Another thing that you may not know about Qatar is that there was an attempted coup in Oct 2002, the put down was helped by the Americans. Had it been sucessful it would have spoilt the amercians plans for using the airbase in the desert. Also Qatar have just invested billions of dollars in Venezuelan oil. Coincidentally USA are one of Venezuala's biggest oil importers so if the coup had gone ahead it would have caused the US a problem there too. Someone told me that they got this info from the Internet, I checked and it was easily available but of course not reported in the Peninsula.