T. Belman. Why punish him at all? What US law did the Saudis violate. The US has no jurisdiction over the Saudis. To suggest that this killing is any more reprehensible than any other killings perpetrated by whomever is ludicrous. Aside from Russia, Turkey has murdered many journalists and so has Iran and China. Perhaps you might argue it was more difficult to ignore this murder because evidence of it became more public. Sorry, Iran hangs gays in the public square and nobody says they should be punished for doing so. But you might argue that being gay is a capital offense in Iran so we have no business interfering in their laws. That doesn’t wash either. Many Arab dictatorships have laws that provide for capital punishment for treason, sedition or even just maligning the monarch. So that isn’t a distinction. The PA made it a capital offense to sell land to Jews and many are executed for doing so.
No, I believe that the obsession with this murder has more to do with the fact that Pres Trump wants to get into bed with with the crown prince (so does Israel for that matter) and the anti-Trump crowd see this as a way to diminish Trump.
On the other hand, Trump should not let this crises go to waste and he should make demands on MBS.
By Clifford D. May, WASH TIMES
ABU DHABI | Consult a map of the Middle East. Locate the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow sea passage separating the Arabian Peninsula from Iran, and connecting the Gulf — whether you call it the Persian Gulf or the Arabian Gulf is a thorny question — to the open oceans beyond.
The Strait of Hormuz is among the world’s most strategic waterways, essential to the health of the global economy. More than a third of seaborne oil shipments and 20 percent of the oil traded internationally pass through it.
The U.S. Navy — specifically the Bahrain-based Fifth Fleet — keeps this sea lane open, frustrating Iran’s rulers who claim it as their private lap pool. They menace American vessels there — though less frequently since Donald Trump replaced Barack Obama in the White House.
Look at the map again. Locate the Bab-el-Mandeb, another strategic strait. It separates Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula from Africa, and guards the entrance to the Red Sea at the northern end of which is the Suez Canal, also a vital chokepoint. Iran’s rulers covet the Bab-el-Mandeb as well.
Their maritime goals support their hegemonic ambitions. The last thing American leaders should do is help them. Yet a bipartisan majority of senators is working on a resolution that would do exactly that by withdrawing U.S. military assistance to the Saudi-led coalition fighting Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.
How did this come about? On Oct.2, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident who for two years had been contributing opinion columns to The Washington Post, was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
The Saudi government has charged 11 individuals in connection with the killing. The Trump administration has sanctioned 17 persons thought to be implicated.
Many members of Congress regard that as woefully insufficient. They believe, as does the CIA, that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, ordered the hit — or at least that the buck stops on his desk, or throne or yacht or wherever.
Fair enough but let me state what ought to be obvious: To punish Saudi royals by rewarding Iranian ayatollahs makes no sense.
It is not in the U.S. national interest for the Houthis to prevail in Yemen, thereby allowing Iran’s rulers to expand their empire, threaten Saudi Arabia’s southern underbelly (from which the Houthis already fire missiles at Riyadh), and station forces adjacent to the Bab-el-Mandeb.
Consider what’s happened in this region over the last few years: Lebanon, for all intents and purposes, is ruled by Hezbollah, Tehran’s proxy. Iranian military forces and mercenary militias have propped up Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Iranian influence in Baghdad has increased since Mr. Obama withdrew American troops in 2011. The clerical regime works closely with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza.
Anyone with a lick of sense understands why preventing the Islamic State from establishing a Middle Eastern caliphate is in the American national interest. How many licks does it take to grasp that it’s no less imperative to prevent the Islamic Republic from achieving the same objective (though the preferable Shia term would be imamate)?
The royal families who rule the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain harbor no illusions about the threat Tehran poses to them. That has been made abundantly clear in conversations I’ve had over recent days with senior officials in both countries, including top officers in the UAE military whose troops are fighting in Yemen.
Commanders with the U.S. Fifth Fleet also made plain why it’s essential to contain — if not roll back — the imperialist and avowedly jihadist Islamic Republic of Iran.
The conflict in Yemen has been devastating for the civilian population. A negotiated solution would be welcome. But the Houthis chant, “Death to America, Death to Israel, a Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam,” and according to an Associated Press investigation practice “extreme torture”— including hanging victims “from chains by their wrists or genitals for weeks at a time.”
We may safely conclude that these are not exactly let’s-make-a-deal kind of guys. Can anyone seriously believe that they will be more amenable to compromise if the military pressure on them is eased?
House members, before deciding whether to support whatever resolution the Senate passes, would be well-advised to spend a few minutes studying a map of the Middle East, and thinking about what it will mean if the region falls under the boot heel of an oil-rich, jihadist theocracy that intends to become nuclear-armed. (Mr. Obama’s deal with Tehran was meant only to delay, not prevent that eventuality.)
There are other ways to punish the Saudis. Or perhaps a better idea: Use this crisis instead to press the Saudis for serious reforms.
Final point: Despots kill dissidents. Always have. Always will.
More than 10 critics of Russian President Vladimir Putin have died in suspicious circumstances. There has been a string of recent Iranian terrorist plots in Europe. And let’s not forget the foiled 2011 Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in a Georgetown restaurant. Meanwhile, both Iran’s rulers and Mr. Putin share culpability with Mr. Assad for the slaughter of half a million men, women and children in Syria.
In these and many other instances, the so-called international community responded fecklessly. It would not be surprising if the 33-year-old crown prince — who though wealthy and powerful is by no means worldly — had expected the killing of Mr. Khashoggi to be treated with similar indifference.
• Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a columnist for The Washington Times.
@ adamdalgliesh:
Actually the Saudis NOW admitted they killed the journalist named Kashoggi.They just say the Crown Prince was not involved.
He was a Muslim Brotherhood member and very Anti-Israel
Trump and Pompeo plus Bolton are all correct that USA & Israeli interests are furthered by not jumping on the MBS death train and realizing their need for this partner, who is best leader potentially as an ally to the USA that have ever had from .a Saudi leader.
Americans are some of biggest political hypocrites in the world that has always been a US problem. Killing Kassoghi is enough to sever relations with an important ally and business partner for the USA. Absolutely stupid. What and replace them with Iran who wants nukes to blow up Israel and maybe the USA?
“International incidents must not be allowed to shape foreign policy; foreign policy must shape the incidents.” Napoleon Bonaparte
Everyone has read this wrong. Not only the CIA, the U.S. Congress, the U.S. and European press, and even MBS, have all been snookered by the Turks into believing that the Saudis did it. But it is Erdogan’s regime that has a long history of “disappearing” journalists, and creating fake audios, videos and transcripts. The Saudis are no saints, to be sure, but they have no history of doing these things. There are many Saudis abroad, living in Washington, Toronto, Montreal and many other places, who openly criticize the Saudi regime, freely use their own names and appear at press conferences when doing it, and they haven’t been murdered. Kashoggi was an annoyance to the Saudi regime, not a serious threat (until he was murdered). If the Saudis did want to murder Kashoggi, they could have hired any number of non-Saudi “hit men” to do it, somewhere far away from their official missions. That way, they could maintain plausible deniability. They certainly wouldn’t have done it in one of their diplomatic missions in an unfriendly country, where the crime was certain to be detected.. No intelligence agency is quite that stupid. There is no record at all of anyone being murdered in a Saudi diplomatic mission before this.
And why would they possibly need 15 people to carry out a murder? One experienced hit man would have been enough
What clearly happened in that Erdogan’s men “offed” Kashoggi, and Erdogan immediately blamed the Saudis. He then had his “experts” fake some videos and audios using actors to make it look like the Saudis had done it. Notice that these audios and videos have not been made public. And no one in the Western governments was shown them until weeks after the murder. That left plenty of time to fake some videos.
As for the individuals accused by the Turks, and later indicted by the Saudis, the Turkish intelligence services probably just named a lot of Saudis with official connections whom they knew had visited Turkey, for one or another innocent reason, in recent months; or who were connected with the Saudi diplomatic missions in Ankara and Istanbul. That would have been very easy to do.
But why, then, would MBS have swallowed all this b__t, arrested his own people who were fingered by the Turks, and had them charged with murder? Probably because not only the Turks, but the CIA and US DOD representives in Riyadh, told him that the Turks were telling the truth. The CIA and DOD are desperate to avoid Erdogan throwing the Americans out of their air bases in Turkey. In addition, they have been working with Turkish intelligence for decades, since Turkey is a member of NATO, and a lot of trust in them has been built up over the years . So the Turks snookered the Americans, who then misled MBS, probably unintentionally.
I have followed MBS’s career over the past two years, and I am believe him to be a decent, idealistic young man who wants to do the right thing. Told by Americans he trusted that his guys were guilty, he believed them and had his own people arrested and charged.
Although the Saudi police rarely if ever deliberately murder prisoners, they do frequently torture them in order to extract information. All Mideat regimes do this, including even Israel at times. The torture can be both painful and scary (waterbording and that sort of thing) although it rarely results in death. But it is enough to persuade most prisoners to tell the interrogators what the interrogators want to hear. Hence some of the suspects have confessed. The reason their confessions have been contradictory and implausible is that the suspects have no idea what really happened, not having been involved at all, and so they made up stories to please their interrogators and end the torture. As a result, the stories were contradictory and unconvincing, making mBS look even worse.
No s–t, Sherlock! It all seems obvious enough to me? Why hasn’t anyone else, not even one one pundit, figured this out? You don’t really have to be a genius to figure out who really done it.
Khashoggi was dispatched on Saudi territory so actually this was an internal affair. I’m surprised that so many people took the time to bother about it.