By now, there can be little doubt in any realistic person’s mind that
Saudi-born journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi
Consulate in Istanbul, where he was briefly tortured and interrogated before
being brutally murdered by agents of the Saudi government, his body apparently
later cut up and removed from the consulate in several containers and disposed
of in an as yet undisclosed location.
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| Jamal Khashoggi |
The original Saudi government narrative that Khashoggi visited the
consulate and then left was swiftly exposed by Turkish authorities as a lie, when
they publicly declared that they had security camera footage and audio that
proved the Washington Post editorialist
had been murdered inside the consulate. The Saudis didn’t bother to ask how Turkey’s
Erdogan government had come by this evidence. It was obvious that they had it
and that the jig was up regarding the lie about Khashoggi’s having left the
Saudi diplomatic mission. It was a story that wasn’t going to fly.
So, many days after the journalist’s disappearance, the Saudi regime
admitted that Khashoggi had been killed inside the consulate in Istanbul, but
claimed (shockingly enough anyway) that Khashoggi had died in “an interrogation
gone wrong”, later expanding that invention to claim that the 59-year-old
journalist had engaged “in a fistfight” (with as many as a dozen trained Saudi
agents) and had been accidently killed when they tried to bring him under
control. Furthermore, the Saudis claimed, it was a “rogue operation” carried
out without the knowledge or consent of the veritable head of the Saudi regime,
Prince Mohammed bin Salman—better known as MBS.
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| Saudi Consulate in Istanbul |
But there were other things the Turks knew and they made them public in
real time, as the Saudis sought to build a narrative that would provide cover
for any direct involvement of the regime. For instance, it was known that the 15
agents who took part in the incident had arrived together on the same day from Riyadh
aboard private aircraft, and that a bone saw and a forensics expert had been
involved in the alleged “interrogation”/“fistfight”.
And even as the Saudis were floating their “interrogation gone wrong”
narrative, video footage was leaked through the US media that proved beyond the
shadow of a doubt that Khashoggi’s murder and disappearance had been so
premeditated that one of the agents, who bore a certain resemblance to the
writer, had put on the dead journalist’s clothing and a fake goatee to try and deceive
the security cameras and pass for Khashoggi leaving the consulate. The fact
that Khashoggi’s shoes didn’t fit the agent and that he had to wear his own
with the dead man’s clothing, quickly drew attention to the fact that while the
journalist could definitely be seen going into the consulate, the man who came
out was a body double. And there was excellent further security footage to
prove it, showing the agent shedding his disguise, disposing of the
journalist’s clothing, and returning to his own identity.
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| Prince Mohammed bin Salman |
Shocking though this tale of cold-blooded murder might be, even more
shocking has been the widespread realpolitik
that has been applied by the West in dealing—or not—with the Saudi regime in
general and MBS in particular. Despite the heinous nature of the crime, its
international implications—since Khashoggi was a permanent resident in the US
and a prominent member of the American press—there has been little indication
that any sort of truly effective measures will be taken to punish Saudi Arabia
and the MBS regime for such a gross violation of human rights and freedom of
expression.
While most Western leaders, including US President Donald Trump—who has
strong public and private ties to the Arab nation—must wish that the Saudi
regime had never done something so blatant, so high-profile and so stupid, it
seems apparent that money and power talk. And while the West as a whole might
declare righteous indignation—Trump later rather than sooner, and only after
media pressure made the incident impossible to ignore without his party’s suffering
permanent political harm in the run-up to mid-term elections that are only days
away—strategic and commercial considerations would appear to weigh a great deal
more than moral and ethical ones.
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| Anti-MBS protester holds up "the Royal Bone Saw" |
The fact is that Saudi Arabia is one of two Middle East superpowers, the
other being Iran. The Arab and Persian states are archenemies and are opposing
each other in proxy wars on several fronts. These actions play as well into the
geopolitical objectives of global superpowers Russia and the United States,
and, as such, elicit their opposing backing for the two regimes.
In the case of Vladimir Putin’s government in Russia, there is no moral
issue in this regard. Putin’s regime is the epitome of realpolitik. He is a politically resilient strongman who likes to
deal with other strongmen who, like him, needn’t answer to legislatures or the
courts. His lack of any sort of moral conscience is clear in his unconditional
material and political support for the regime of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who,
in his war on opposition popular movements, has slaughtered more than a
half-million of his own people. And without the strategic aid of Russia—whose
Middle East war fleet is based in Syria—Assad never would have been able to keep
his grasp on power.
Trump himself has expressed his admiration for numerous despots (including,
but not limited to Putin and MBS), but no matter how much he might like to, he
still cannot completely ignore his people, his party, his opposition or the
ethical standards that continue to characterize—if perhaps to an ever lesser
degree—the democratic system of the Unites States. Still, however, the
condemnation being aimed at Saudi Arabia over the Khashoggi slaying by the West
in general would appear to be more lip service than reality.
Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s largest oil producers and the country
combines this economic strength with also being a major arms purchaser.
Although the US, for instance, no longer necessarily needs Saudi oil to
survive, the US government knows full well that simply by cutting their oil
production, the Saudis can raise the price of oil overnight, and oil and
gasoline prices in the US are a key political pressure point. Other Western
nations, meanwhile, are indeed dependent on Saudi oil, and are highly influenced
politically by the price for which the Saudis sell them that oil.
Meanwhile, arms sales are one of the least talked about and most
lucrative businesses on earth. The West knows that if it imposes embargoes on
arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Russia and China will jump at the chance to take up
the slack.
There was a time, however, when these factors would have taken a
backseat to issues of human rights and freedom of expression. But that time is
not today. Today the world is an increasingly cynical and hypocritical place in
which lip service is paid to the higher principles of democracy, while money
and power rule. The vile murder of Jamal Khashoggi is a reminder of that sad
truth, as well as being a symbol of the ever-increasing assault on such
democratic values as freedom of expression and human rights and of the impunity
with which they are being violated.
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