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Notes -
CNBC is reporting that
Notably
The USA's GDP is $20 trillion, so a cost of $220 billion is about 1% of the USA's GDP, which should immediately raise some red flags. Now that something smells fishy, we can look up Qatar's GDP and realize that CNBC is claiming that Qatar has spent at least 120% of their GDP on the World Cup.
Unsurprisingly, we can count on Reuters to set the record straight.
Some Googling also gets us news.sky.com being more explicit
I think it's fair to say that reporting all infrastructure spending in the last decade as "spending on the World Cup infrastructure" is pants-on-fire misleading, particularly when comparing it to the costs other countries paid.
The New York Times does it with a bit more plausible deniability.
Although their tweet is more suspect
But what about that $45 billion stadium (which, incidentally, is greater than Qatar's annual government spending)?
That also seems implausible. No source is cited but, for comparison, Yankee Stadium has 12,000 seats (vs Lusail's 9,000) and cost $2.3 billion (or 5% the alleged cost of Lusail). Also sportingnews.com, while also guilty of running that $220 billion number, helpfully lists the costs of each of the new stadiums and claims Lusail Stadium cost $767 million.
Rough order-of-magnitude verification of numbers is a valuable skill. If I tell you the deepest part of the ocean is 500 miles deep you should really be able to know that I'm wrong (the USA is ~2500 miles wide). You should know if the government spends $1 billion or $50 million on something. Reporting that a country spent $200 billion on a sporting event instantly raise a red flag.
Go play Wits & Wagers.
I find it most interesting that Qatar is being treated like Russia in 2018. The west fought a war against Iraq in 1991 to save the Gulf states. If anything the west has ignored the anti-woke nature of the Gulf states and seen it as cool place for finance, tourism and futurism. It seems like the view of these countries have massively swung in a few years to becoming fairly hostile.
Is it their cozying up to China? Is it that these countries are becoming big and influential enough to have too much free will? Is it that the hypocrisy of being liberal in the west yet doing business in Dubai has become too much?
Then you are either with us or against us attitude of elite class westerners is increasingly putting more of the world in the against us category. They aren't going to give half the world the Iran/Russia treatment and if they do the other half of the world is going to do fairly fine under an alternative system.
It's a rather big stretch to include any state besides Kuwait in that statement.
"Save" might be a bit of an excessive claim, but circa 1991 the local balance of power certainly suggested that Iraq could have made attempts to annex all or part of other adjacent states. Before the Gulf War, Iraq had the world's fourth largest army and relatively modern equipment. That the war would end in a curbstomp in hours was not a foregone conclusion beforehand.
Qatar is a peninsula, Bahrein is an island. Speaking of those two realistically, they are only reachable from Iraq's direction through a seaborne invasion. Did the Iraqis ever have the capability to do that?
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