Six on Saudi Arabia: The Royal Touch How Saudi Money Keeps Washington at War in Yemen; Crown prince sought to lure Khashoggi
philip panaritis
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"The Khashoggi story may, however, help to expose the foolishness of depicting MBS as a reformer, a narrative favoured by Western governments and promoted by several established Middle East commentators. For too long, the minor social reforms of an autocrat have been elevated beyond all reason. Marketed as an enlightened liberal prince, MBS presides over a regime that regularly executes dissidents at home and decapitates people in public squares for witchcraft. Under MBS, Saudi Arabia remains a hereditary dictatorship kept in place by US power and British weaponry, in which the only check on repression is inefficiency.
US senators, among others, have suggested that the Khashoggi affair may lead to some change in Western treatment of Saudi Arabia. This is delusional. The defence of the Saudi monarchy is the heart of US policy in the Middle East, and it entails an ugliness that far exceeds the murder or abduction of a journalist. In Yemen, the US and Britain are complicit with Saudi Arabian crimes on an incomparable scale."
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"A Lobby to Contend With
The roots of that lobby’s rise to prominence in Washington lie in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. As you may remember, with 15 of those 19 suicidal hijackers being citizens of Saudi Arabia, it was hardly surprising that American public opinion had soured on the Kingdom. In response, the worried Saudi royals spent around $100 million over the next decade to improve such public perceptions and retain their influence in the U.S. capital. That lobbying facelift proved a success until, in 2015, relations soured with the Obama administration over the Iran nuclear deal. Once Donald Trump won the presidency, however, the Saudis saw an unparalleled opportunity and launched the equivalent of a full-court press, an aggressive campaign to woo the newly elected president and the Republican-led Congress, which, of course, cost real money.
As a result, the growth of Saudi lobbying operations would prove extraordinary. In 2016, according to FARA records, they reported spending just under $10 million on lobbying firms; in 2017, that number had nearly tripled to $27.3 million. And that’s just a baseline figure for a far larger operation to buy influence in Washington, since it doesn’t include considerable sums given to elite universities or think tanks like the Arab Gulf States Institute, the Middle East Institute, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (to mention just a few of them).
This meteoric rise in spending allowed the Saudis to dramatically increase the number of lobbyists representing their interests on both sides of the aisle. Before President Trump even took office, the Saudi government signed a deal with the McKeon Group, a lobbying firm headed by Howard “Buck” McKeon, the recently retired Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. His firm also represents Lockheed Martin, one of the top providers of military equipment to the Kingdom. On the Democratic side, the Saudis inked a $140,000-per-month deal with the Podesta Group, headed by Tony Podesta, whose brother John, a long-time Democratic Party operative, was the former chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Tony Podesta later dissolved his firm and has allegedly been investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for serving as an unregistered foreign agent."
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" ... On June 24, they will be allowed to drive, the most symbolic and practically important of the changes so far.
Political freedoms are definitely not included. The arrest last month of 17 activists, including seven of the most prominent women who had campaigned for the right to drive, sent a clear signal to all Saudis that only the government can bestow freedoms – and the government can take them away. Eight of those detained have since been freed, but nine remain behind bars, including three of the female driving activists.
The arrests probably had less to do with the specific demands the women were making than that they were making demands at all, said Hala al-Dosari, a Saudi activist who has supported the driving campaign and is at Harvard University. Male clerics, bloggers and human rights campaigners critical of the government also have been detained but simply received less publicity, she said.
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