After Khashoggi, rethinking our Mideast role
The initial reports after the disappearance of disaffected Saudi Jamal Khashoggi were instructive.
The Turkish regime said that the Saudis has killed and dismembered Khashoggi in their Istanbul consulate. The Saudi regime said that the Turks were making it up.
What is instructive is that both accounts are plausible. The Saudi regime is brutal enough to commit such a brazen and heinous murder. And the Turkish regime is mendacious enough to concoct such a lurid tale and manufacture supporting evidence.
And these are supposedly two of our best and closest allies in the region.
The Khashoggi melodrama should occasion a rethinking of U.S. policy in the Middle East. It won’t. But it should.
For a very long time, the consensus view of the foreign-policy establishment in both political parties has been that the United States has two fundamental objectives in the Middle East: Protect Israel and keep the oil, particularly Saudi oil, flowing to fuel the world economy.
Lately, at least neoconservatives have added a third: Contain and deter Iran.
Subjected to a cold-blooded assessment, none of these constitutes an actionable security interest for the United States.
These days, the United States doesn’t rely much on Middle Eastern oil imports. Moreover, the Saudis are no longer in a position to weaponize oil exports, as they did against the United States in 1973.
The House of Saud relies on two things to keep their rickety hereditary monarchy in power. The first is brutish repression. The second is subventions and subsidies to keep the populace sedated.
Simply put, the House of Saud needs the money.
Despite duping presidents of both parties and virtually all of the foreignpolicy establishment, Saudi Arabia has never been a U.S. ally. The only interest the House of Saud has ever had regarding the United States is to get us to fight their fights for them.
In that, they have succeeded mightily. And never more so than with the neoconservative conviction, embraced fully by President Donald Trump and his administration, that containing and deterring Iran should be a principal U.S. objective in the region.
Iran and Saudi Arabia are in competition for regional influence. The rivalry is in part religious, Shia Iran vs. Sunni Saudi Arabia. In part ethnic, Persian Iran vs. Arab Saudi Arabia.
There is nothing about this conflict regarding which the United States should be taking sides. There is no reason for the United States to prefer Sunni despots to Shia ones. Or Arab autocrats to Persian ones.
The Islamic terrorism that does constitute an actionable security threat to the United States finds far greater roots in the fundamentalist madrassas the Saudis have seeded throughout the world than in anything that Iran has done.
Yet Saudi Arabia has convinced U.S. leaders that we should enter their regional competition for influence with Iran fully and unreservedly on the side of Saudi Arabia. And align ourselves completely with the regional Sunni powers, particularly Saudi Arabia and Egypt, irrespective of how reprehensible their domestic policies are or become.
The Saudis have even persuaded the U.S. to provide logistical and intelligence support for their military operation to roll back the influence of a Shia militia in Yemen, even though no one could possibly articulate an actionable U.S. interest in who controls what part of Yemen.
Which brings us to Israel. Iran does still threaten to destroy Israel, as it also issues threats against the United States. But unlike the United States, Iran can reach Israel.
By contrast, Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni regional powers have established a sort of cold peace with Israel.
Israel is a brave country in a dangerous neighborhood. It is the only true U.S. ally in the region.
The U.S. should be willing to sell Israel the armaments it feels it needs to protect itself. And defend the country against calumnies in international forums, such as the United Nations.
But U.S. interests aren’t advanced by offering Israel formal or de facto security guarantees. Its fights shouldn’t automatically become our fights.
There is a six-decade history of maladroit U.S. involvement in the snake pit of the Middle East’s geopolitics. Not much of an argument can be made that those interventions have made the Middle East better. Or the United States safer.
U.S. interests lie in being as insulated from the snake pit as possible.