Explaining the unexplainable
by digby
The job of a career state department official isn’t easy these days. Esquire’s Jack Holmes:
The heavily memed image of President Trump caressing The Orb with King Salman bin Abdul-Aziz Al Saud was an unsettling reminder of the United States’ deep ties to Saudi Arabia. The House of Saud is our key partner in the Middle East, despite the state’s rampant human rights abuses and subjugation of women, the extended royal family’s documented funding of terrorist groups, and of course the fact that Saudi Arabia is a monarchy. For decades, the answer to this little riddle was easy: oil. But now that the United States is challenging—and at times surpassing—the Saudis as the world’s largest energy producer thanks to the natural gas boom, our dependence on foreign oil is dwindling. That’s part of the reason President Obama was empowered to pursue the nuclear deal with Iran and chill our romance with King Salman’s clique just a bit.
Now there’s a new man in the White House, however, and he’s all in on Saudi. The Trump administration is taking a hardline stance against Iran, whose elected leaders we do not like, in favor of the Saudis, whose kings and princes we do. In a press conference following the president’s Reluctant World Tour, State Department Acting Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Stuart Jones was asked just why this is. His answer is telling:
Watch as Stuart Jones, a high-level acting official in the State Dept, is asked why they criticize Iranian elections but never Saudi Arabia: pic.twitter.com/RLkKGn48Z7— Alex Emmons (@AlexanderEmmons) May 30, 2017
That long silence is what the honest truth sounds like. There is no longer any moral or strategic reason for our position on Saudi Arabia, a country that employs a broad interpretation of Sharia law to cut off thieves’ hands and drug dealers’ heads. (It has also set up schools in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, to spread its extremist vision of Islam, Wahhabism, there.) Then there’s the fact that the Saudis and Iranians are battling for dominance in the region using Islam’s Sunni and Shia denominations—a split that occurred in the year 632—as uniforms. We are in effect backing one side in a conflict that has raged for more than a millennium in the most consistently war-torn part of the world.
Yeah.