[VISION] | PEOPLE: There are no people visible in the image. | TEXT: ``` of neighboring Saudi Arabia. Among Qatar's tactics was deliberate outreach to Israel as a means of countering potential U.S. congressional opposition. At one point, this led to an Israeli diplomatic office operating under commercial cover in Doha. Yet when presented with a reciprocal offer to open a Qatari office in Israel, the emirate ignored it, while the Israeli presence in Doha met with criticism from other Arab states and was eventually closed. On a grander scale, Qatar speculatively built the giant al-Udeid Air Base a few miles outside Doha. Following the September 11 attacks, U.S.-Saudi relations grew tense, and Riyadh asked Washington to stop using the Prince Sultan Air Base and its associated Combined Air Operations Center. Qatar was thus able to step in and offer the United States instant access to al-Udeid. Today, the U.S. military runs most of its regional operations out of the base, including patrols to counter any hostile moves by Iran a hundred miles to the north and flights over Afghanistan six hundred miles to the east. Yet U.S. forces do not have carte blanche over al-Udeid: the Qatari military jealously guards its sovereign control over access to the facility even though its own small air force does not use it, instead operating from one side of the capital's main international airport. LARGELY SYMBOLIC ROLE IN LIBYA Qatar is taking great pride in its role in stemming the Libyan crisis. As the Qatari air force chief of staff put it: "Certain countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt haven't taken leadership for the last three years. So we wanted to step up and express ourselves, and see if others will follow." In actuality, however, the Qatari military is greatly limited in both size and capability. The four Mirage 2000 jets that Doha deployed to Greece for Libyan operations represent the bulk of its operational air force. And two of those aircraft nearly failed to arrive, having