Qatar Remains Crucial Gulf Ally

D O H A, Qatar, Sept. 21 -- America all but ignored the Persian Gulf nation of Qatar for years, but with a conflict brewing with Iraq, the tiny country within easy striking distance of Baghdad looks set to become America's new best friend.

"Qatar is in the middle of the Gulf," said Sheikh Hamad ali Jassim al-Thani, the Qatari foreign minister. "So, strategically for the U.S., it's perfect."

The Al Udeid Air Base, near the capital, Doha, will play a critical role. Located just 700 miles from Baghdad, the base has the longest runway in the Gulf and can handle 120 planes. Qatari officials say about 3,000 U.S. military personnel live on the base and they expect that number to grow to about 9,000 by the end of the year.

Signaling Qatar's strategic importance, the Pentagon has announced that up to 600 members of the U.S. military's Central Command headquarters staff would head to the country for a three-week exercise in November. Some of those personnel will be stationed at Al Udeid.

ABCNEWS has learned that once the exercise ends, most staff will probably leave the Gulf nation, but a new high-tech modular command facility — the pieces of which will be arriving by sea over the next two months — would be left behind in Qatar, and could easily be used as a field headquarters for an attack on Iraq.

Forging a Relationship

Qatar is a tiny country — not much more than a peninsula of sand — home to just 800,000 people. But it also sits on a massive treasure: the biggest, purest natural gas field in the world.

For much of its modern history, Qatar relied on Britain and Saudi Arabia for its defense. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, however, Qatar's royal family realized only one country was likely to protect its wealth.

"The only power that can project power in this part of the world is the United States," said Hamad. "There's nobody else."

So Qatar set out to woo the United States. After the Gulf War, Qatar began building the Al Udeid Air Base and invited the United States to use it. The American military, however, didn't move in until after the attacks on Sept. 11.