A Middle Eastern mystery is finally being unraveled, and what is emerging looks like one more disaster for the Muslim Brotherhood.
It was Qatar, the miniature emirate endowed with outsize wealth and equally outsize ambitions, that served as the Brotherhood’s most powerful supporter when it looked as if the group would rise inexorably to power throughout the region in the wave of populist uprisings known once as the Arab Spring.
Qatar gambled on the Brotherhood, and when fortune abruptly and viciously turned against the group, the emirate decided to double down and continue betting that the Brotherhood would ultimately succeed. Nobody knew how long the strategists in Doha would stick with their plan, how long they would keep betting they could help the group engineer a return to power.