Qatar stands by US as war looms

It seems a perfect match.

At a time when the US is preparing to make war against Iraq, and some of its traditional friends in the Middle East are reluctant to provide staging areas, a small country steps forward to offer the Americans the use of the facilities they need.

This country - the mitten-shaped state of Qatar, a peninsula that pokes into the Persian Gulf from the east coast of the Arabian peninsula - has the world's third-largest reserves of natural gas, resources that are being exploited by American companies. Qatar is ruled by an autocratic emir, but one who seems to appreciate democracy, freedom of speech, and women's rights.

This relationship provides tiny Qatar with the biggest, most powerful friend there is. It provides the US with well-situated military facilities - from a government that seems to embrace some of the same values America does. For American policymakers and military planners, this is the stuff that dreams are made of.

The US-Qatari bond has been consummated without any apparent domestic discord. But behind the marriage-of-convenience bonhomie, some Qataris question the need for an extensive American military presence and caution that the emir's reforms are superficial.

Yesterday the US military's Central Command, which would run the US war effort against Iraq, initiated a secretive computer-assisted war game from a high-tech movable headquarters it has recently set up in Qatar. The exercise, dubbed "Internal Look," is intended to allow Central Command to test how well it can guide air, sea and land forces in a time of war.

It is a low-key affair - journalists are banned from the base where Gen. Tommy Franks and hundreds of other senior Central Command officials are engaged in the exercise - but it is a crystallizing moment for Qatar, one that demonstrates the country's growing dependence on the US.

Although it is not played out on television or in newspapers, the ties with the US are a matter of debate in Qatar.

To some Qataris, the relationship is logical, even inevitable. Surrounded by bigger states - Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia - it makes sense to welcome the Americans. "I don't see any other way to do it," says Hassan al-Ansari, a historian at the University of Qatar.

"We don't need this," counters another Qatari, resplendent in his white headdress and floor-length white tunic. Interviewed in an equally white and resplendent mall in Doha, the capital, the man adds: "We can solve our problems by ourselves." He declined to be identified.

Qataris have been courting a significant US military presence since the mid-1990s. In August 2000 the US opened a "pre- positioning" facility here - a vast storage area for tanks and other equipment - that is designed to allow the US to respond militarily to a crisis in the Middle East in as little as four days.

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