First act of dismal realpolitik from Biden
It took 57 days for Joe Biden to disappoint and dismay.
Even a decent man, an honourable president, will cave to realpolitik and geopolitics. That’s the nature of the beast. Risks are calculated with Machiavellian finesse and Washington will only go so far in shaming a crucial ally in Riyadh.
That Biden has done so transparently is small solace. There’s still precious little justice for murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Instead, on Tuesday it was Paris-based Reporters Without Borders stepping up, filing a criminal complaint accusing Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — known as MBS — and top aides of committing crimes against humanity in the grisly killing of the Washington Post contributing columnist. Submitted to a prosecutor in Germany because that country’s laws are more conducive to prosecuting certain crimes committed outside its borders, although it’s highly probable German officials will pursue the case.
We’re left with symbolism, on behalf of the slain Khashoggi and the arbitrary detention of 34 other journalists in the Kingdom — the humanity.
There is no doubt that Khashoggi, a prominent self-exile living just outside D.C., and a thorn in the side of Saudi Arabia, was assassinated in 2018 with the approval, at the direction, probably at the instigation, of MBS. That was widely accepted by the international intelligence community even before the Biden administration publicly released last Friday a declassified intelligence report that, if nothing else, reminded the world of Khashoggi’s gruesome fate.
Lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — he needed paperwork for his planned marriage to a Turkish citizen, as she waited outside — Khashoggi was drugged, strangled, dismembered with a bone saw and the body parts dissolved in acid. The murder was carried out by a kill squad that included members of an elite Royal Guard unit whose primary job is protecting the Crown Prince.
The four-page summary, heavily redacted, was released by Avril Haines, Biden’s new director of national intelligence. Same report that Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, had kept under wraps, defying demands from Congress that he turn it over. Trump, chasing the Kingdom’s petrodollars, persisted in discounting the conclusions of his own intelligence service — with which he was endlessly at odds; went through five of them in his one-term presidency — insisted the killing was a “rogue operation,” and continued to shield the crown prices, boasting in an interview with Bob Woodward that he’d “saved his ass.”
Trump knew as well that his CIA chief, Gina Haspel, had flown to Ankara, where Turkish intelligence played for her the chilling audio tape of Khashoggi’s last desperate moments inside the consulate as he was overpowered and suffocated by the hit team. Those tapes were shared with other western intelligence agencies, presumably Canada as well, though never publicly released. There is reportedly also video evidence.
While the report uses some vague terms such as “probably” and “highly likely” — seized upon by MBS loyalists as inconclusive and exculpatory — it does cut to the quick for the prince’s responsibility: “We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. We base this assessment on the Crown Prince’s control of decision-making in the Kingdom, the direct involvement of a key adviser and member of Mohammad bin Salma’s protective detail in the operation, and the Crown Prince’s support for using violent measures to silence dissidents abroad, including Khashoggi.”
Since 2017, the report continues, MBS has had “absolute control” of the Kingdom’s security and intelligence operations, “making it highly unlikely” that anyone would have carried out the operations without his authorization.
On the campaign trail, Biden had been scathing about the prince — “a pariah” — who would be made to “pay the price” for killing Khashoggi, asserted the Saudi government had “very little social redeeming value”, and condemning the Kingdom for “murdering children” in the brutal Yemen civil war. Saudi Arabia is responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians killed in airstrikes, Riyadh siding with the government ousted by Houthi rebels — primarily to prevent arch-enemy Iran from gaining a foothold B the Arabian Peninsula.
Earlier, before he took to the stump, Biden lambasted the Trump administration’s inaction on Khashoggi’s death as “embarrassing” and “dangerous.”
That was then, this is now, and Biden has lost his nerve, or his advisers have arm-twisted him into small-beer consequences. The report specifically names 21 individuals who participated in the murder of Khashoggi, yet no action will be taken to bar the crown prince from entering the U.S., much less bring criminal charges against him. Just 35 years old and heir to the ailing King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, de facto ruler already, MBS will be in play with Washington for decades to come. Unless the King can be persuaded to name a different successor.
Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, grandson of the Kingdom’s founding monarch, had been next in line to the throne. Lauded as the Prince of Counterterrorism for successfully defeating the al-Qaeda insurgency in the kingdom and a key ally of the U.S. as interior minister, he was removed as heir in 2017, replaced by MBS, and is now under arrest, accused of corruption and plotting against the crown prince.
Whoever’s in charge, Washington — the West — crucially needs Saudi Arabia as a reliable strategic friend, its iron fist dictatorship and ghastly human rights violations tolerated for geopolitical expediency. For the counterterrorism partnership (the US maintains five military bases in the country), as a proxy influence in the Middle East, as the world’s biggest customer for American weaponry and the billiondollar gravy train it drives through Wall Street.
“The relationship with Saudi Arabia is bigger than any one individual,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said at a press conference. “What we’ve done by the actions that we’ve taken is really not rupture the relationship, but to recalibrate it to be more in line with our interests and our values.”
Thus Biden has had to “thread the needle” in punitive repercussions over the Khashoggi murder because the last thing the U.S. wants is for an offended Riyadh to pivot towards Beijing or Moscow.
Those sanctions are modest: visa restrictions against 72 Saudis accused of suppressing or harming journalists (known as the Khashoggi ban), freezing assets of the kingdom’s former intelligence chief and … well, that’s about it, really.
Oh, and Biden made his first phone call to Saudi Arabia since his inauguration — to the King, not the MBS, as was publicly stressed.
Biden had already suspended — not cancelled — two major sales of precision-guided bombs to the Saudis, totalling more than $750 million, that the Trump administration had approved in its waning days. There’s no indication those military sales — same bombs Riyadh is dropping in Yemen, a war the kingdom launches — will not eventually go through.
But we, Canada, aren’t without blood on our hands either, despite having little cause to coddle the Saudis. For several years, Canada has been shipping armoured vehicles manufactured here — LAVs equipped with machine guns or anti-tank cannons to the kingdom, artillery being used against Yemeni civilians, as part of a 10-year deal negotiated by the Stephen Harper government and later renegotiated by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. Some $2.9 billion flowed into Canada’s coffers in 2019 from the arms compact, double the figure from 2018.
At the time it was signed, it was the largest export deal in Canada’s history, making us the second-largest arms exporter to the Middle East.
After the murder of Khashoggi, Trudeau froze any further exports pending a review. That pause was quietly lifted last April, when the review found no evidence that Canadian military hardware was being used for human rights violations.
So we can shake hands with the devil too.