This is Fine

So the Israelis have blown up a building in Doha

This is a live post for the next little bit so I am writing some quick updates — they are in italics, like this message.

So one of the things about living in an interesting city in interesting times is that interesting things happen!

If you haven’t heard, Israeli intelligence services have just blown up the headquarters of Hamas’s political wing in Doha. The building is in the West Bay, an upscale neighborhood around here (but not the upscale neighborhood I live in).

This is likely in reaction to the mass shooting of Israelis in Jerusalem yesterday. The timing suggests that this was an operation that was ready to go before those events (it is literally difficult to get from Israel to Qatar so fast), meaning that high explosives have been in this country as part of an intelligence operation for a while. UPDATE 8:07 pm Qatar time: It now appears that the explosives were delivered by missile or air-dropped bomb. Which raises a whole raft of other questions, given how many countries these planes had to overfly and the fact that airspace here wasn’t closed.

Reactions here are mixed. On the one hand, the reaction is like all local reactions—what does this mean for traffic? It’s like Angelenos (or Orange County-ans) dealing with an earthquake: “Oh, it’s just a 3.9, no problem.” On the other hand, this is actually quite bad. It is quite bad because it represents a massive escalation—the norm against assassinations is a strong one, but it is weakening a lot. (Yes, in some ways, this is worse than attacking Iran, because norms are difficult and tricky things.)

It is bad in particular because I suspect it is likely that there will be some civilian deaths or injuries, even if (and not to dismiss them) it is just the household or other staff. Even if not, there very plausibly could have been. And states do not take well to having acts of violence committed on their soil, in their capitals, in the neighborhoods where their well-heeled citizens and guests go. (If the rumors are right that it was in Katara, or near Katara, well, there are schools, daycares, malls, stores, and everything around.)

I am also told that Trump reportedly gave the green light. That is twice in four months that he has approved the use of force by an adversary state around my country (if we include the Iranian missile strike in June). This does not make me particularly cheerful as an American living in Doha, for many reasons. UPDATE: Subsequent reporting has shaded this, and I should have been more careful, but he also didn’t say “No, stop it.”

What’s going to happen next? Well, the next steps will be diplomatic, likely including a denunciation by the Qatari government and likely the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League. The bigger risks would be to Washington’s ties with Doha and other regional powers. For one point, Hamas’s political leadership was in Doha because Washington asked Doha to host them. They were here for negotiations. And now they are dead as the result of a covert assassination. I suspect this is a difficult pill to swallow.

In the longer term, this is terrible news for the world. If wars of conquest and targeted killings everywhere are back on the menu, then the next thirty years are going to be awful everywhere. Norms matter, but from massive killings in Gaza to air piracy in Belarus (and name your violation in between), the normative fabric we have become accustomed to over the past thirty years is fraying to unrecognizability.

It is not even good news for, say, a Chinese bid for world leadership a la the Tianjin SCO summit last week. Does Beijing really want to take responsibility for managing (waves hand) all this? And if not, who will? If the answer is that we are seeing international order dissolve into a vaccum, then that is a recipe for having might make right from Venezuela to Vanuatu—and that is a nasty world indeed.

No small amount of blame for this should be apportioned on Donald Trump UPDATE: See above update, but there’s also a reason why Israel’s government would think the USA wouldn’t object too strongly., but at this point I think it’s also fair to recognize the world-historically noxious role of Benjamin Netanyahu, who has chosen escalation and violence at each stage. But blame is not the point. Coping is. For now, all of us in Doha are in the same situation as you: waiting to see how this develops.