Trump’s should try to get ahead of the Jamal Khashoggi story by announcing a cut-off of US aid for Saudi Arabia’s war against Yemen. From Patrick Buchanan at buchanan.org:
Was the assassination of JFK by Lee Harvey Oswald still getting as much media coverage three weeks after his death as it did that first week after Nov. 22, 1963? Not as I recall.
Yet, three weeks after his murder, Jamal Khashoggi, who was not a U.S. citizen, was not killed by an American, and died not on U.S. soil but in a Saudi consulate in Istanbul, consumes our elite press.
The top two stories in Monday’s Washington Post were about the Khashoggi affair. A third, inside, carried the headline, “Trump, who prizes strength, may look weak in hesitance to punish Saudis.”
On Sunday, the Post put three Khashoggi stories on Page 1. The Post’s lead editorial bashed Trump for his equivocal stance on the killing.
Two of the four columns on the op-ed page demanded that the Saudis rid themselves of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the prime suspect in ordering the execution.
Who is doing more to advance reform, diplomacy, and peace—Muhammad bin Salman or Kim Jong Un? From Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com:
While the whole civilized world is reeling in shock at the barbaric murder of Washington Post writer and Saudi “moderate” Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), the spotlight moves away from another despot on the other side of the world whose temperament was once thought to be more volcanic: Kim Jong-un, communist dictator of North Korea.
Remember when President Trump first announced the Korean peace initiative? Boy oh boy, the Washington wonks went wild! Why, Kim is a monster! He’s killed millions! It’s a trick! Is Trump crazy? – because, they claimed, Kim certainly is! When the Singapore Summit finally occurred, and Trump actually met Kim, the event was declared a “failure” by the Western media before it had begun. The joint statement that came out of the meeting was deemed to be so vague as to be meaningless, and the whole thing was written off by the mandarins of the Beltway as one of the President’s whimsies.
Should America’s foreign policy be driven by its potential effects on the stock market? That such a question can be seriously asked shows how out of whack things are. From David Stockman at antiwar.com:
During an appearance on Fox Business yesterday we were asked about the Khashoggi affair and whether any intemperate response by Washington might inconvenience the party kids’ reviling on Wall Street. Perhaps we were having a bad hair day, but the question did trigger a fairly intemperate response on our part.
For crying out loud, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) is hands down the most murderous thug operating on the middle eastern stage at the moment, and he’s got a lot of competition for the title.
For instance, last month General al-Sisi apparently spent some of the $1.5 billion Washington sends him each year to run a show trial against 700 Egyptians who have been in jail the past five years for protesting his bloody 2013 coup against Egypt’s first freely elected president, Mohamed Mursi.
Their sin, of course, was that they had exercised the right of free speech – which supposedly the Arab Spring had conferred upon them – in order to affiliate with the Muslim Brotherhood. The latter is the scourge of tyrants and greedy monarchs throughout the Islamic world; and is especially loathed by the House of Saud, which may explain a thing or two about the missing body parts of Mr. Khashoggi, who was also an outspoken brotherhood adherent.
In any event, 75 of these protesters are to be awarded the hangman’s noose, and the rest a long stay in General al-Sisi’s hospitality suites, which are widely understood to be not all that.
Still, that ain’t nothin’ compared to the virtual genocide that MBS has conducted against Yemen. And there the body parts in question are the fragments of Yemeni civilians – frequently women and children – who get in the way of MBS’ Washington supplied and targeted bombs, drones, shells and bullets; or who simply drop dead from starvation and the worst outbreak of cholera in recent times.
According to Save the Children, upwards of 50,000 children died from hunger and disease in 2017 alone, while the UN estimates that at least 16,000 civilians have been killed or maimed by the Saudi air attacks.
So we called a spade a spade on the matter, only to have our Fox host retort as follows:
“…..not making a judgment on the moral right or wrong of the matter…but if we crack down hard with sanctions and such, are you telling us you don’t think there is a financial market impact?”
Of course that wasn’t what we were saying. But what we were thinking was: Really?
Apparently this Foxified stock market cult-boy assumes even America’s foreign policy should be driven by the divine right of the casino to be pleasured by rising stock prices each and every day.
Then again, it looks like Fox’s greatest Fan-boy is slouching in the same direction and for the same reason. That is, to keep what he has now embraced as the Trump Bubble levitated come hell or high water.
As the Middle East Eye noted this morning, it would appear that Jared Kushner and/or the Donald have seized upon a solution. Namely, that the hotheaded 33-year old MBS, who has created the greatest murder spectacle since O.J. Simpson’s wild ride in the Bronco, could benefit from the steadying hand of, well, his 28-year old brother, Khalid bin Salman!
“In DC the talk is about Khalid becoming a deputy crown prince to show the world that MBS is basically opening up his autocratic and self-centered leadership to include others and create more accountability.
We don’t know whether this prospective Salman Brothers duo can make the Istanbul Bonesaw Massacre go away or not, or keep the stock market rising on its appointed ascent. But we can at least hope the MBS contretemps will stir a modicum of thought in the Imperial City about the larger issue involved.
Namely, that the biggest state sponsor of terror in the Middle East is Saudi Barbaria, not the Iranians. And that the house of Saud’s corrupt bargain with its own medieval Wahhabi clerics is the true source of jihadi terrorism in the region, not the Shiite/Alawite communities of Iran, Syria and Lebanon.
The truth of the matter is that it was the Iran-led Shiite coalition – with the help of the Russian Air Force – which essentially extinguished the barbaric Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
So not only has Washington long been on the wrong side of the Shiite/Sunni divide, but owing to the Donald and Jared’s bromance with MBS, the Trump administration has taken the US right off the deep-end with its vicious attack on the Iran nuke deal and the ruling regime in Tehran.
And that’s the real evil being perpetrated by MBS. His infantile yet bloodthirsty vendetta against Iran is the driving force behind much that roils the middle east at present.
Thus, MBS’ political and economic attack on Qatar was motivated not only by the Muslim Brotherhood friendly policies of its ruler, but more especially by Qatar’s friendly relations and diplomatic recognition of Iran, with which it shares the largest natural gas field in the world.
Likewise, he recently kidnapped, roughly interrogated and humiliated Prime Minister Hariri of Lebanon for being too soft on Hezbollah. Never mind that the latter controls the largest bloc in Lebanon’s parliament and is a participant in the nation’s constitutionally prescribe three-way split of power – wherein the Shiite elect the Speaker of the Parliament, the Sunnis name the Prime Minister and the Chrisitians select the country’s President.
But none of this mattered because MBS is determined to confront Tehran and its allies from one end of the Mideast to the other. And that’s the real reason for his genocidal attack on Yemen.
The latter is among the poorest, most industrially backward redoubts in the entire world and doesn’t remotely have the capacity to threaten Riyadh. Its GDP of just $18 billion or a paltry $650 per capita is less than 3% of Saudi’s stupendous oil-fueled GDP, which funds the fourth largest military budget in the world.
And now Yemen’s polity has been completely shattered, too, by civil war and the relentless Saudi bombing campaigns.
The west and north are controlled by the Houthi government, which sized power during 2015 in the country’s capital city of Sana’a. So doing, they inherited a large cache of American weapons left behind by the fleeing official government.
At the same time, the south and east are fragmented between former President’s Hadi’s Saudi puppet government and regions controlled by al-Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood and various tribal potentates and small time warlords – some or all of whom are warring with each other as well as with the Houthi.
In a sane world it would be instantly obvious that America has no dog in this fratricidal bloodletting in one of the true armpits of the planet. But the Houthis, who have long dominated their region of the country, practice a form of Shiite Islam. In turn, that makes them a confessional ally of Iran and therefore a convenient target for MBS’ proxy war on Tehran.
That’s the sum and substance of the Yemen catastrophe: It’s a genocide launched three years ago by the then 30-year old Defense Minister of Saudi Arabia and son of its dementia-enfeebled king for no other purpose than to kick the Iranians in the shins.
But one thing has led to another – including the aforementioned bromance of the Donald and his son-in-law with a reckless power-hungry young tyrant who has gotten the White House to fall hook, line and sinker for his anti-Iranian agenda. And that didn’t take much doing – since Bibi Netanyahu had already polluted their thin grasp of the region with his own demonization of Tehran.
The irony is palpable. The boys and girls on Wall Street may get by accident that which they desperately do not want: Namely, a material oil outage in the Persian Gulf and a temporary surge in oil prices back to $150 per barrel.
That eventuality would make no matter in the longer run because world supply and demand would adjust, and high-cost deep water oil and shale production would get an added incentive, as would conservation and all the various flavors of alternative energy.
But a Persian Gulf oil interruption would instantly shatter an egregious stock market bubble that is being held aloft on fumes and awaits only for a windshield on which to splatter.
At the end of the day, however, that may well be the silver lining.
The Donald’s demented sanctions campaign to reduce Iran’s oil exports to zero after November had already threatened to upset the applecart in the global oil market; and, apparently, it had also given the reckless Crown Prince the impression that he could operate with impunity, and that no act of thuggery was to brazen to be eschewed.
But now the Khashoggi imbroglio threatens to get totally out of hand. Mohammed bin Salman’s recklessness in Istanbul may yet send the house of Saud into an existential crisis – especially if the Donald’s stubby little hands are forced to severely punish the Saudi’s owing to the overwhelming sentiment of the world community.
That is to say, along with the collapse of the stock market we could also see the collapse of the monarchy, and the seizure or sabotage of its Persian Gulf oil fields. After all, they happen to lie in the eastern region of the country which is heavily populated by Shiites, who have been brutally prosecuted by MBS.
Needless to say, you will be worse for the wear if you hang around the casino in the face of this potential double collapse.
But the world will be far better off on both counts.
It wouldn’t be surprising if bookmakers were making odds on MBS’s chances of survival. From Andreas Krieg at middleeasteye.net:
Nothing has put the relationship between Washington and Riyadh to the test like the Khashoggi affair
The United States’ special relationship with the royal family of Al Saud has long been controversial: an ultraconservative, oil-fuelled kingdom run by a single family through medieval, draconian laws, disregarding basic human rights.
Yet, as Washington’s client, Saudi Arabia has helped consecutive US administrations to balance US national interests in the region – often at the expense of American values.
Slimy financial and political opportunists will make hay while the sun shines on the Khashoggi murder. From Tom Luongo at strategic-culture.org:
Every crisis is also an opportunity. Don’t worry I’m not about to go all Rahm Emmanuel, Mr. Realpolitik, on you today. The disappearance/death/dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi is both a crisis and an opportunity for the worst people in the world.
And all of them are seizing the day, as it were.
Frankly, most of it makes me sick to my stomach. Because where were these virtue-signaling champions of human rights like Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan or Lindsay Graham (R – AIPAC) for the past three years as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) prosecuted a starvation campaign in Yemen with U.S. complicity?
Does Lindsay not know that MbS is funding the U.S. occupation in eastern Syria he’s so in love with?
Now all of a sudden, every war-monger in Washington and Wall St. wants to cut ties with him because killing a political opponent is “beyond the pale?” Even Christine LaGarde of the IMF will be a no-show at MbS’s big “Davos in the Desert” conference.
The question isn’t whether or not Muhammad bin Salman will proffer a lot of cash to try to make his current difficulties disappear. That’s a certainty. The question is whether it will work. From James George Jatras at strategic-culture.org:
The hazard of writing about the Saudis’ absurd gyrations as they seek to avoid blame for the murder of the late, not notably great journalist and Muslim Brotherhood activist Jamal Khashoggi is that by the time a sentence is finished, the landscape may have changed again.
As though right on cue, the narrative has just taken another sharp turn.
After two weeks of denying any connection to Khashoggi’s disappearance, Riyadh has ‘fessed up (sorta) and admitted that he was killed by Saudi operatives but it wasn’t really on purpose:
Y’see, it was kinda’f an ‘accident.’
Oops…
Y’see the guys were arguing, and … uh … a fistfight broke out.
Yeah, that’s it … a ‘fistfight.’
And before you know it poor Jamal had gone all to pieces.
The Khashoggi case may never be “settled” to anyone’s satisfaction. From Moon of Alabama at moonofalabama.org:
The negotiation over the Khashoggi case will be extremely difficult. The protagonists are headstrong and dangerous people. The issue could easily escalate.
The Ottoman empire ruled over much of the Arab world. The neo-Ottoman wannabe-Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan would like to regain that historic position for Turkey. His main competition in this are the al-Sauds. They have much more money and are strategically aligned with Israel and the United States, while Turkey under Erdogan is more or less isolated. The religious-political element of the competition is represented on one side by the Muslim Brotherhood, ‘democratic’ Islamists to which Erdogan belongs, and the Wahhabi absolutists on the other side.
There are more tactical aspects to this historic conflict. When the Saudis cut ties with Qatar it was Turkey that sent its military to prevent a Saudi invasion of the tiny but extremely rich country. This gave Erdogan the financial backing he urgently needs. In response to that the Saudis offered several $100 millions to prop up the YPK/PKK proxy force the U.S. uses to occupy north-east Syria. These Kurdish groups fight a guerrilla war within Turkey and are a threat to its unity.
Words to the wise from Caitlin Johnstone. From Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:
The Trump administration has ended its weeks-long silence on the disappearance of the Saudi Arabian Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Following a briefing from Secretary of State Pompeo who has just returned from a visit to Riyadh and Ankara, the president has said that contrary to some hopeful speculation that had emerged early on after his disappearance, Khashoggi does indeed appear to have been killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. If it is determined that the Saudis were responsible, Trump warned that there will be “very severe” consequences. Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin has announced that he will not be attending the Future Investment Initiative summit in Riyadh next week.
I’ve been following this story with some interest, but I haven’t been writing about it until now. This is one of those rare stories that has drawn the focus of both mainstream and alternative media, the latter because it’s seen as an opportunity to criticize the west’s extremely immoral involvement in the depraved activities of a murderous theocracy, and because it’s an opportunity to attack the hypocrisy of the establishment in decrying the murder of a single man while ignoring Saudi Arabia’s far more unconscionable behavior like its war crimes in Yemen and facilitation of bloodshed in Syria. Killing one man is very, very far from the top of the list of the most horrific things Saudi Arabia has done; criticizing them for that is like criticizing Henry Kissinger for not tipping well at restaurants.
If Trump had his way, Jamal Khashoggi’s murder would go away. However, it might not. From Eric Margolis at lewrockwell.com:
After watching the Saudis behead and even reportedly crucify critics and opponents for decades, suddenly Washington’s great and good are outraged by a single murder.
The victim was a Saudi columnist from that nation’s elite who was noted for his moderate, cautious views, who was also linked to the former Saudi intelligence chief, Turki al-Faisal.
But even gentle criticism of the royal government, and particularly its strongman, crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (aka MBS), caused Khashoggi to be murdered and cut up into pieces in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, to where he was lured last week and from whence he never emerged alive. Turkish intelligence secretly monitoring the Saudi consulate picked up the gruesome details as Khashoggi’s fingers were reportedly cut off, followed by his head.
The first returns on 32-year-old Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman are not promising. From Pepe Escobar at atimes.com:
Saudi women being allowed to drive is a smokescreen – Salafi-jihadism is alive and well inside the Kingdom. What’s more, another coup may be along shortly
A handout picture provided by the Saudi Royal Palace on September 20, 2017, shows King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud speaking during a ceremony welcoming the Saudi national football team to the Royal Palace in Jeddah. Photo: AFP / Saudi Royal Palace
Suddenly, the ideological matrix of all strands of Salafi-jihadism is being hailed by the West as a model of progress – because Saudi women will finally be allowed to drive. Only next year. Only some women. And still subject to many restrictions.
What’s certain is that the timing of the announcement – which comes after years of liberal American pressure – was calculated with precision, arriving only a few days before House of Saud capo King Salman drops in for a chat at Trump’s White House. The soft power move was coordinated by the 32-year-old Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, a.k.a. MBS, the Destroyer of Yemen; the king merely added his signature.
The diversionary tactic masks serious trouble in the court. A Gulf business source with intimate knowledge of the House of Saud, having held a number of personal meetings with members, told Asia Times that “the Fahd, Nayef, and Abdullah families, the descendants of King Abdulaziz al Saud and his wife Hassa bin Ahmed al-Sudairi, are forming an alliance against the ascendancy to the Kingship of the Crown Prince.”
No wonder, considering that the ousted Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef – highly regarded in the Beltway, especially Langley – is under house arrest. His massive web of agents at the Interior Ministry has largely been “relieved of their authority”. The new Interior Minister is Abdulaziz bin Saud bin Nayef, 34, the eldest son of the governor of the country’s largely Shi’ite Eastern Province, where all the oil is. Curiously, the father is now reporting to his son. MBS is surrounded by inexperienced thirty-something princes, and alienating just about everyone else.
