Blaming the Saudi/American alliance on oil is probably too kind to American leadership though. There's no particular reason we need to be allies with Saudi Arabia to have access to their commodities sold on the open market. I don't doubt oil is hugely impactful but it's a glib story; presumably the US is interested in Saudi Arabia to constrain Iran as well. Presumably we want to sell them munitions. And you cannot now discount the Saudi/American alliance vis a vis the Trump Administration specifically being part of the emerging global authoritarian/kleptocracy ideology. As I referenced earlier, Trump got asked this very question in 2015 and said he loved the Saudis during the campaign because they buy his hotels and apartments.

Blaming consumer demand is dumb ("everyone in the US who drives is guilty"), it's a factor, but don't remove the agency of elites who are actively making this choice, there's lots of ways to get oil without being as close to the Saudis as we are.

Sure, you are all guilty for supporting a government, that independent of politics, deals arms worldwide like no other. That's also true.

The US is an immoral, depraved, decadent society full of people enjoying the benefits of slavery in Dubai and repression of women in Saudi Arabia.

Yeah, all prior US presidents' fault. I'm sure Trump making his first presidential visit to SA and slavishing praise on a newly arrived crown prince who kidnapped, tortured, extorted, and in some cases killed his rivals; selling SA unlimited weapons; supporting SA vs Qutar, where our largest ME base is; selling them tons of gold condos and hotel rooms; eliminating the hard-won Iran deal and giving SA maximal support in that rivalry; and Kushner visiting there 4 times since the start of the Trump admin and working to do MBS's bidding had nothing to do Saudi's recent behavior in Yemen, or internally, or in killing a US resident critic in Turkey.

The great things about politics is all you have to do is not know anything to have perfectly valid viewpoints from your own perspective. Even better if you just mash parties/administrations/philosophies together, because you fail to understand relevant distinctions.

As Trump said, "I love the uneducated!" [because they are the ones who support me]

Well it's definitely the fault of past US President's too. But Trump is obviously moving the US closer to Saudi Arabia than past administrations, so yeah, Trump is obviously making things worse if you care about being allied with brutal authoritarian regimes, which we should. I think that's increasingly becoming the concern of liberal globalists and I assume we are going to be treated to more stories soon about how Khashoggi was part of the Fake News Soros cabal and ate at Comet Pizza and actually the Saudis did a Good Thing.

BUT, I don't think it's a lock, the far right also hates Saudi Arabia due to their rabid Islamophobia so this could be a conflict. Saudi Arabia is one of the far right elite/far right hoi polloi divides; the elites desperately want a Saudi/American alliance to share in oil and arms money together and the elites on the right hate Iran, and they want Saudi Arabia to control them, but the average street deplorables have blood lust for Muslims and really want to bomb Mecca and have all become amateur scholars on Wahhabism and how Sharia Law is threatening white vitality and stuff, will be interesting to see how Trump plays this. I have underestimated Trump's control over the true deplorables and so if he presses it, I think he might win but he's swimming against like a generation of right-wing low brow agit prop that place Saudi Arabia at the heart of the Western/Muslim global conflict fantasies.

Does the American deplorable really tie Islamic terrorism to SA particularly? Not saying they don't as am not from the US, but I admit I'd be surprised if it actually mattered. SA talks a good game about combating terrorism, and the US government is happy to pretend it means something - and they probably do want to keep them away from SA itself, so could probably provide the odd propaganda news story if they really wanted too.

Obviously I'm not disputing that actually SA exports and funds Islamic terrorists around the world, just that it can't be managed sufficiently.

Deplorables hate Muslims, not terrorists, and so yes, there's a whole cottage industry of right winger faux intellectuals that have been writing about the dangers of Sharia and Wahhabism and how it's all funded and controlled from Riyadh, terrorism really has nothing to do with it. These people want a religious war, among the other race wars they want.

Dvaut is right about the split between the right wing elite/masses. Right wingers know that the 911 hijackers were all from SA. This is one of the few issues where Trump is with the "elite", because the Saudis have thrown a lot of cash around, some of which hits Trump and his friends, not to mention Kushner.

This is the pot calling the kettle black (not that there's anything wrong with that).

The idea that US support of the Saudis is something new might be characterized as "uneducated". The idea that Trump's foreign policy is - in its practical effects or conceptual underpinnings - worse than that of Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama, hardly stands up to scrutiny. These are the presidents of the Iraq wars, Guantanamo, Afghanistan, etc. A cornerstone of their Middle Eastern politics was and has been propping up the Saudi State, for its oil, for its opposition to Iran, for whatever reasons, with the benefit of guaranteeing not only arms sales, but business for big firms of the Westinghouse and Halliburton and Bechtel and Fluor and Enron and Exxon sort.

The idea that this politicas has been unknown to the average "educated" voter is a lie, as is the idea that the average so-called progressive voter has not turned to it a completely blind eye.

The idea that consumer decisiones are not directly related to this situation is also absurd. The lifestyle so many in the US cherish depends directly on its politics in Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and so many other similar places.

Trump is a miscreant, but in foreign policy he's mostly made a lot of noise and continued existing trends - that have continued for a long time mostly independently of who has been president and who has controlled Congress.

Look at immigration politics (another side of this same issue). Trump has engaged in directly xenophobic and racist rhetoric in a way Obama or Clinton never would have, but his concrete politics with respect to immigrants have mostly consisted in strengthening the abusive ICE/Homeland Security apparatus put in place by Bush and built up by Obama.

What runs the US are the interests of energy companies, banks, and large scale industrial and military contractors, (to a lesser extent technology companies), and the rich pirates they spawn. Who doesn't play ball with these people doesn't get elected. Obama certainly had better instincts than Trump, but he was severely limited in what he could do, and to make progress on matters like health care he was forced to be continuist in the foreign policy arena.

Back in the day a principal (!) argument of Al Qaida against the US was the presence of infidel US soldiers in the Arabian peninsula. There's nothing remotely new about it. Trump just shows it off where Obama (and even Bush) tried to keep it quiet. He has no sense of shame. His predecessors did. Kushner goes because Trump is looking to get rich personally off the situation; this actually makes him a cheaper play for the Saudis, but it doesn't change in a material sense the general thrust of US politics in the region, or the general moral blindness of US politics to its support of a dictatorship as horrible as any there has been.

This grossly overestimates the direct US involvement in Saudi governance and grossly underestimates the degree to which the Saudi monarchy is just a mafia state (built on energy not drugs) like Putin's Russia. It's not an isolated incident, just one that has gotten a lot of press coverage in the US and Europe, and sending a kill squad to dismember a journalist is hardly the sort of thing the king needs to run by the US ambassador.

What can be criticized is that US and European complacency with respect to this vile religious dictatorship that represses women and cuts people's heads off has become so apparent that something so shameless can be done with so little care, so sloppily so to speak. It's like the Russian spies poisoning people in England. It's gotten to where it's known that at worse there will be a bit of a fuss, but the money will keep coming, and it won't really matter, it might even help distract from the barbarities meaningful at a national/state scale (Ukraine, Yemen, Chechnya, Syria etc.).

The route to fighting this stuff isn't a bit of indignation about Trumpian politics. It's an overhaul of the broken US pseudo-democracy that frees it from the control of the same despots who back the Saudis, Putin, and Trump.

Saudi Arabia did this now because of Trump, because they know he's bought so he won't do anything to the weapons sales and other benefits they get from us.

The real housecleaning here needs to be a wholesale purge of everyone who wrote up fawning profiles of MBS and Saudi Arabia 2030 and all that ****. All of those articles were sponsored ****ing content and the columnists should be fired along with the editors who allowed it to run.

It's true the direction of US policy isn't new and simply stepping back a little like the old days wouldn't be that admirable, but the relationship between MBS coming to power, the focus of Trump's regime on SA & UAE particularly, and the increasingly bold moves (Qatar blockade, kidnapping the Lebanese PM, this) is hard to miss.

Can probably add to that the attack in Iran a few weeks back. MBS talked earlier this year about taking the fight inside Iran, Bolton has written articles about supporting Khuzestani separatists, and then there's a very deadly attack that never quite gets firmly attributed. Not saying SA did it directly, but it seems a fair bet it was by people benefiting from some new funding and ideas.

But the women drive now. Also, dynamic millennial reformer MBS is also reforming journalists physical bodies into 15 different pieces with a bone saw instead of the traditional ceremonial sword as he continues to institute dramatic change and modernize Saudi Arabia. Also, his iTunes playlist inclues Taylor Swift and LMFAO songs, a sign of changing times in very traditional Saudi Arabia.

We'll get right on that Chomsky, our long-term plan of eating steamed veggies and exercising every day, when in reality we elected Trump, who is like a five Big Macs a day + OxyContin habit. Yes, we have been "foolishly" in bed with SA since the 50s. The US doesn't run without energy, and we've certainly made some nasty compromises to get it. Now that we are less dependent on foreign oil and could, in theory, use that leverage to pressure SA (we arguably have more in common with Iran), Trump triples down on all the worst aspects of prior administrations.

As with immigration, Obama wasn't perfect but he was pretty good in light of the constraints he faced. Trump, on the other hand, wants to get rid of asylum, proposes reducing legal immigration by more than 50%, and locks kids in cages. Your knowing #bothsides takes while pining for a perfect world fails to recognize the dire situation. And all your "it's the corporations" type analysis is just shallow and fails to deal with the actual complexity of the world.

This is similar to Assad. (I think his iTunes was hacked or something.) Brutal dictators love pop music and animals, to which they are invariably kind. One suspects the pol pots and even the hitlers of the world are a bit more eclectic and exacting in their tastes, but the dynastic uday/qsay eric/don jr MBS/Kushner types are inevitably big fans of bland top 40. Trump was surprised and hurt by Taylor Swift.

I completely made up what was on his iTunes playlist, I haven't a clue what's really on it, just that the typical Tom Friedman style "SAUDI ARABIA IS OPEN FOR BUSINESS VISION 2030 the Saudi taxi driver I talked to has Netflix now, we talked about Game of Thrones, his favorite character is Daenerys Targaryen, who is A WOMAN, GOD BLESS MBS The People's Reformer" style propaganda that MBS bought last year always, always has "<dictator> is a real reformer, he listens to American pop artists <whoever> and <jabroni>" that America's hapless Boomer centrists think is just the most charming ****, he's really one of us now!

You probably think all dictators have similar tastes because of pundits love talking about how these dictators somehow found American culture in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eighteen and have internet access, which is really incredible, it shows their reformer Western culture bonafides and from there you're not supposed to Other them like a common North Korean or Iranian or whoever we're menacing.

I would also assume that the assassination team didn't have diplomatic immunity, so this is all irrelevant. Moreover, I believe it's the case that consulate staff are not immune from prosecution for "grave" crimes, so it wouldn't matter even if they did have consular status.

It's also not true that embassies and consulates aren't the territory of the host nation. They are, they're just physically inviolable by the host government.

Right, and this is the diplomatic privilege/norm that was abused here. Has there ever been a case where the diplomatic purpose of a consulate or embassy was so brazenly subverted? A guy walks into the consulate to do some routine paperwork and is kidnapped, tortured, executed and dismembered. I read some diplomacy-knowing-guy say that there isn't an example of comparable behavior in the 20th or 21st centuries.

I suspect that the right loves Trump, authoritarian dictators, and destroying liberalism more than they hate muslims, so they'll rationalize this away just like every other issue they flip on depending on when it suits them. It's close though.

and also a strawman

https://twitter.com/theonion/status/1050797018938007557

Is this overblown? I've read some articles like this and they seemed reasonable, though it certainly doesn't make me want a religious war. It's also totally possible this is, like, a "black crime statistics" sort of thing that isn't prevalent enough to be an obvious dogwhistle while nonetheless being one.

Example I remember reading a couple years ago, from NYT: How Kosovo Was Turned Into Fertile Ground for ISIS (their answer: Saudi Arabia)

Why do a lot of ruling class elites find Trump objectionable, when they mostly share the same policy goals, especially the NeverTrumpers? It's because he says the quiet part out loud. He is admitting the bleak truth of U.S. imperialism and the "compromises" we are willing to make in order to pursue our goals. In reality it's not a compromise at all but central to the mission of capitalist imperialism: make as much money as possible by selling as many weapons as possible, but much much much preferable to do it to a right-wing government rather than a moderate, liberal, or of course left-wing government.

Of course, of all the goddamn things, there's a wrestling angle to this story as well:



Linda McMahon: Senate confirms former WWE executive for Small Business Administration post
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-a7580226.html

Saudis did a Good Thing confirmed: