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As long as Saudi Arabia sits atop one of the world’s largest pools of oil and as long as they insist on payment in dollars for that oil the U.S. will continue to sell massive amounts of armaments to Saudi regime and nobody is going to pay much attention to the Saudi’s atrocious human rights record. From Glen Greenwald at greenwald.substack.com:

Biden’s immediate abandonment of his 2020 vow to turn the Saudis into “pariahs,” and his increasing support for the regime, shows the core deceit of U.S. propaganda.

In 2018, President Trump issued a statement reaffirming the U.S.’s long-standing relationship with the Saudi royal family on the ground that this partnership serves America’s “national interests.” Trump specifically cited the fact that “Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producing nation in the world” and has purchased hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons from U.S. arms manufacturers. Trump’s statement was issued in the wake of widespread demands in Washington that Trump reduce or even sever ties with the Saudi regime due to the likely role played by its Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in the brutal murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

What made these Trump-era demands somewhat odd was that the Khashoggi murder was not exactly the first time the Saudi regime violated human rights and committed atrocities of virtually every type. For decades, the arbitrary imprisonment and murder of Saudi dissidents, journalists, and activists have been commonplace, to say nothing of the U.S./UK-supported devastation of Yemen which began during the Obama years. All of that took place as American presidents in the post-World War II order made the deep and close partnership between Washington and the tyrants of Riyadh a staple of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

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