While nominally an American ally, the small nation uses its vast wealth to support terror and to cultivate anti-American sentiment. Daniel Rosen writes:

Qatar has provided clandestine financial and logistical support to Islamic State in recent years, as even Hillary Clinton acknowledged in a leaked email in August 2014. Moreover, Qatar funds Sunni groups linked to al-Qaeda and is the main financial backer of Hamas. While this should have [been sufficient reason to] destroy Qatari-U.S. relations, the Arab state continues to host a large number of American troops on its soil, which protect it from Gulf rivals, domestic dissidents, and Iran.

Meanwhile, the Qatari-funded Al Jazeera network regularly chastises the United States for [alleged] human-rights abuses. This hypocrisy is very rich, since Qatar abuses migrant workers, flogs dissidents, and says that women’s testimony counts only half as much as men’s. . . . Equally outrageous are Qatar’s increasingly successful attempts to lure American think tanks and universities into its sphere of influence. . . .

This duplicity will only end when the U.S. forces Qatar to come clean. There is no strategic advantage for U.S. troops to be based in Qatar instead of on the soil of more genuine Gulf allies.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.