The recent report of the attempted Qatari coup plot that allegedly went down Oct. 12, and reported by Strat­for and Ara​bic​News​.com, may not be what it appears. The story hasn’t bro­ken here in the United States (or in most West­ern media it seems) lead­ing Strat­for to deduce that Wash­ing­ton has done a fair job of tamp­ing this story down.
But sources in the State Depart­ment say the whole thing is made up, a bit of dis­in­for­ma­tion on the part of the Saudis who are angry over the milder form of Wahab­bism prac­ticed in Qatar, Al Jazeera, which is based in there and, espe­cially, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khal­i­fah al-Thani’s rel­a­tively close ties with the United States. (It should also be noted that al-​Thani deposed his father in 1996 in a blood­less coup and Riyadh helped the deposed monarch stage an unsuc­cess­ful counter-​coup soon after.)
I don’t believe the State Depart­ment. How are Saudi inter­ests served by spread­ing rumors of an attempted coup? I’ve been try­ing to puz­zle out what pur­pose dis­in­for­ma­tion might serve, and damned if I can make sense of it. So that leads me to the sim­plest expla­na­tion. That there was a coup attempt, U.S. sol­diers may or may not have helped put it down and the United States is telling fibs to keep up appear­ances that it’s got the Gulf sit­u­a­tion under con­trol. I don’t believe Saudi Ara­bia was behind the coup, since the peo­ple arrested seem to be mil­i­tant Islamists and Riyadh wouldn’t do some­thing that might strengthen the hands of its own mil­i­tants.
Some­thing is fishy is Doha, but what it is we might never know.