Get your bearings on an architecture

tour (from £3 per person). The itinerary might include Rotterdam’s

two signature bridges – the bold, red Willemsbrug and the

Erasmusbrug, nicknamed ‘The Swan’ after the spread-eagled stance

of its 139-metre pylon. Striking buildings abound, from Toren op Zuid, which

seems to rest against a long pole, to the Willemswerf, with its

diagonal slash. The most eyebrow-raising is the Overblaak development, whose upended,

cube-shaped apartments seem to have tumbled out of a JG Ballard novel.You

can continue in the architectural vein at the Nederlands Architectuurinstituut,

whose admission price includes a visit to a perfectly preserved Functionalist-style

house from 1933 (admission £8). Alternatively, the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen is among Europe’s finest

galleries, where paintings by the Dutch masters and 20th-century surrealists can be found next to a 1970s bubble TV or vibrating table (admission £10, free on Wed).

Qatar, a tiny nation whose

natural gas reserves have made it enormously wealthy, for years has tried to expand its influence in the Arab world. Since 2011,

with dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa coming under siege in the Arab Spring, Qatar has given arms and money to various

opposition and militant groups, chiefly Sunni Islamists, in hopes of

cementing alliances with the new governments. Officials from Qatar and the emirates would not comment.After discussions among members of the National Security Council,

the Obama administration backed the arms shipments from both countries, according to two former administration officials briefed on the talks.

American officials say that the United Arab Emirates first approached the Obama administration during the early months of the Libyan

uprising, asking for permission to ship American-built

weapons that the United States had supplied for the emirates’ use. The administration rejected that request, but instead urged the

emirates to ship weapons to Libya that could not be traced to the United States.“The U.A.E. was asking for clearance to send U.S. weapons,”

said one former official. “We told them it’s O.K. to ship other weapons.”For its part, Qatar

supplied weapons made outside the United States, including French- and Russian-designed arms, according to people familiar with the shipments.

But the American support for the arms shipments from Qatar and the emirates could not be completely hidden. NATO air and sea forces around

Libya had to be alerted not to interdict the cargo planes and freighters transporting the arms into Libya from Qatar and the emirates, American officials said. Concerns in Washington soon rose

about the groups Qatar was supporting, officials said. A debate over what to do about the weapons shipments dominated at least one meeting of the so-called Deputies Committee, the interagency

panel consisting of the second-highest ranking officials in major agencies involved in national security. “There was a lot of concern that the Qatar weapons were going to Islamist groups,” one official recalled. The

Qataris provided weapons, money and training to various rebel groups in Libya. One militia that received aid was controlled by Adel Hakim Belhaj,

then leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group,

who was held by the C.I.A. in 2004 and is now considered a moderate politician in Libya. It is unclear which other militants received the aid.

“Nobody knew exactly who they were,” said the former defense official. The Qataris, the official added, are “supposedly good allies,

but the Islamists they support are not in our interest.No evidence has surfaced that any weapons went to Ansar al-Shariah,

an extremist group blamed for the Benghazi attack whose members have ties to an offshoot of Al Qaeda. That episode has set off a furor on Capitol Hill,

where Republicans accuse the federal government of having failed to provide adequate security to the diplomats and of trying to play down any terrorist links.