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WASHINGTON – On Friday, the Saudi government finally admitted that writer Jamal Khashoggi had died inside the Istanbul consulate, claiming that he had been killed during a police raid. fight.
Asked to respond to the Saudi statement, President Donald Trump called the intervention "an important first step" and then began to talk about the size of the agreement on the sale of arms in the UK, warned against any retribution against Riyadh and said, "I will talk to the Crown Prince. "
Since the beginning of his presidency, Trump has offered a warm embrace to Saudi Arabia and his ambitious royal heir, Mohammed bin Salman, believing he could help the United States deal with Iran in the Middle East .
But the bet seems to have gone wrong, say experts and former officials, the young prince is now involved in the murder of Khashoggi, who dared to criticize the regime.
The United States has long ignored Saudi Arabia's crackdown on its dissent and its intolerance of dissent to maintain a strategic alliance with the oil-rich kingdom. Trump, however, has cultivated Saudi Arabia to an unprecedented degree, blessing the ascent of the 33-year-old crown prince into the royal family and his crackdown on his opponents and rivals, said D & # 39; former US officials and Western diplomats.
"All US presidents since the FDR have courted the Saudis, but none of them has done it with as much greed and cruelty as Donald Trump," said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who served in the spy agency for 30 years.
On his first trip abroad as president last year, Trump made the unusual choice to travel to Riyadh, where he participated in an all-male traditional dance with Saudi royals, swinging back and forth with a ceremony sword in hand.
"It was a great day, huge investments in the United States and our military community is very happy," Trump said after his first day of meetings. The Saudis have projected his words on large digital screens. Trump again made reference to the trip Friday in his reaction to Saudi Arabia's admission in Khashoggi's death.
But the vast arms sales and promised investments have not materialized yet. The Saudis continue to argue with the United States over the cost of buying the THAAD ballistic missile defense system. Instead of the $ 110 billion in arms sales initially touted by Trump, the government now says that only $ 14 billion worth of weapons have been used with signed letters – and many of these weapons have been created under the previous government.
The State Department was largely excluded from the planning of the President's visit to Riyadh. The task was assigned to Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a senior adviser to the president. The young real estate businessman with no diplomatic experience would apparently be impressed by the Crown Prince, while they were aged two and a half to anointed powerful families with shared orders.
In Saudi Arabia, the Crown Prince is sometimes nicknamed "Mohammed bin Kushner," said Riedel, who wrote a book on US-Saudi relations.
The court was the Crown Prince's fixation on the fight against Iran.
Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, "is viscerally anti-Iranian," said former CIA director John Brennan, now an analyst for NBC News. "He strongly opposed the Iran nuclear deal and found Trump White House partners with little understanding of the complexities of the Middle East eager to scuttle it."
A few weeks after the president's visit to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf allies, Qatar was blockaded, accusing it of funding Muslim Brotherhood activists and supporting Iran's rulers. Shiites. It was another bold and controversial move by the Crown Prince that alarmed Western governments, but Trump approved it.
"On my recent trip to the Middle East, I said that there could no longer be funding for radical ideology. The leaders pointed to Qatar – look! ", Tweeted the President on June 6, a day after the announcement of the blockade.
In the same month, the Trump government canceled President Barack Obama's suspension of the sale of precision-guided bombs to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. Obama had opposed civilian casualties. Congress narrowly endorsed, in the direction of partisan politics, a resumption of arms deliveries, despite repeated reports from human rights groups that the Saudis were using weapons. bombs to hit civilian targets.
"The decision to end the prohibition of the sale of precision weapons to Saudi Arabia announced very early that it was going to be in the corner of the MBS (…) and reject any this joke about human rights issues, "said William Hartung, director of the Weapons and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, a leftist think tank.
The crown prince had impressed Trump administration officials as well as other Westerners by explaining to them the openness of the Saudi economy, the reduction of extremist Islamist ideologues and the fight against corruption. But his iron fist methods have raised concerns both inside and outside the country. In November 2017, it took a decisive turn by gathering and temporarily holding hundreds of some of the most powerful personalities in the country, including members of the royal family. Some were confined to the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Riyadh and others were tortured.
The roundup stunned and angered many people inside the House of Saud, but Trump congratulated MBS.
"I have great confidence in King Salman and Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, they know exactly what they do …," he tweeted. "…. Some of those they have been treating hard for their country for years!"
Prior to the rise of the crown prince, successive administrations had forged close ties with Mohammed Bin Nayef, a nephew of the king who had won the confidence of the US intelligence services for his cooperation in the fight against terrorism during his tenure as minister of the interior. He had been considered the heir to the throne, until Mohammed bin Salman won the favor of his father's king, and repelled Mohammed bin Nayef last year.
"MBN did not go there willingly, MBS would have allowed his return to Washington, whether it be the White House or the CIA." He wanted to make sure that his relations did not occur. Would have no repercussions, "Brennan told NBC News.
When asked if the administration took into account the rivalry, a State Department official, who asked not to be identified, was not allowed to speak, told NBC News: "The estate is an internal case of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Other former officials said the demotion of Mohammed bin Nayef was a worrying sign. "Leaving Mohammed bin Salman to drive out Mohammed bin Nayef is the original sin of this relationship," said Ali Soufan, a former FBI official who has written extensively on counterterrorism in the Middle East. "Mohammed bin Nayef was the most important leader in the fight against terrorism in the Middle East. [and] had been working with the United States for decades. "
The president and his aides felt that President Obama had abandoned his Arab allies and that the Crown Prince would be a vital partner in reducing Iran's influence in the region. They were ready to suspend the judgment when it came to excess MBS, officials said, even as critics raged around the world.
But the death of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the crown prince who had long-standing ties with the Saudi royal family, placed Trump's relationship with the crown prince under unprecedented control.
Turkish officials claimed that Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul by a Saudi shock team, allegedly linked to the Crown Prince. On Friday, Saudi Arabia issued a statement claiming that its agents had strangled Khashoggi after the fight. Riyadh said that 18 officials had been arrested, but that the Crown Prince was not one of them. Instead, Mohammed bin Salman was empowered to reorganize intelligence services as part of another promotion.
Despite the indignation of the international community, Trump remains reluctant to break with the crown prince who has worked so hard to cultivate, even as lawmakers on both sides have dismissed Saudi Arabia's story as whitewash.
"The brutality, the wickedness caught people. People knew Jamal. It's personal, "said Gerald Feierstein, a former US diplomat who has served as ambassador to Yemen and other positions. The Crown Prince's abuses are no longer "abstract".
Trump and his team base their hopes on an impetuous and reckless Crown Prince, he said, partly because of a burning desire to break with the previous president's policy.
"So, why did the administration crack? The ignorance, the naivety of Trump and Kushner, the lack of experience and the Saudi promises are taken into account, "Feierstein said. "There was also the desire to overthrow Obama's policies. They believed that Obama had been sucked in by Iran, so they would have sucked in by the Saudis. "
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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