Qatar, the owner of France’s main soccer team, Paris Saint-Germain (PSG) and also the host of the World Cup, is also home to the Taliban and Hamas. Both groups have representative offices in that emirate, which for some represents the main focus of expansion of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most important fundamentalist currents in the Islamic world, within which Hamas falls, more or less.
And in Qatar there are 6 billion dollars (5.69 billion euros) from Iran. The Islamic Republic had been authorized by the United States to use that money only to purchase food and medicine, following a mechanism very similar to that of the oil-for-food program, applied in the 1990s with Iraq, under which the money That country obtained from the sale of its oil remained in an account in Switzerland supervised by the UN. The Baghdad regime could only use these resources to buy food. Food that was necessary precisely because of the blockade that the UN had imposed on Iraq (whose leader, Saddam Hussein, was also not willing to spend his fortune on feeding his subjects).
Today, the US has announced that this money remains frozen in Qatar. That is to say: he will not allow Tehran to use him to buy drugs or food because of his links with Hamas. It is the first deterioration in the tenuous relations between Iran and the United States, which seem destined to worsen as the war between Hamas and Israel escalates, despite the fact that neither Washington nor Tel Aviv seem to have found any link between Tehran and the terrorist offensive. of Hamas.
If neither the Biden nor Netanyahu governments see Iran’s hand behind the war, why do they adopt this measure? The reason is simple: internal politics. The Republican opposition has been using the 6 billion as a weapon against the Biden Government. Senator and White House candidate Tim Scott – whose campaign is funded entirely by Silicon Valley billionaire Larry Ellison, founder of the software company Oracle – has gone so far as to say that the US president “has blood on his hands.” “.
Those 6 billion are not Americans, but South Koreans. His story is this: in 2018, when Donald Trump broke Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and imposed a trade blockade on that country, he allowed South Korea to continue making oil purchases from Iran. In 2019, Trump toughened that policy, and Seoul was left unable to trade with Iran and with 6 billion that it owed to Tehran for its crude oil.
In September, as part of the US’ goodwill gestures to revive the nuclear deal (and, in the process, reduce oil price tensions that threaten to slow the fall in inflation in the US, on which Biden depends to be re-elected), Washington accepted the transfer of those 6,000 million to Qatar under the conditions described above. The issue, for Republicans, is that, by having $6 billion for food and medicine, Iran has been able to free up another $6 billion to arm Hamas.
It is a statement that does not hold up, because, even if Iran had delivered that amount to that terrorist group, it would not have had time to arrive in the two weeks that elapsed from the approval of the transfer to the start of the war. But in the climate of misinformation on US social media, anything goes. In fact, Donald Trump campaigned in 2016 with the madness of “planes full of pallets of money” that Obama would have sent to Iran for the nuclear deal. They are airplanes that did not exist. Now, Biden has wanted to avoid a repetition of that political battle with the 6 billion South Koreans.