The blood of Jamal Khashoggi is on your hands, America.
OK, sure, also the Saudi leadership’s hands, in their case, literally.
It’s you who let them get away with it.
Well, you and your electeds in Washington, beginning with Donald Trump, though, to be fair to someone who doesn’t deserve being treated fairly, considering, all Trump is doing, in pretending that we don’t know for sure what happened in the Saudi embassy in Turkey, that he’s been personally assured by King Salman that nothing happened, is what we elected him to do.
Honestly, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be doing much different if they were in the big chair right now.
I say that about Obama and Clinton, and, yes, Trump winked, winked, nodded, nodded, in such a way that emboldened the Saudis to think luring a critic into its embassy for the purpose of decapitating him would be met with meh from the U.S.
Leading the meh parade is Trump’s feckless son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is in hock to the Saudis, personally and politically, having hitched his slim resume to Mohammad bin Salman, the Crown Prince, the heir apparent.
You could say the same for Trump, about him also being in hock to Saudi interests, in the context of him bragging in 2015 about having sold millions of dollars worth of apartment to Saudis, though you do have to factor in that Trump is an inveterate liar, who regularly overstates and outright misstates things related to money, so who knows there.
When Trump says, meh, they’re saying they didn’t kill him, and even if they did, we have $110 billion in contracts for arms sales to the Saudis on the line here, so, what, this was a journalist who isn’t even a U.S. citizen, he’s just continuing a bipartisan tradition of turning a blind eye to what our rich frenemies in the Middle East are really all about.
And if you don’t believe it’s a bipartisan thing, remember how long it took for the missing 28 pages of the 9/11 Commission report, detailing Saudi government involvement in the 2001 terrorist attacks, to be made public.
The Bush and Obama administrations willfully covered up, then downplayed, the role the Saudis played in terrorist attacks that were used as the pretext for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is to say, not Saudi Arabia, that have bankrupted us, morally and financially.
If we’re willing to kill millions and spend billions to fight wars that are little more than obfuscation, seriously, a single Washington Post columnist got his head chopped off?
The Saudis will get their $110 billion in arms, to use to kill more Yemenis.
We’ll get the $110 billion, and, I mean, come on, none of us had heard of Jamal Khashoggi before last week, and can any of us come with a couple of time zones of finding Yemen on a map?
There are any of myriad things we could do to change the status quo with regard to Saudi Arabia, beginning with, electing people with fully working spinal columns to represent us in Washington.
But you’d have to want to do that.
It’s easier to take the money and pretend that it’s not blood money.
Column by Chris Graham
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