Brookings, Qatar and the Corruption of Expertise
As a Qatari agent of influence, it's difficult to be more obvious than former CENTCOM Commander and Brookings President Gen. John Allen.
The Brookings Institution was founded in 1916 as America’s first think tank, an indispensable product of the Progressive Era. The fuel that powers the Progressives’ administrative state is the raw material of social science: reports, data, position papers, and all the things which buttress its claim to expertise.
Brookings, as well as publications like The Atlantic and The New Republic, provided the illusion of that expertise–and, more importantly, narratives and biases that would unify the massive and growing classes of bureaucrats, analysts and policymakers responsible for shaping the workings of the US government.
Over the last century, Brookings’ influence has “contributed to the creation of the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, and the Congressional Budget Office, as well as to the development of influential policies for deregulation, broad-based tax reform, welfare reform, and foreign aid.”
The work product generated by Brookings’ experts often reflected the foreign policy priorities of the US intelligence community. When the CIA wanted to engage with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, for example, a Brookings report would helpfully conclude–erroniously, of course–that the Ikhwan had abandoned violence and had become a constructive and legitimate force in Egypt’s domestic politics. (My old friend, the late Middle East expert Barry Rubin, was approached to write this very report on behalf of Langley. He declined.)
Of course, the US intelligence community wasn’t the only influential force that saw the importance of think tanks like Brookings. As a non-profit “research” institution, it depended on money from private donors: wealthy individuals, corporations and, increasingly, foreign governments.
Having influence over a think tank like Brookings became a prize, and at least one energy-rich Gulf monarchy wanted it. Qatar donated an estimated $24 million to Brookings, becoming its largest forign donor.
But that wasn’t anywhere near the extent of it. In 2008, the Qatari government essentially licensed Brookings’ name to affix to a new think tank called the Brookings Doha Center, based in the emirate’s capital city. This was advantageous for both parties, as it created a multi-million-dollar influence-peddling slush-fund, with no possibility of oversight or disclosure required by American law.
According to a WikiLeaks cable from 2009, one Doha-based expatriate told a U.S. diplomat that, “their drive for international conferences, their hosting of U.S. military bases, and their relentless engagement with others were all part of a strategy to protect Qatar. ‘We have no military,” one Qatari told him, “so think of the conferences as our aircraft carriers, and the military bases as our nuclear weapons.’”
This week, news broke that federal prosecutors have evidence that the former head of US Central Command, retired Marine Corps 4-star general John Allen–who also, for the last year, ran the Brookings Institution–secretly lobbied for the Emirate of Qatar and lied about it to federal agents.
It’s a relatively complex sentence, but none of it should be surprising–aside from the fact that this particular influence-peddling scheme on behalf of Qatar seems as though it’s moving from the shadows into the light. The little we know so far confirms nearly five years of my reporting and analysis on Doha’s influence schemes in the United States; indeed, it seems like it could’ve been pulled directly from my 2020 book, Qatar’s Shadow War.
If there’s anyone who’d be working to advance Qatar’s interests in Washington, it would of course be the head of Brookings, long compromised by tens of millions from Doha and weaponized as an propaganda attack-dog against the Islamist Emirate’s enemies. And, if that Qatari agent of influence were to be the former head of CENTCOM–with its massive al-Udeid Airbase located outside the Qatari capital–it might be almost too perfect.
While the FBI executed a search warrant on Allen’s electronic communications in April, the contents haven’t yet been made public. But, according to the government’s narrative, they show that the now-disgraced commander was being paid to influence Members of Congress and the Trump White House on behalf of Qatar’s interests. The text messages law enforcement is focused on involve his alleged co-conspirators, Richard G. Olson, former Obama ambassador to the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan, and jailed influence peddler Imaad Zuberi, who is now serving a twelve-year prison sentence.
According to the FBI, “Zuberi’s business largely consisted of receiving funds from foreign clients, using those funds to make political campaign contributions, parlaying those contributions into political influence, and using that influence to change U.S. government policy for his foreign clients.” One of those clients was Qatar, and Olson–a veteran of the diplomatic corps–reportedly engaged Allen to lobby for the tiny, Gulf emirate.
Olson and Allen wouldn’t have been the first former ambassador or retired general to leave government and cash in with lucrative work for a foreign company or government peddling the relationships and influence they’d spent their careers building. Doing so would mean having to register with the Justice Department, however, under the terms of FARA, the Foreign Agent Registration Act (as I did when I worked for the government of Hungary).
When it came to Allen and Olson, it’s possible their refusal to register under FARA was tied to their source of money; Zuberi later pled guilty to a variety of financial crimes, as well. Even apart from the shady money, there’s a massive incentive to avoid filing as a forign agent. Public FARA disclosures generate media attention, leading to an increased degree of skepticism from potential targets of influence. Many of these targets–especially in the media or government–would be reluctant to share information or even take meetings with someone they know to be on the payroll of another country, if for no other reason than the appearance of impropriety and potential for scandal.
Again, while none of this is particularly shocking in outline, the particular details of how the money flowed freely from the Arabian Gulf to the corridors of power within the Beltway will make what happens with this story both fascinating and instructive, if either the media or the Justice Department decide to follow where it leads.
However, considering the heavy politicization of law enforcement under the Biden administration, getting justice in this case might seem unlikely.
It’s important to keep in mind that, as of this writing, there has not been a statement to the media or a press release from the FBI or the DOJ in regards to Allen or his part in the Qatari influence-peddling and FARA-violating scheme. The story only became public because the Associated Press got a hold of the Allen warrant, which was certainly fallout from the 2020 Zuberi prosecution under Trump-era Attorney General Bill Barr.
The leak itself indicates a whistleblower at the FBI believes that the case against Allen is in danger of being dropped. The Biden administration has every reason to wish this away, as it reflects so poorly on so many of the Left’s important institutions.
Allen owed his career to Barack Obama, who rewarded him with command of coalition forces in Afghanistan and, then, the even less ineffective war against the then-nascent ISIS in Iraq. From 2010 until 2015, General John Allen clung tightly to the dangerous counterinsurgency strategy developed by his immediate predecessor, David Patraus.
COIN has been called a “population-centric” strategy because it reoriented the war’s aims from victory over enemies to the battle for the population’s hearts and minds. The strategy was pitch-perfect neoconservative virtue-signaling; the US military would illustrate that it is willing to needlessly endanger the lives of its citizen-soldiers by exposing them to danger among the population. So, while Allen would chase Afghan and Iraqi hearts and minds through restrictive rules of engagement that got American soldiers killed on the battlefield, green-on-blue attacks proliferated.
Following his retirement, Allen continued to cling to the Democratic Party leadership that were his source of patronage throughout the prior decade. He became an outspoken Hillary Clinton supporter, making the case for her candidacy at the Democrats’ convention in 2016. As we know, it was not to be.
In the summer of 2017, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and other nations initiated a diplomatic offensive against Qatar, blasting it for its attempts to undermine their regimes through its support of the Muslim Brotherhood.
For the last decade, Qatar had used its massive al Jazeera tv network as a platform to agitate for Islamist revolutions throughout the Middle East, culminating in what was known as the Arab Spring. This information operation turned out to be massively effective: in Egypt, al Jazeera broadcasts from Cairo convinced the Obama administration to abandon America’s longtime ally, Hosni Mubarak. Only months later, programming on al Jazeera inspired the Obama administration to send the US military to topple Qadaffi’s regime in Libya.
The Saudis and Emiratis, especially, believed that the then-new Trump administration would understand their position and put pressure on the Qataris. For a time, Donald Trump himself seemed to understand–if not the dynamics of Qatar’s sophisticated information operation, at least the sponsorship of the Muslim Brotherhood–and he blasted Qatar’s funding of extremists and terrorism from the Rose Garden.
The diplomatic row soon hardened into a shipping and travel blockade, and what was essentially a fight between Qatar and Saudi Arabia changed venue to Washington in order to capture the biggest prize: the position of the US government. In no time, millions of dollars from the Middle East poured into lobbying shops and think tanks, each jockeying to nudge their contacts in and outside government in their favored direction.
It was at this moment that US policy in the Gulf seemed up for grabs, providing people like Zuberi, Olson and Allen an opportunity to make themselves wealthy.