Our friends the murderers

The government of Saudi Arabia planned and carried out the murder of a Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, who wrote columns for the Washington Post and who was a legal resident of the United States. The gruesome killing by a Saudi government hit squad sent to Turkey specifically for the purpose of murder took place inside the Saudi consulate in Turkey.

The assassination, which was meticulously planned except for one huge flaw—the failure to build into the plot the element of plausible deniability—could not have taken place without foreknowledge and approval of the top Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

This Tuesday Turkish President Recep Erdogan laid out the basic facts and provided many credible details about the state-sponsored slaying, confirming what U.S. intelligence agencies had known almost from the outset despite Saudi denials and Trump administration dissembling. But the operation was so brazen and brutal that the web of Saudi lies quickly unraveled and Trump finally had to back away from endorsing the changing Saudi cover story amid withering criticism at home, and not just from the media. Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, including strong Trump allies like Lindsey Graham, also screamed bloody hell.

This sordid story reveals a lot about Saudi Arabia, the United States and the relationship between these two rogue states. A needed digression before plunging into the main topic. Few people, at least in this country, would agree to put the United States with Saudi Arabia as a rogue state. Admittedly, we are talking about vastly different societies. But consider the dictionary definition of rogue and tell me it doesn’t fit: 1. resembling or suggesting a rogue elephant; 2. corrupt, dishonest; 3. of or being a nation whose leaders defy international law or norms of international behavior.

That Saudi Arabia is a rogue state doesn’t merit taking the time to lay out a case, especially after it just carried out an extrajudicial killing in a foreign country. But the United States too has been a rogue state for a long time—from the war to grab Mexico’s land more than 150 years ago to the illegal Iraq invasion. But never more than under the corrupt, dishonest rogue elephant Donald Trump.

There are so many angles to the Khashoggi killing to merit a small book, but I will stick here to my 800-900 allotted words.

Point one: Saudi Arabia, the closest U.S. ally in the Arab Middle East, is a brutal monarchic dictatorship. It routinely carries out punishment by beheading. It is currently carrying out a scorched-earth war in Yemen that daily claims many civilian lives. The Saudis have been raping Yemen using devastating weapons provided by the United States. Saudi Arabia today rivals Myanmar as the world’s worst human rights violator. The United States is the Saudis main enabler.

Point two: The Khashoggi murder has cast the Saudi state in an appropriate light, revealing it for what it really is—an absolutist, obscurantist state more like a medieval kingdom than a modern nation—and undoing the charm offensive recently carried in out in the United States by the Crown Prince. Ditto for the Trump administration, which was desperate to support any outlandish Saudi explanation if only it could get away with it and continue to sell the Kingdom some very expensive weapons. What is the murder of a journalist, an enemy of the people, compared with a rich arms buy?

Point three: This is a huge story that should have dominated the news for several media cycles. After all, how often does a country carry out a murder in its own consulate? What is one U.S. ally doing killing a journalist—a U.S. resident and a Washington Post contributor to boot–in its consulate in a NATO country bound by a mutual defense treaty to the United States. But the media did not put this story front and center. Instead, it went with the story of the Central American “caravan,”—a trivial issue in comparison—and one the Trump administration has been using to rev up its electoral base through what the Washington Post called a strategy of fear and falsehood.

What is going on here? Has Trump finally succeeded in intimidating parts of the mainstream media, especially network television controlled by huge corporate conglomerates, into humming its tune? Or is it that a caravan is more sensational and produces better visual and higher ratings than a murder behind a consulate’s walls? Or both?

The United States has a history of supporting unsavory autocrats but even then the United States has preferred to deal with countries that practice democracy and human rights, such as Canada. The U.S. attitude toward the Somoza, Marco, Trujillo, Batista and the rest of a long list was thus articulated by a U.S. president: “He is a bastard but he is our bastard.”

This president actually prefers to kiss up to Duterte, Putin, and the Saudis and to dump on democratic leaders like Justin Trudeau. Then again, Donald Trump, ,, has more in common with the likes of Putin than with the Canadian Primer Minister.