{"id":44165,"date":"2020-10-26T04:26:19","date_gmt":"2020-10-26T04:26:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=44165"},"modified":"2020-10-26T04:26:19","modified_gmt":"2020-10-26T04:26:19","slug":"public-attitudes-in-ally-qatar-at-odds-with-us-middle-east-priorities-poll","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=44165","title":{"rendered":"Public attitudes in \u2018ally\u2019 Qatar at odds with US Middle East priorities: poll"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nDUBAI, ERBIL: For a country that advertises itself as a close ally of the US, hosting America\u2019s biggest military contingent in the Middle East at Al-Udeid air base near Doha and spending billions of dollars on US military hardware, public attitudes in Qatar are conspicuously out of sync with the thinking in Washington on Middle East issues.
That is according to the findings of the Arab News\/YouGov pan-Arab survey. From the killing on Jan. 3 of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani to US President Donald Trump\u2019s role in the fight against extremism in the Middle East, respondents in Qatar belonged to that segment of Arab opinion most critical of Washington\u2019s recent actions.
The question \u2014 to what extent has Trump has helped or hindered the fight against extremism \u2014 was put to 1,960 people in 18 Arab countries. Overall, 56 percent of the respondents felt he had hindered the fight. Among respondents from Qatar, this view soared to 79 percent.
Respondents in Qatar also disapproved of Trump\u2019s May 2018 withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) \u2014 better known as the Iran nuclear deal.
\u201cDespite the official relationship between Qatar and the US, every single Qatari media outlet, especially Al Jazeera, is bombarding Qatari public opinion and the Arab world with anti-Trump talk,\u201d said Dr. Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, former chairman of the Arab Council for Social Sciences.
\u201cThey are the ones that shape public opinion and it seems that this is fine with the Qatari government, despite the fact that they have a vast relationship with the Trump administration. So, this shows a kind of contradiction at the official level with public opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\nREAD<\/strong>: The methodology behind the Arab News\/YouGov Pan-Arab Survey<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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\nSince the Arab boycott of Qatar began on June 5, 2017, the gas-rich Gulf state has taken a number of steps to strengthen its relations with the US in order to assuage the effects of diplomatic isolation. But it has also continued its manifold engagement with a country viewed by many in the US foreign-policy establishment as a \u201cmalign actor,\u201d Iran. The two countries happen to share the world\u2019s biggest natural-gas field, South Pars.
The upshot is that public opinion in Qatar is somewhat softer on Iran than elsewhere in the Arab region, if the Arab News\/YouGov survey findings are any guide. The killing of Soleimani was viewed as \u201cnegative for the region\u201d by 52 percent of respondents overall, but feelings were especially strong in Qatar, where 62 percent saw it that way.
By contrast, the strike was viewed as \u201cpositive for the region\u201d in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Iraq respectively by 68 percent, 71 percent and 57 percent of respondents. Soleimani, who headed the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps\u2019 Al-Quds Force from 1998 until his death, was killed in a US drone strike near Baghdad Airport alongside the commander of Iran\u2019s paramilitary proxies in Iraq, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis.
The disparity was also apparent when people in Qatar were asked what the next US president should do about relations with Iran. A substantial (55 percent) number called for the nuclear deal to be revived, while a smaller amount (16 percent) favored the continuation of sanctions and for Washington to maintain a war posture.
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\nAgain, by comparison, of 1,949 respondents in the wider MENA region, just 34 percent said they want to see the JCPOA revived and 33 percent said they want to see the sanctions continued and the US to maintain a war posture.
Given the apparent opposition in Qatar to the Trump agenda on Iran \u2014 and the expectation that his Democratic rival Joe Biden may revive the nuclear deal he helped draft in 2015 \u2014 it is perhaps unsurprising that just 6 percent of the respondents in Qatar said they would vote for Trump if given the opportunity, while 57 percent said they would vote for Biden.
Granted the wider region also appears to favor Biden over Trump \u2014 with 12 percent saying they would vote for the Republican incumbent and 40 percent signaling they would back the Democratic challenger \u2014 but the antipathy in Qatar seems particularly stark.
For Varsha Koduvayur, senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the results of the new Arab News\/YouGov survey reflect public awareness of the sharp geopolitical tensions in the region since Soleimani\u2019s death.
\u201cThis tit for tat we saw between Washington and Tehran was certainly a factor in how respondents viewed this question,\u201d Koduvayur told Arab News.
She said Doha\u2019s relationship with Tehran was one of the \u201cstraws that broke the camel\u2019s back\u201d when the GCC countries chose to impose their embargo. \u201cQatar has always been this outlier, not always in a positive sense, in the GCC,\u201d she said.
The Arab News\/YouGov survey results seem to confirm this difference of opinion. \u201cThis response underscores that notion to me,\u201d Koduvayur told Arab News. \u201cQatar has its own independent policies at times but this doesn\u2019t always gel well with what the rest of the GCC is thinking, nor is it always comfortable with what the US is thinking or with US interests in the region.\u201d
Finally, for a country accused by three fellow GCC members and Egypt of supporting extremism through its backing of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Qatar data offered few surprises. \u201cContaining Iran and Hezbollah,\u201d \u201cWeakening Islamist parties\u201d and \u201cQuashing radical Islamic terrorism\u201d received respectively 17 percent, 6 percent and 6 percent support from respondents in Qatar to the question \u201cWhat would you want the next US president to focus on in the coming years?\u201d
Presumably for the same reasons, the perception of \u201cradical Islamic terrorism,\u201d \u201cIran\u201d and \u201cIslamist parties\u201d as the \u201cthree biggest threats facing the Arab world\u201d garnered respectively 22 percent, 11 percent and 7 percent from respondents in Qatar, in contrast with the relatively higher regionwide figures \u2014 33 percent, 20 percent and 16 percent.<\/p>\n

Twitter: @CalineMalek<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DUBAI, ERBIL: For a country that advertises itself as a close ally of the US, hosting America\u2019s biggest military contingent in the Middle East at Al-Udeid air base near Doha and spending billions of dollars on US military hardware, public attitudes in Qatar are conspicuously out of sync with the thinking in Washington on Middle…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spotlight_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44165","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44165"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44165\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44165"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44165"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44165"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}