How Saudi Arabia's leader charmed Washington while cracking down on opponents
Joseph Westphal was wowed from the start. As President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia in 2015, Westphal started paying regular visits to the rising new power in the royal court: the country’s new defense minister, Mohammed bin Salman, favored son of King Salman.
“First of all, we shared a really nice sense of humor,” said
Westphal. “I mean we, we laughed, we joked around. ... It was just laughing
about life, and talking about things that maybe happened to me or happened to
him.”
More important, Prince Mohammed, who is known as MBS, was
pledging to start to rein in the country’s religious police and grant greater
rights to Saudi women — steps that U.S. officials had long been calling for.
“Yes, absolutely,” Westphal replied when asked if he viewed MBS at the time as
an agent of change. “From the very beginning. Absolutely.”
Westphal’s relationship with the young Saudi prince is one
glimpse into a much broader and, from today’s perspective, unsettling
phenomenon: the strange and successful courtship by MBS of America’s foreign
policy and corporate elite, presenting himself as a cultured reformer who was
positioned to revolutionize his rigidly conservative country.
The story of that courtship — and its embarrassing
aftermath, as MBS’s ruthless crackdowns on dissent and his bloody military
adventure in Yemen became ever more apparent — is the subject of “The Rise of
the Bullet Guy,” Episode 5 in Yahoo News’ "Conspiracyland" podcast:
“The Secret Lives and Brutal Death of Jamal Khashoggi.”
It is a courtship that came to a final, crashing and
ignominious end when, in October 2018, a so-called Tiger Team of Saudi
assassins brutally murdered the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi — drugging him
with illicit narcotics brought from Cairo, suffocating him and then carving up
his body with a bone saw and depositing his body parts in plastic bags.
It was a crime that the CIA soon concluded had been
authorized by the crown prince himself, noting — among other factors — that
MBS’s right-hand man had met with the team before they left to kill Khashoggi
in Istanbul, and that seven members of the hit squad were part of MBS’s
personal security detail, answerable only to him.
And yet the shocking nature of Khashoggi’s murder has tended
to obscure the preceding years, when at first top Obama administration
officials, and then President Donald Trump and his influential son-in-law,
Jared Kushner, embraced MBS with few reservations and extolled his supposed
virtues.
“He’s the only person I’ve met in 30 years of my involvement
or more with Saudi Arabia who has put that kind of a vision on the table for
the transformation of the country,” said John Kerry, Obama’s secretary of
state, in an interview for “Conspiracyland” about his assessment of MBS at the
time.
Kerry’s Georgetown home was the setting for perhaps the most
iconic moment in MBS’s courtship of the U.S. government. It was in June 2016,
and the new Saudi defense minister, during a trip to the United States, was
invited to a Ramadan dinner at Kerry’s house. As he entered, MBS spotted the
grand piano in the living room, promptly sat down and started to play
Beethoven's “Moonlight Sonata.”
“I mean, we were all surprised,” recalled Kerry. “Somebody
had trained him well.”
But even as he impressed the guests in Kerry’s living room,
others saw the dark impulses of a would-be tyrant. Ben Rhodes, then Obama’s
deputy national security adviser, recalls a summit in Riyadh the previous
April, when Obama raised U.S. concerns about Saudi Arabia’s worsening human
rights record, including a mass execution of 47 prisoners and the case of a
Saudi blogger who had just been sentenced to 10 years in prison — and 1,000
lashes with a whip.
“Obama’s like, ‘What are you guys doing? I’m not gonna defend
this,’” said Rhodes in an interview for “Conspiracyland.”
But suddenly, “MBS stands up in the middle of the room, and,
and begins to lecture Obama: ‘You don’t understand the Saudi justice system.
And if we didn’t do this, our people would demand vengeance.’ And then he
offers to get Obama a briefing on the Saudi justice system. I mean, dripping
condescension. You know? And I just remember sitting there and thinking, like,
‘What is going on here?’”
“It spoke to a personality type that feels absolutely no
guardrails, you know?” Rhodes added. “I mean, if you’re comfortable standing up
in a room full of people and lecturing the president of the United States …
because he’s raising concerns about mass executions in your country, you are
not the guy people [are] reading about … in the New York Times and the
Washington Post, who’s [described as] a reformer. I mean, it just laid bare the
utter bullshit of the narrative around MBS to me. And I’m, I’m sitting there
thinking, you know, ‘How are people calling this guy a modernizer?’"
But there was an issue of far more concern to U.S. officials
than the young prince’s condescending lecture to Obama. With virtually no
warning to Washington, MBS had launched a merciless war in Yemen, targeting the
Houthis — a religious minority group loosely aligned with the Iranians who had
seized control of the country’s capital. Saudi warplanes, using American
weapons, had unleashed a relentless wave of bombings that were slaughtering
civilians by the thousands, sparking outrage from human rights groups.
There was “countless documentation of U.S.-manufactured
bombs being used on markets, on schools, on people’s homes, on hospitals, on
clinics throughout the country,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, then the director of
Human Rights Watch’s Mideast Division and now the executive director of
Democracy for the Arab World Now.
Officials in the Obama administration were well aware of the
compromising position this put them in. The State Department’s legal office
even launched an inquiry into whether the United States was complicit in war
crimes. (The lawyers never reached a firm conclusion.) But the White House was
torn about what to do.
At the White House, officials were “repelled by what we were
seeing,” said Rob Malley, who was then on the National Security Council and
charged with coordinating U.S. policy in the region. “But the first instinct
was, ‘Well, let’s see if we could give them advice on how to make sure that
they don’t kill civilians again.’ But it turns out time and again, whether it’s
a mosque, whether it’s a market, whether it’s whatever it is, that they would
not only hit it once, they hit it twice, sometimes more.”
Still, said Malley, Obama was reluctant to provoke a
confrontation with the Saudis. At the time, relations were tense over the Iranian
nuclear deal, which Riyadh opposed, and he wanted the Saudis' help in the war
against the Islamic State group.
“There was a meeting [about the war in Yemen] of the
Principals Committee, chaired by President Obama,” said Malley. “There were
voices expressing a lot of concern.” But Obama “felt he could not, given
everything else that was happening in the region, afford a crisis with one of
the few countries with which we still retained ... strong relations and
cooperation on a whole host of issues, counterterrorism first and foremost.
“I was extremely — how could I put it? — troubled by the
whole decision, because we should not have been complicit in this war,” added
Malley, who has rejoined the National Security Council under President Biden.
“And, you know, the U.S. makes enormous — mistakes is probably too, too kind a
word, to describe many, many of its actions.”
There was no doubt in the minds of Malley and other U.S.
officials that it was MBS who was driving the train. “He seemed to be already oblivious
to the consequences of the actions that he took,” said Malley. “And this was
his war … because he was the one who appeared to order it.”
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