Back in 2006 and 2007, and again in 2011, I wrote about how I view American Exceptionalism. One of the things I focused on was the alliance America made with Saudi Arabia and how it made sense in the context of lessons learned from World War Two, particularly around the centrality of oil supplies for any future confrontation with Stalin’s Soviet Union in the European theater. I didn’t see then, and I still do not see now that America was motivated by imperialism or greed or disrespect for Muslim culture and human rights when it decided to help develop the kingdom’s energy supplies. Having said that, things developed as they developed, and in retrospect our relationship with the House of Saud has been a deal with the devil.
We have always had justifiable reasons for wanting access to the oil fields there, and we still have good reasons for wanting cooperative relations with the Saudi government. But we can’t deny that the relationship has corrupted us and that is has corrupted them. It seems inevitable that we’d eventually reach a point where the American people and even Congress would question whether the relationship could continue.
It might seem inexplicable that President Trump is refusing to let Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s assassination order against Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi interfere with U.S.-Saudi relations, but it’s really just a naked version of what’s been going on all along. It’s less that Trump is a true outlier than that he doesn’t know how to sugarcoat things.
I actually agree with Trump in the limited sense that we ought not decide whether to support the prince’s war in Yemen or whether to sell the kingdom billions of dollars in arms based on the Khashoggi case. Where we differ is that I don’t think we should have been doing those things in the first place. Yet, at the same time, I also know that we don’t have great choices and that the president is expressing a real concern when he says “I really hope that people aren’t going to suggest that we should not take hundreds of billions of dollars [in arm sales] that they’re going to siphon off to Russia and to China.”
Having Saudi Arabia in our corner has always been, from the very beginning, just as much about denying access to oil and regional bases to our adversaries as it has been about gaining those things for ourselves. We’ve lived with the downsides of this arrangement for decades now, including the 9/11 attacks and all the resulting tragedy that resulted from that, and it seems bizarre that the murder of a single journalist would, by itself, cause a complete reevaluation of our Middle East foreign policy.
We should have embarked on that revaluation long ago and for different reasons.
Needless to say, I can’t endorse Trump’s behavior here. Even if he were right on the merits, he’s incapable of making the case. And that he is once again ignoring the assessments of his own intelligence agencies to defend the actions of a brutal despot is one more piece of evidence that there’s something deeply wrong with our president that needs to be explained.
Me, me, me, I have this one;
The reason Trump is acting the way he is, is because the Sawdi’s are paying him to act that way.
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After 9/11 we should have buried the saudis. An alliance with Iraq or Iran would have made much more sense than what Cheney did to kill and cause PTSD among so many American youth. Not to mention all the innocent Iraqis that died or how his incompetence led to the rise of ISIS. One of Obama’s biggest mistakes was not to prosecute Cheney for outing a CIA agent. Oh, and not giving DC House and Senate representation when we had a supermajority.
A realistic foreign policy doesn’t require conscious complicity in cruel murder. Stretch the laws of war. Justify atrocities with doublespeak. But at least pay your respects to the dead with the effort. That’s why this is a bridge too far. There’s no possibility of forgiveness if we move on from this. This is different.
Also, your Advisor Son in Law having private conversations with a murderer on how to avoid the consequences of said murder is not the normal behavior of a POTUS.
Hell ya we have a few questions.
Will the Democrats have the guts to get Jared and Ivanka under oath?
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The real question is:
Will the Democrats have the guts to get Jared and Ivanka under oath and then ask the right questions?
Two large contradictions.
If “the right questions” also bring into focus Dem misdoings?
Never happen.
Bet on it.
AG
And once again Arthur lurches into another clumsy deflection from the Trumpistas’ criminality into yet another attack on the Democrats.
It’s like he’s not even trying any more.
The “Trumpistas'” criminality is not in question here. That’s quite clear in the post. The fact that I believe there are indeed “right questions” that need to be asked (in order to establish the guilt of these two) presupposes that fact.
“The right questions” have not been asked by the Democrats…and their mainstream media allies…at least since Trump refused to make public his taxes, fer chrissakes!!!
Why would I expect it at to happen at this late date?
Somebody’s hiding something, janicket, and it ain’t just the Trumpist Third Party.
Bet on it.
Why do you think they call it “The Deep State?”
It’s got lots of secrets, that’s why.
AG
I am a scientist. I was associated with a NSF funded center that was evaluated by a team from SRI International (associated at one time with Stanford).
Based on that experience, I was later hired as a consultant by SRI for a project in Saudi Arabia.
Their main government research arm is KACST – it is the only source of funding for research at universities. The VP Research (in 2008) was a Stanford PhD. So he had affinity for SRI. (He is not the President of KACST)
One of the national projects involved funding centers of industry-university research cooperation. It was similar to the NSF Engineering Research Centers that I was familiar with.
When I first went in 2008, I was written into the project for 1 trip only. I thought it would be an interesting once-in-a-lifetime adventure. At Kuwait airport, I met another US traveler, who said “If they like you, you will probably return multiple times!”
That is exactly what happened.
I went several times from 2008 to 2013. I became the principal architect of this national Technology Innovation Centers project. I designed it at the national level, and ran it for several years. Initially with SRI involvement. Later when SRI bowed out of it, I ran it independently.
My initial justification was that by helping their S&T efforts, I was helping this nation modernize. And any money not spent in fundamentalism was good!
But toward the later stages, it became clear that they were reverting to the mean. External project evaluations were not going to guide who they funded. (The now President was a member of the royal family, and family allegiance took precedence, in at least one case)
In the end it became painfully obvious that while they had all the money, it was not going to be feasible to help them with western ideas of excellence and meritocracy.
In all my visits to various universities (all four majors – KSU, KSU, KFUPM, KAUST, – and several smaller ones in Mecca, and Riyadh and Dahran, and Jeddah) I found the faculty to be much more cynical about the idea that funding would be based on merits in the long term. In the end they were right!
While I had good support from the President of KACST in the beginning, it later was not clear he wanted any external constraints on how to spread the money!
KSA has still some things to offer other countries, besides oil. One of the projects I later helped seed was their genetic database. Because of a large population of co-sanguinous marriages leading to genetic diseases, their genome map can help pharmaceutical companies identify targets for drug design. I was happy to make that connection to a company in Iceland.
But overall it was a personal defeat for what I idealistically took to be a huge opportunity to shape national policy for KSA!
KSA consists of an enormous Saudi extended royal family, a bunch of commoners and legions of foreigners who do all the menial, technical, logistical and other ordinary work. It’s essentially a shell of a country That would immediately collapse into poverty without their huge oil and gas resources.
92% of their revenue comes from oil.
I don’t think they export any natural gas.
Most of the menial and technical work are indeed done by foreigners. Our hotels had workers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Phillipines, Egypt, Lebanon, and other countries. Not a single Saudi worker. Same with cab drivers, shopkeepers.
There are a few wealthy well connected families that have control over businesses. bin Laden family in construction. Althwaijri family (jewelry?).
I actually agree with Trump in the limited sense that we ought not decide whether to support the prince’s war in Yemen or whether to sell the kingdom billions of dollars in arms based on the Khashoggi case.
I find the Khashoggi murder to be a ‘clarifying moment’; it underlines and illuminates the character of the Saudi government in a way that previous exposes have not (for me). It wasn’t some terrible mistake by rogue elements, it was horribly personal act of revenge, for the purpose of squashing dissent. It’s the sort of act that makes one stop and ask, who ARE these people that we are supporting with our weapons sales? This goes beyond what I thought they were capable of. So the furor over this case is, to me quite understandable and useful, and I hope it DOES lead to a change in policy wrt the Saudis. Because fuck those guys.
Who are these people?
They stone adulterers to death, give rape victims 30 lashes, and chop off the hands of thieves.
Was killing someone and chopping him up all that surprising?
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When you put it that way, maybe not.
Lots to say about this post. Since Abdulaziz bin Saud created the self named AlArabiya AsSaudiya, the family made a bargain with the Wahabists, an extreme salafiyah school of Islam to have their support for his family’s rule. Then oil was discovered and ARAMCO (Arab-American Oil Company) formed, which meant the USA endorsed the medieval Saudi regime for the sake of oil.
Fast forward to the present: the US is now the world’s largest oil producer (believe it or not). We get only 11% of our sweet low sulfur oil from Saudi Arabia. We don’t need them for strategic reasons. They need us.
The argument about the military sales is laughable. Saudis have developed their entire military hardware and personnel (trained pilots, mechanics, other personnel) based entirely on the US military for at least 40 years. It is laughable that they could suddenly switch to Russia or China just like that. Trump may not know that nor his ignorant followers but anyone knowledgeable knows that.
MBS is a monster and we have no reason to be supporting that terrible regime, including for Israeli reasons and certainly not their genocidal Yemeni war.
We no longer have any strategic reason to support Saudi including their opposition to Iran. It is far past time that we adopt a more neutral position in the eternal Sunni-Shi’a conflict, which is nearly 1500 years old and will go on forever AFAIK.
Trump and Kushner are probably compromised by money interests in Saudi. But it doesn’t matter. They are hopelessly corrupt. Now is the time for the Senate to get some courage and stop support for this war.
It’s already happening on the arms and technological sales.
Two examples for you.
President Carter flipped Egypt from a Soviet to an American client, and he basically did it overnight.
Iran struggled after the revolution because their armed forces/tech was all American, but that did not prevent them from holding Saddam Hussein to a standstill over an eight year war. They did come begging for replacement parts, and they had Hezbollah take American hostages In order to force our hand, but that was a drop in the bucket.
Still, they survived. Saudi Arabia could easily become a Chinese client state in the near future, which would result in the loss of American bases in the emirates in the Gulf.
Well, you disagree with the Eisenhower administration which founded the Saudi relationship in the post-war era. They called the Middle East oil reserves, “the greatest material prize in human history.” Those study authors weren’t talking about human rights!
Of COURSE it was all about imperialism, and greed. Why else would the US support a brutal dictatorship that is funding terrorists all over the world, and whose nationalists blew up the World Trade Center? It’s a “strategic partnership” in which we get an ally in the Middle East, help in keeping oil prices in reasonable bounds, and they get military and technical support.
Our partnership of convenience with a medieval and brutal dictatorship that is causing immense problems world-wide is all about the oil.
Do we have a choice? Of course we do. A Green New Deal to convert to renewable energy. Jimmy Carter proposed energy independence back in the ’70s, but we never followed that path, because it would mean attacking the interests of big oil. We could have energy independence right now and wouldn’t need Saudi Arabia for anything.
But, we’re still unwilling to take that path.