Biden Declares War on Saudi Arabia

By now you know that the Biden administration has released a report claiming that the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was responsible for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

It has elicited gale force outrage from the bastions of the media and former Obama administration officials. Nicholas Kristof-- a writer we praised yesterday-- insisted that America visit great punishment on MBS-- because Khashoggi was Kristof’s friend. It's always good to stand for principle.

It almost feels unnecessary, but not one of these sanctimonious hypocrites cared in the least when the Iranian ayatollahs were crushing domestic dissent in 2009. The Obama administration could not even muster the courage to denounce it. And, as for the thousands of gay youth that have been murdered by the Iranian regime-- for the crime of being gay-- the Obamaphile media has simply forgotten to report it. Dare we mention that the anti-homophobia left has been as silent as a lamb. 

Anyway, the Obama administration has returned to power. Among its first tasks, undermining the Abraham Accords that count as one of the most consequential achievements of the Trump administration. The high priests of identity politics hate the accords because they were fashioned by Trump and by his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Anti-Semitism is alive and well in the Biden administration, on the National Security Council and in the State Department.

Besides, if you prefer another interpretation, the Trump management of the Middle East made former government officials look like incompetent buffoons. Didn’t the surgically enhanced John Kerry intone, with the maximum of conviction, that no peace would ever come to the Middle East until we could solve the Palestinian problem. Now, the Gulf Arab states do not care about the Palestinian terrorist strategy and are doing business with Israel.

So, the administration needs to find a way to mask the shame of John Kerry and other Obama officials. 

Of the articles I have seen, the best was written by Caroline Glick. One might say that the Trump administration was practicing Realpolitik while the Biden administration is practicing idealistic foreign policy-- with a hefty dose of anti-Semitism.

Glick begins by saying that releasing the report, an indictment of MBS will be:

...destructive to U.S. national security and to the security and stability of the Middle East.

And yet, the action was perfectly intelligible. Glick offers a sage reading of the policy:

It was predictable for 2 reasons. First, this is Obama’s 3rd term. And in Obama’s 1st term he played a central role in overthrowing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, the anchor of the U.S.’s alliance system in the Sunni Arab world in favor of the Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological anchor of every Sunni terror group in the world.

Obama’s consistent policy for 8 years was to side with the jihadists. Obama’s anti-colonialist worldview bred his anti-Western sensibilities. He and his neo-Marxist advisors viewed the jihadists as the “authentic” voice of the Islamic world. They were favored because they were “revolutionary” and anti-Western. In every conflict that pitted either conservative Sunni leaders, Iranian anti-regime forces, or Israel against jihadists from Hamas to Hezbollah, to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Houthis, or Iran, Obama and his people supported the jihadists. For this reason, Obama admired both Turkish dictator Erdogan and the Qatari ruling family. Like him, they supported jihadists.

Of course, Obama always sided with the radical jihadist. He refused consistently to denounce radical Islam. And he refused to denounce anti-Semitic actions committed by Islamists-- i.e., the attack on a kosher supermarket in Paris. About that, Obama said that a couple of guys had done a couple of things.

Now, when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates found new young leaders, leaders who were working to reform Islam, to modernize and liberalize their nations, this posed a problem for an administration that had cast its lot with the jihadists. Worse yet, these new leaders wanted to have better ties with Israel, and the Obama administration flunkies hated them, to the roots of their deluded souls.

We will add that these leaders are wildly popular in their nations. For America to attack them with the Khashoggi indictment will certainly damage the administration reputation in the Middle East. Of course, the mullahs and the Palestinian terrorists will be cheering:

MBS and MBZ from the UAE were big problems for Obama, Robert Malley and their ilk. They appeared out of nowhere.

Young and vigorous, they seek to liberalize their conservative societies. They are deeply opposed to Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. They are open to peace and cooperation with Israel. They support Israel in its campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah. And they are certainly “authentic” Arab Muslims. When the UAE declared the Muslim Brotherhood, and Obama’s key supporters and ideological allies at CAIR terrorist organizations, Obama and his comrades were so angry they could barely put together a coherent sentence.

As for Jamal Khashoggi, besides being a friend of Nicholas Kristof, his resume is anything but clean. In fact, he was a terrorist sympathizer:

 He was a Qatari agent of influence. He was a former Saudi intelligence officer who sided with the Wahabist jihadists in the royal family who supported al Qaeda. He was friends with Osama bin Laden and mourned his death. The al Qaeda, ISIS, Iran and Hamas supporting Qatari regime was essentially writing his columns in the Washington Post.

And, Glick suggests that he was an agent of international Islamist terrorism:

Khashoggi’s receipt of a green card made no sense. His gig as a columnist at Jeff Bezos’s paper made no sense unless seen as an effort of Obama’s deep state friends, particularly former CIA director John Brennan, who opposed MBS from the outset. And then it made perfect sense. In other words, Khashoggi, a terror supporting Qatari agent against a modernizing, pro-American, anti-jihadist and pro-Israel Saudi Crown Prince was an important political warfare asset for Obama’s clique. His job was to discredit MBS and legitimize the terror-supporting Qataris while making pro-jihadist progressives feel good about themselves.

At the least, the Obama administration flunkies want the old Saudi Arabia back. Whereas the current king has wanted to support Palestinian terrorism, his son wants to recognize the legitimacy of the state of Israel. And, we can’t have that, can we, Obamaphiles. So, the Biden administration is working to undermine the Saudi line of succession and to reduce the power of MBS. We are willing to try to crush reform in order to restore anti-Semitism.

Glick explains:

They immediately set out lionizing Khashoggi as some sort of Nelson Mandela so that they could turn MBS into Hitler or whatever. As Smith reported in another article, Robert Malley, who is now in charge of Biden’s Iran policy, was the first pushing the line that in response to Khashoggi’s death, the U.S. should end its support/alliance with Saudi Arabia in retribution and side with the Iran-controlled Houthis against Saudi Arabia.

It was a testament to Donald Trump’s common sense and his political courage that he refused to bow to their pressure. And it was equally obvious back in 2018 that if a Democrat beat Trump in 2020, the next Democrat administration would resuscitate the Khashoggi affair to try to push MBS from power.

And, of course, the Biden administration wants to undermine or abolish the Abraham Accords:

The worst thing that happened to the Obama nee Biden crowd were the Abraham Accords. This is why the first thing that Biden and his handlers did was bow out of the U.S. side of the deal by freezing the arms sales to the UAE and Saudi Arabia. The Abraham Accords put paid their false claims that the jihadists are the authentic voice of the Arab world. The popularity of the deals among the citizens of the Gulf and much of the wider Arab world – like Morocco and Sudan — made clear that Obama (Biden) and their ilk were basing U.S. Middle East policy on the propaganda being taught in Middle East Studies departments throughout the U.S. rather than on anything even vaguely resembling the reality of the region and the views of people who actually live here.

Glick does not want to predict whether MBS and MBZ will survive. Obviously, if either of them make gesture of conciliation with the American administration it would constitute a loss of face-- so they will probably not concede anything at all.

For now the governments of both countries have denounced the indictments in the strongest terms. And, we note again, that they are both very popular among their people. Saudi subjects are very happy with MBS’s reformation. For our part we will look to see any movement in the relationship between Israel and the Muslim states that are part of the Abraham Accords. And we will also look at whether or not these countries start doing more business with Russia and China. 

I don’t know if MBS will survive this blow or not. There is reason to fear that at the end of the day, the leaders of the UAE and of Saudi Arabia will decide they are better off making an arrangement with Iran supported by the U.S. than standing up for their sovereignty and their interests with Israel. And if they do, it will be a disaster of epic proportions. The danger of war will rise exponentially. Jihadists of the Sunni and Shiite varieties will be empowered as never before. And Israel will be in a pretty horrible position.

But in the midst of all of this, leave it to the fake human rights activists and real terror supporters and jihad sympathizers like Malley and his comrades in Obama’s new administration to pat themselves on the back for ushering in an “authentic” era in the Middle East.