It’s kind of amazing to watch the talking head squad comment on the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi columnist for the Washington Post who was apparently abducted and quite probably killed and dismembered by his government for the crime of being mildly critical of Prince Muhammad Bin Salman. As I’m sure you know, Khashoggi went to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain some documents relating to his planned marriage … and never emerged. Now denizens of Morning Joe who were not so very long ago praising Bin Salman to the skies – I’m looking at you, David Ignatius – are now wringing their hands over the disappearance of a colleague. Rightfully so – if there’s any truth to the murder allegations, this is a sickening and despicable act.
What’s ironic is that these pundits should be surprised and appalled by such behavior. After all, the Saudis have been killing people by the thousand in Yemen. It appears that Yemeni children’s biggest mistake may be that they aren’t members of the Washington Post editorial board. And if memory serves, they were well represented in the 9/11/2001 attacks … nearly as many hijackers as there were assassins sent to kill Khashoggi. I’m surprised that the Saudis considered this such heavy lifting. Nevertheless, all of the gray-headed shills who were running around trumpeting the virtues of “MBS” will now have to find some way of reconciling themselves to the ugly truth: their hero is a murderous despot.
The evidence of the Saudi regime’s toxicity is much broader and deeper than this suggests. They have been complicit in supporting some of the most retrograde and destructive movements in the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa over the last six decades. Most often, they did so with our help. They were deeply hostile to Arab nationalist movements, to the point of becoming de facto allies of Israel after the Israeli military destroyed Nassar’s army in 1967 (while Nassar and the Saudis were engaged in a conflict in – you guessed it – Yemen). They funded and manned the radical opposition to the Soviets in Afghanistan, with our active participation. They fueled radical movements in Iraq, Syria, you name it. And their intelligence services reportedly supported the Saudi 9/11 hijackers as they prepared to pull off their spectacular atrocity.
Will Trump do anything? Not a chance. He’s worried about arms sales and lucrative bookings at his hotels, to say nothing of plans for future ventures for him and Jared Kushner. This is where we’re at, folks. Don’t like it? Vote.
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Why? Is it just oil? Well, that’s a complicated issue. Sure, Saudi Arabia wouldn’t have been the center of attention for so long if their chief export had been nutmeg. Their ample supply of easy-to-extract, cheap-to-process crude oil was famously described by our policymakers as a source of enormous strategic power and perhaps the greatest material prize in the history of the world. But it’s that “strategic power” that is the key, as I’ve mentioned previously in these pages. We didn’t need Saudi oil in the 1950s and we don’t need it today, but we do need to have influence and a potential veto over it to maintain our leverage over other nations.
As Bruce Cumings and others have pointed out for many years, the South Korean military is essentially under the command of U.S. generals. That is, in the event of a war, South Korean commanders would take orders directly from our military. Add to that the fact that the U.S., South Korea, and North Korea have technically been in a state of war since 1950, and you have a sense of how this works. Think about it – what does it say about South Korea’s sovereignty that they are not in control of their military? Recall, too, that the country was under the rule of generals and assorted dictators into the 1980s, all backed by the U.S. So when a president threatens the sanctity of “military exercises”, essentially admitting that they are, in fact, war games and, as such, “provocative,” as Trump accurately described them, national security reporters and consultants on every network start spinning like crazy.