Back on December 12, I argued that we should have reevaluated our relationship with Saudi Arabia long before now. It seems that the days of reckoning have finally arrived, yet we appear to be off to an inauspicious start to the process. In Wednesday’s New York Times, Declan Walsh and Eric Schmitt explore some of the absurdities of the situation.
The biggest distortion in our relationship is that we’ve spent decades building up the Saudi’s armed forces but have always done so with the expectation that those forces would never be used. Now that they are being used, they’re killing civilians in a losing conflict that is devoid of strategic vision. We don’t like the situation, and yet we can’t easily extricate ourselves from it.
In my earlier piece, I wrote “it’s less that Trump is a true outlier than that he doesn’t know how to sugarcoat things,” and what I meant by that is that we’ve been reliant on selling billions of arms to the Saudis for a while but only now do we have a president who’s willing to say that we don’t want to rein in the House of Saud on any level because we don’t want to risk our contracts or political relationship. In the past, we’ve struggled with the moral and strategic implications of this situation, but not to the point of changing it. Now we’re at risk of making our peace with it at a time when that position is least defensible.
Our country is completely implicated in the war in Yemen, including the atrocities, the starvation, and the military failure, and the New York Times is wondering why we can’t even keep track of which aerial bombardment missions are being carried out by which coalition partners or whether or not it is our bombs that are landing on civilian schools and markets and hospitals.
The Saudi Air Force is armed and trained by us, and Boeing has “a $480 million contract for service repairs to the fleet.” The new acting Secretary of Defense Patrick M. Shanahan is a 30-year veteran of Boeing who, until now, has been recusing himself for decisions related to the defense contractor. It won’t be long before Boeing finds itself in a public relations disaster.
They are in the same position as our government. They made a contract with the devil, and now the consequences of that bargain are coming due.
On December 12, the U.S. Senate voted 56-41 to halt cooperation with the air war in Yemen, but the House of Representatives refused to follow suit. These are nothing more than baby steps in any case, as it is the entire relationship and our complete Middle East foreign policy vision that must be reevaluated.
This would be excruciating for our country even with the best leadership, but we don’t have any leadership right now. Before we can move forward, we first have to clean our own house.
Does “cleaning our own house” include taking responsibility for the fact that this slow-motion genocide is being effected by military jets sold to the Saudis by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with the warm approval of her boss, Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama?
Yes.
It should, anyway.
Will it?
Not if the current management of the DNC has anything to say about it.
Bet on it.
AG
○ Salman Offered Candidate Trump Assassination Program on Iran
○ UAE Hired US Mercenaries for Assassinations in Yemen
Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, US advisor Middle East Jared Kushner and PM Bibi Netanyahu are all close friends. The Arab Sheikh of Abu Dhabi is close to the Saudi monarchy and has a good working relationship with the US military establishment. A very strong alliance for US interests [MIC].
What the fuck.
Got nothing better to do.
That is exactly what it means; I do not read anything to the contrary. That this is a reckoning that should have come years before, also underscores the point. Maintenance of the relationship in this way has spanned both republican and democratic administrations. It highlights the influence corporations and wealth have on government policy, and how “doing the right thing” essentially means what is good for corporations and not America, per se. This is not to say that there hasn’t been a strategic justification for it, however the time has come when, all things considered, what’s left of the strategic value as it is today is certainly not worth the moral and political price we pay for it.
Trump, like a stopped clock that’s right twice a day, actually put it plain: why should we end our relationship over a murdered journalist when that means forfeiting hundreds of billions of dollars in arms sales? Regardless of how odious that sounds, that has essentially been the US calculation of both democratic and republican administrations. It is a lot like this, too: why should we care about Russian interference in our elections, kids dying in our custody at the border or any of the other myriad atrocities that come to the fore damn near on a daily basis, when the economy is going good? It says the bottom line for “Americans” is we don’t give a shit about anything else, as long as I as an individual am good. The sad fact is, it is the truth.
None of this started with Trump, and he embarrasses us all with his crass way of stating the facts. But truth be told, “America” has been about dollars first and foremost, above practically everything. Its why we always ask “how are we going to pay for it” when a program designed to actually help people is proposed, and if it is allowed the requirement is that it be “revenue neutral.” But if it is to lavish tax cuts on the already fabulously wealthy, give billions to an Amazon to locate in a particular area, or spend billions on “arms research” with no defined and finite spending goal, the money is always there.
” Revenue neutral” is not an economic requirement. Heck we manage to fight all our wars on a credit card. So even though we want to say it is important we are not exactly insisting on it. I mean why not cut all sorts of things if you are going to cut taxes or fight a war? So deficits are permitted and the contrary is merely an artifact to make you back off. We should stop it.
You’re damned right it has to stop. Revenue neutral is not an economic requirement but we have allowed it to become a political requirement when it comes to any public expenditure that doesn’t serve wealth. And we’ve done that by immediately running around trying to find other programs that don’t serve wealth to cut any time a proposal for a program that serves the general public is made, rather than question that as a requirement. Even with proposals for infrastructure spending its been a demand, although this is something that would definitely serve everyone, wealth included, though not in the direct infusion of loot in their pockets they prefer. And what this says is government as it is today exists to serve the wealthy, and any benefit the public may get will be residual.
The internal struggle the democratic party now faces is between the progressive voices who raise this very legitimate question, versus the “centrists” who insist on maintaining the status quo to preserve a relationship with wealth in exchange for funding. It can’t be both.
I don’t think the Bitch or her boss wanted to start a genocide. Sometimes you may just want to help an ally with his military defense and, let’s face it here, do you really want the Saudis to go to Russia to get it? I still think we have some influence over what they do with it, assuming one makes the effort.
Don’t hold your breath, Dunwoody.
Waterboarding will always win out in the end.
By death if by no other means.
Bet on it.
AG
Foreign policy is led by the prez in our dubious system, with the Congress as almost a bit player–and so far no prez candidate has run a campaign that seeks to change the appalling longstanding relationship with our medieval ally and oil market subsidizer. Will someone ever run for federal office who calls the question of our quasi-permanent support of KSA? (It certainly hasn’t happened with Israel, either.)
The deepest criticism I can recall is almost 50 years old during the Arab oil embargo of the early 70s. Since the time of St Reagan it’s been mostly presidential sword-dancing and hand-holding and kissing of the King. Of course, the Kingdom’s little, um, er…entanglement in 9/11 was swept under the rug and forced down the memory hole by (acting) Prez Cheney. (There’s something to this new “acting” nomenclature!)
Late Capitalism is naturally addicted to corporate welfare schemes, with oceans of gub’mint defense dollars keeping “good jobs!” afloat and the hamster wheel a-spinning, with nothing of any real value to show for at the tail end of the massive operation. Our economy’s addiction to wasteful and unnecessary defense spending (from all parts of the globe) is actually a sign of its structural weakness and mis-allocation of resources.
In this little economic drama Saudi Arabia has been happy to play its part over the decades. As for the senate’s newfound dissatisfaction over the Yemen genocide, the rule appears to be that only America gets to crack things up and bomb defenseless pygmy nations back to the stone age. But as far as can be told, all the King’s planes and all the King’s armaments (and all the King’s “service” men!) were bought and paid for with no strings attached….and they surely aren’t gonna put Yemen back together again!
Heckuva Job, Defense Industry!
It is indeed a structural weakness and mis allocation of resources. To hell with health care, children, climate change or a myriad of other creature needs. Guns and bombs, guns and bombs. And so it has been for as long as one remembers.
The relationship as it exists should have at least changed if not ended with the knowledge that damn near all of the 911 attackers were Saudis steeped in what could be called their state sponsored religious education system, Wahhabi-ism. A system that continues to this day. That “we” pretended that Iraq was responsible should tell us all we need to know about how important the money, er “relationship” with the Saudis is.
Trump’s “policy” pronouncements, with respect to the Saudis, is like the guy at a black tie party who announces to all within earshot he’s going to take a dump rather than go to the restroom.
The relationship with KSA should have fundamentally changed, from “co-dependents” to “nuke Riyadh NOW” on 12 Sept 2001.