The missiles, American officials warned, could one day be used by terrorist groups, some of them affiliated with Al Qaeda, to shoot down civilian aircraft.

But one country ignored this admonition: Qatar, the tiny, oil- and gas-rich emirate that has made itself the indispensable nation to rebel forces battling calcified Arab governments and that has been shipping arms to the Syrian rebels fighting the government of President Bashar al-Assad since 2011.

Mazzetti, Mark, C. J. Chivers, and Eric Schmitt.  “Taking Outside Role in Syria, Qatar Funnels Arms to Rebels.”  The New York Times, June 29, 2013.

It’s mighty social of President Obama to allow others to strut their hour upon the global stage, which it appears Qatar may be doing as promotes a Sunni front in Syria by proxy.

As modern and shiny as Qatari money has made Qatar, onlookers may not be so certain about its mercenaries and their ability to restrain themselves.  The alleged murder of Roula Adnan last week adds its bit of opprobrious behavior to the eating-the-heart video that went viral earlier in the month.  I’ve hedged with “alleged” as the news reached me by way of Pakistan and involved as source a Syrian nationalist outlet given to headers like, “US Citizens Kill Deputy Head of Ministry of Education in Aleppo.”

We’re not going to have two essential empirical truths in a world integrating within the communal mind of the World Wide Web: whatever Qatar has enabled, even if spun over-the-top with canards out of the political playbooks of bomb throwers of the 1970s, what happened to Roula Adnan (and her neighbors) will come out.

And just before coming after Roula, the same “rebels”, the ones that the MSM is romanticizing broke into another home. They carried a man from Khalil family to the street and shot his hands and feet. Then they beaten up his wife and daughter, right in front of the neighbors. The terrorists wanted Syrians to witness the crime; they wanna scare us into submission.

As it does always, the fog of war will lift — but these days, it’s likely the curtains masking behind-the-scenes deals, wherever they have taken place, will be drawn back too.

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