the same scenario is unfolding relative to the U.S. alliance with Qatar. The government of Qatar is the chief financier of Hamas, a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO); Qatar also supports ISIS, which is beheading any Christian, Jew, or non-ISIS Muslim it can get its hands on.
Just two months ago, Qatar hosted another annual, lavish U.S.-Islamic World Forum (US-IWF). American politicians, elitists, and media figures galore were in attendance. The former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Anne Patterson gave the keynote speech.
Despite this, equivocation about how to deal with Qatar is in high supply. Politicians are apathetic, ignorant, or willing to press ahead with the alliance by citing things like pragmatism. Ironically, it’s a German who is sounding alarm bells.
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel (L) and Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad
Paul Alster at Fox News writes:
If the Middle East were one big room, Qatar would be the elephant, according to a growing number of regional experts who believe the oil rich emirate is propping up violent jihadists around the globe even as it poses as a U.S. ally and would-be broker of peace.
Israel has long complained of Qatar’s alleged duplicity, accusing it of meddling, bankrolling Hamas in Gaza, exporting radical Islamic terrorism through its tight links to the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Nusra. And a German official recently suggested that Qatar may also play a role in funding Islamic State, the savage extremist group behind the beheading of U.S. journalist James Foley.
“You have to ask who is arming, who is financing ISIS troops? The key word there is Qatar – and how do we deal with these people and states politically?” German Development Minister Gerd Muller said last week.
Let’s be clear. When politicians are faced with having to take a politically untenable position or look stupid, they run to stupid like Forrest Gump runs for the end zone:
A spokesman for the Washington, DC think tank Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) Jonathan Schanzer reveals the thinking:
Qatar is a U.S. “frenemy,” according to Jonathan Schanzer, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. On one hand, it hosts the biggest U.S. military base in the Middle East at Al Udeid; invests tens of billions of dollars in the U.S and across the globe in a bid to make itself indispensable and acts as the ‘white knight’ intermediary in hostage negotiations.
On the other hand, Qatar is arming and funding Hamas in Gaza, brazenly fueling violent Arab uprisings including the brief and bloody reign in Egypt of the Muslim Brotherhood and is long alleged to be arming vicious rebel groups in Libya, Mali, Syria, Iraq, and Tunisia.
Frenemy? Really? Was Nazi Germany a “frenemy”?
Quite possibly when one considers that the grandfather of George W. Bush was doing quite a bit of business with them:
George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.
The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.
His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.
The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator’s action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
Al Gore’s recent legal fracas with Al-Jazeera notwithstanding, his multi-hundred million dollar deal with the Qatari-based cable news network is hardly much different than what Prescott Bush did with Hitler. Yet, Qatar is not as politically radioactive today as the Nazis are.
As was the case in the 1930’s a hard reality is incubating and American politicians who choose the path of least resistance are just as complicit as those who are in league with the Qataris. Unlike the 1930’s however is the fact that in this information age, such politicians will not be able to use the ‘I’m stupid’ excuse. All of the information they need is not only at their fingertips but at the fingertips of American citizens who don’t have access to the information said politicians do. If the information age has taught us anything, it’s not just that politicians are nowhere near as stupid as they’d like to be perceived but what is available to the average citizen makes them look no smarter than chia-pets if their professed ignorance was believable.
Prescott Bush (L) and George H.W. Bush (R).
In fact, politicians look increasingly stupider as a result of their constituents’ education.
Even ten years ago, many people would give the Bush family a pass on such associations, saying that there is no way Prescott Bush could have known and that any charges to the contrary were levied through the prism of hindsight.
Something else hindsight has taught us is that people in the position of Prescott Bush are not nearly as ignorant as they would have the public believe. Ditto for his son and grandson (George H.W. and George W. respectively). This reality applies to every politician – regardless of party affiliation – in Washington. When nation states like Qatar and Turkey are chronicled in the history books, future generations will read with apoplexy at how American politicians either stood by and did nothing or advocated on behalf of those countries.
This guarantee is more ironclad the longer these alliances exist.