It's hard to see how the Saudis wriggle off the hook for the assassination/disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, dissident journalist and critic of crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
A counter-narrative is being prepared that would have Khashoggi whisked out of Turkey to rot in Saudi detention instead of being murdered and dismembered in Istanbul. But either one is bad for the House of Saud. Al-Saud is facing another Democrat-backed war powers resolution in the House over U.S. involvement in the genocide in Yemen.
Khashoggi is no doubt dead. If he were abducted and jailed in Saudi Arabia why wouldn't the crown prince crow about it? Khashoggi's murder is a brutal, foolish act of an impetuous, narcissistic buffoon. Mohammed bin Salman is signaling to the international community the arrival of a new dark age.
The silver lining here is that stories like "Khashoggi’s Disappearance Puts Kushner’s Bet on Saudi Crown Prince at Risk," by Mark Landler, Edward Wong and Eric Schmitt, which limn the connections between the corporate super-elite and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, are being published:
Policymakers across Washington expressed concern that the Saudi government’s lack of transparency and refusal to provide any information about Mr. Khashoggi’s whereabouts reflected a darker consequence of the kingdom’s relationship with the Trump White House.
“It does seem like the Saudis are less concerned about U.S. views than ever before, both because they assume Trump won’t care and because they think they don’t need U.S. approval,” said Gerald M. Feierstein, a former ambassador to Yemen who was the State Department’s second-ranking diplomat for Middle East policy from 2013 to 2016.
Saudi Arabia’s muscle will be on display next week, when American technology and financial titans gather at the investor conference in Riyadh that the crown prince will attend. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will represent the Trump administration at the meeting, which participants have called “Davos in the Desert” and is held at the same Ritz-Carlton hotel where Prince Mohammed jailed dozens of wealthy Saudis in what he said was an anticorruption campaign.
Among the prominent figures scheduled to take part are Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase; Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chief executive of the Blackstone Group; and Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive of Uber.
Two other scheduled attendees have ties to Mr. Trump: Thomas J. Barrack Jr., a financier who is a friend of the president’s; and Dina H. Powell, a Goldman Sachs executive and former deputy national security adviser who worked closely with Mr. Kushner on Saudi Arabia and is a leading candidate to replace Nikki R. Haley as ambassador to the United Nations.
The Treasury Department said Mr. Mnuchin was still planning to attend. A person working with American business executives said that if proof emerged that Saudi Arabia ordered Mr. Khashoggi’s killing, at least some would cancel.
The New York Times, one of several major news organizations that were media sponsors of the conference, has decided to withdraw from the event, Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the paper, said Wednesday night.
This is how the world works. It's savage and pitiless. Darkness, not enlightenment, is dispensed from on high. As Bill Van Auken of World Socialist Web Site writes this morning in "Murder in Istanbul":
The Khashoggi affair has far broader international significance. It is emblematic of a sinister shift in world politics, in which such heinous crimes are becoming more and more common and accepted. It recalls the conditions that existed in the darkest days of the 1930s, when fascist and Stalinist death squads hunted down and murdered socialists and other opponents of Hitler and Stalin throughout Europe.
Journalists have suffered the consequence of this change in global politics, with the Committee to Protect Journalists reporting 48 killed this year—a 50 percent increase over all of 2017—as well as another 60 “disappeared” around the planet.
Targeted assassinations, developed by the Israelis as a central instrument of state policy, were adapted by Washington in its so-called “global war on terror” on an industrial scale. The killings, torture and “extraordinary renditions” begun under the Bush administration—for which no one was ever punished, not to mention a “black site” torturer being elevated to director of the CIA—were institutionalized under Obama with the White House organizing its so-called “terror Tuesdays” in which targets for assassination were selected from files and photographs presented to the president and his aides.
US wars of aggression that have claimed the lives of millions, the routine assassination of supposed “terrorists,” and the wholesale repudiation of international law as an unacceptable fetter on American interests, have created a fetid global political environment in which crimes like that committed against Khashoggi are not only possible, but inevitable.
In the face of growing social tensions and sharpening class struggle rooted in the crisis of the global capitalist system, there has been a sharp turn to the right and toward authoritarianism in bourgeois politics, from the rise of Trump in the US, to the increasing strength of far-right forces in Europe, to the near election of a fascistic former army captain in Brazil. Under these conditions, the methods of assassination and disappearances as a means of dealing with opponents of the existing governments and social order will become ever more prevalent.
The fate of Jamal Khashoggi, whose high-level connections apparently failed to protect him, must be taken as a serious warning. Those who place themselves in the hands of the state in virtually any country have no reliable expectation that they will emerge intact.
The only answer to this threat—and that of a global relapse into fascism and world war—lies in the building of a mass revolutionary socialist movement to unite the international working class in the struggle against social inequality, dictatorship and war.
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