By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
The biggest mistake the Trump administration made in the
Jamal Khashoggi case occurred while Khashoggi was still alive: letting Saudi
Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, think he could get away with
something so heinous — and so heinously stupid.
But the bell was rung, as it were, and there is no way to
unring it.
The Saudis surely made everything worse by lying about
it. But the aftermath is such a complicated mess because it illuminates
decisions made long before Prince Mohammed’s goons brought a bone saw to
Istanbul.
It’s a bit analogous to the assassination of Archduke
Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That murder
sparked World War I, yet the war was about far more than the murder of a single
official.
Look at the situation from the Saudi perspective. The
U.S. has turned a blind eye to far larger horrors, including the Saudi-led war
in Yemen. Prince Mohammed’s forces reportedly target civilian centers and
tolerate rape, torture, and the conscription of children. The Iranian side is
just as guilty.
Saudi Arabia also executes about 150 people a year,
mostly by beheading and occasionally by stoning. In recent years, several women
were executed for practicing “witchcraft” or “sorcery.” Yet the U.S. doesn’t
say boo about that.
Instead, the Saudis have gotten two mutually reinforcing
messages from the White House. First, President Trump has repeatedly said that
every country has a sovereign right to protect its own distinct culture.
Well, in Saudi Arabia’s distinct culture, rulers can do
whatever they can get away with, particularly with regard to their own
citizens. From Prince Mohammed’s perspective, Khashoggi — a longtime supporter
of the Muslim Brotherhood and an operator in the Saudi court — was an obstacle
to reform and a tool of his enemies. That he had a U.S. tourist visa and a
column in the Washington Post didn’t
change that. It made him a greater threat.
The second message is that Saudi Arabia is our ally. This
isn’t new, but the Trump administration has taken it to new, personalized
extremes. So long as Saudi Arabia helps contain Iran, softens on Israel, and
keeps the oil flowing out (and the weapons in), they can have a free hand.
To paraphrase FDR, the man who forged the U.S.-Saudi
alliance, the Saudis may be SOBs, but they’re our SOBs.
The Saudis are also getting a third message, one that is
coming more from the world of NGOs, op-ed pages, and Wall Street than from the
West Wing: Saudi Arabia needs to reform its economy and culture.
Indeed, Prince Mohammed jumped the line of succession to
do precisely that. It’s thanks to him that women are finally allowed to drive
in the kingdom.
One of the more cynical talking points among those
calling for new leadership in Saudi Arabia is the idea that reformers in
backward authoritarian nations don’t do terrible things.
The shahs were reformers, supporting Western-style
modernization and women’s rights. They were also brutal dictators.
Mikhail Gorbachev was a reformer. But I would be stunned
if he’d never had anyone murdered. Regimes founded on mistaken principles have
few nice options when seeking to reform.
The point isn’t that the ends justify the means, but that
when dealing with murderous regimes, the choice is often between the more
tolerable of murderers.
Some of the most outraged American voices in the
Khashoggi affair had no problem working with Iran’s brutal regime. The Obama
echo chamber made realist arguments about the nature of reform under the
mullahs, but these same people are now morally aghast at our realpolitik with
the House of Saud.
The Turks are even worse. Along with Iran, Turkey is
competing with Saudi Arabia for regional dominance, and Khashoggi’s death is
merely a propaganda tool for them. The Turks are brilliantly feeding evidence
in dribs and drabs to an indignant Western press.
I get the indignation, but has no one followed the mass
arrests and periodic assassinations of journalists under President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan? Do people really believe the Turkish tyrant and NATO ally — who calls
journalists the “gardeners of terrorism” — is sincerely offended? Should we
call for Erdogan to step down? Why not?
I have no good idea for what we should do next, because
the problem isn’t really the killing of Khashoggi. As outrageous as it is,
Khashoggi’s murder is a symptom of a far longer series of mistakes.
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