View from Latin America and the Symbolism of Saudi Arabia
I’ve spent much of December and January in Latin America and now am teaching in the Bahamas. As I talk with local people, I find that they are astonished and dismayed by the United States. “What’s happened to your country?” and “where did US democracy go?” are frequently asked questions.
They point out that our Congress can’t seem to reach any compromises, that every decision is divided along party lines. They describe what many see as self-dealing and cowardice in the impeachment process and the idea that Republican Senators, acting as jurors in a trial, can state ahead of the trial that they will follow the accused person’s orders. They highlight the absurdity of a presidential election that consumes the country for two years, half the presidential term. They wonder how Democrats can say “anyone but Trump” and then hold endless debates where the candidates tear each other apart.
One of the most common themes running throughout many of these conversations is about corruption and the abuse of personal power. “I thought the president and other elected officials in your country were forced to give up private profit-making once they were elected; now I see this isn’t true,” they tell me. Some quip about the US being “the world’s biggest banana republic – without bananas.”
One example often cited in the conversations I’ve had these past months is about the US relationship to Saudi Arabia. Although in the US it has taken a back seat to Ukraine and impeachment, the symbolism of that relationship – and what it says about US democracy – is very much on the minds of the people I meet. As examples, I’ve received email that link to articles like those excerpted below:
The New York Times, January 23, 2020:
On the morning of Sept. 11 last year (2019), about two dozen family members of those killed in the terror attacks filed into the White House to visit with President Trump. . .One after another, the families asked Trump to release documents from the F.B.I.’s investigation into the 9/11 plot. . .Some of the relatives reminded Trump that Presidents Bush and Obama blocked them from seeing the files, as did some of the F.B.I. bureaucrats the president so reviled. . . The president promised to help. “It’s done,” he said, reassuring several visitors. . .
From the day of the attacks, the trail seemed to point to Saudi Arabia. First, there was the inescapable fact that, like Osama bin Laden, 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis. . .
Later, the families were told that Trump ordered the attorney general, William P. Barr, to release the name of a Saudi diplomat who was linked to the 9/11 plot in an F.B.I. report years earlier. Justice Department lawyers handed over the Saudi official’s name in a protected court filing that could be read only by lawyers for the plaintiffs. But Barr dashed the families’ hopes. In a statement to the court on Sept. 12, he insisted that other documents that might be relevant to the case had to be protected as state secrets. Their disclosure, he wrote, risked “significant harm to the national security.”
The BBC reported on December 23, 2019:
A court in Saudi Arabia has sentenced five people to death and jailed three others over the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year. . .
A UN expert said the trial represented "the antithesis of justice".
"Bottom line: the hit-men are guilty, sentenced to death. The masterminds not only walk free. They have barely been touched by the investigation and the trial," Special Rapporteur Agnes Callamard wrote on Twitter. A report released by Ms Callamard concluded in June that Khashoggi's death was an "extrajudicial execution" for which the Saudi state was responsible, and that there was credible evidence warranting further investigation that high-level officials, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, were individually liable.
Another comment: “The US seems terrified that Russia is hacking your computer and communications systems, yet Saudi Arabia is doing it too.”
GENEVA (22 January 2020) - UN human rights experts are gravely concerned by information they have received suggesting that, in contravention of fundamental international human rights standards, a WhatsApp account belonging to the Crown Prince of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 2018 deployed digital spyware enabling surveillance of The Washington Post owner and Amazon CEO, Jeffery (sic) Bezos.
A question I often hear is “why is the US so determined to defend and support Saudi Arabia and its brutal dictatorship, the House of Saud, even when all the facts point toward Saudi crimes?” Answering rhetorically, people suggest that it is all about the money. They have linked me to:
The New York Times, January 23, 2020:
Earlier last year, addressing the Saudi government’s murder of a Saudi columnist for The Washington Post, Jamal Khashoggi, Trump argued that such offenses should be seen in a broader context. “I’m not like a fool that says, ‘We don’t want to do business with them,’ ” he told NBC News.
Kenneth Williams — a retired agent who wrote a prescient memo before 9/11 about radical Arab students taking flying lessons in possible preparation for hijackings — said in a sworn declaration for the plaintiffs that an F.B.I. lawyer told him that the Trump administration did not want him to help them because it could imperil “good relations with Saudi Arabia.” (The F.B.I. declined to comment.)
The Times of Israel (re President Trump and Saudi Arabia):
NEW YORK (AP) — He’s booked hotel rooms and meeting spaces to them, sold an entire floor in one of his buildings to them and, in desperate moments in his career, gotten a billionaire from the country to buy his yacht and New York’s Plaza Hotel overlooking Central Park.
President Donald Trump’s ties to Saudi Arabia run long and deep, and he’s often boasted about his business ties with the kingdom.
Saudi Arabia buys the most weapons from the US government. . .The United States is notably not just by far the world’s largest military force, but also by far the largest supplier of arms.
[Saudi Arabia topped the list at #1]
Saudi Arabia
• Arms imports from US, 2008-2018: $13.72 billion. . .
• Arms imports from US, 2018: $3.35 billion
My personal answer to such questions is offered in the description of a deal I helped forge between the US and Saudi Arabia in the early 1970s (right after the OPEC oil embargo that crippled the US economy). The below is excerpted from my book The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Pages 110-111:
Under this evolving plan, Washington wanted the Saudis to guarantee to maintain oil supplies and prices at levels that could fluctuate but that would always remain acceptable to the United States and our allies. If other countries, such as Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, or Venezuela, threatened embargoes, Saudi Arabia, with its vast petroleum supplies, would step in to fill the gap; simply the knowledge that they might do so would, in the long run, discourage other countries from even considering an embargo. In exchange for this guarantee, Washington would offer the House of Saud an amazingly attractive deal: a commitment to provide total and unequivocal US political and—if necessary—military support, thereby ensuring their continued existence as the rulers of their country.
It was a deal the House of Saud could hardly refuse, given its geographic location, lack of military might, and general vulnerability to neighbors like Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Israel. Naturally, therefore, Washington used its advantage to impose one other critical condition, a condition that redefined the role of EHMs in the world and served as a model we would later attempt to apply in other countries. . .
The condition was that Saudi Arabia would use its petrodollars to purchase US government securities; in turn, the interest earned by these securities would be spent by the US Department of the Treasury in ways that enabled Saudi Arabia to emerge from a medieval society into the modern, industrialized world. In other words, the interest compounding on billions of dollars of the kingdom’s oil income would be used to pay US companies to fulfill the vision I (and presumably some of my competitors) had come up with, to convert Saudi Arabia into a modern industrial power. Our own US Department of the Treasury would hire us, at Saudi expense, to build infrastructure projects and even entire cities throughout the Arabian Peninsula.
One thing becomes clear as I travel in Latin America and many other parts of the world: the US is no longer the respected democracy we have been during most of my life.
Can we turn this around?
I still have hope, but it will require major changes in the way we perceive ourselves and the actions we decide to take in the very near future.