Biden's Protection of Murderous Saudi Despots Shows the Hidden Reality of
U.S. Foreign Policy
That the U.S. opposes tyranny is a glaring myth. Yet it is not only believed
but often used to justify wars, bombing campaigns, sanctions, and protracted
conflict.
Glenn Greenwald
Mar 2
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal (2nd R) welcomes then-US Vice
President Joe Biden (C) at the Riyadh airbase on October 27, 2011 (Photo:
AFP via Getty Images)
A staple of mainstream U.S. discourse is that the United States opposes
tyranny and despotism and supports freedom and democracy around the world.
Embracing murderous despots is something only Donald Trump did, but not
normal, upstanding American Presidents. This belief about the U.S. role in
the world permeates virtually every mainstream foreign policy discussion.
When the U.S. wants to start a new war - with Iraq, with Libya, with Syria,
etc. - it accomplishes this by claiming that it is, at least in part,
motivated by horror over the tyranny of the country's leaders. When it wants
to engineer regime change or support anti-democratic coups - in Venezuela,
in Iran, in Bolivia, in Honduras - it uses the same justification. When the
U.S. Government and its media partners want to increase the hostility and
fear that Americans harbor for adversarial countries - for Russia, for
China, for Cuba, For North Korea - it hauls out the same script: we are
deeply disturbed by the human rights violations of that country's
government.
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Yet it is hard to conjure a claim that is more obviously and laughably false
than this one. The U.S. does not dislike autocratic and repressive
governments. It loves them, and it has for decades. Installing and propping
up despotic regimes has been the foundation of U.S. foreign policy since at
least the end of World War II, and that approach continues to this day to be
its primary instrument for advancing what it regards as its interests around
the world. The U.S. for decades has counted among its closest allies and
partners the world's most barbaric autocrats, and that is still true.
Indeed, all other things being equal, when it comes to countries with
important resources or geo-strategic value, the U.S. prefers autocracy to
democracy because democracy is unpredictable and even dangerous,
particularly in the many places around the world where anti-American
sentiment among the population is high (often because of sustained U.S.
interference in those countries, including propping up their dictators).
There is no way for a rational person to acquire even the most minimal
knowledge of U.S. history and current foreign policy and still believe the
claim that the U.S. acts against other countries because it is angry or
offended at human rights abuses perpetrated by those other governments.
What the U.S. hates and will act decisively and violently against is not
dictatorship but disobedience. The formula is no more complex than this: any
government that submits to U.S. decrees will be its ally and partner and
will receive its support no matter how repressive, barbaric or despotic it
is with its own population. Conversely, any government that defies U.S.
decrees will be its adversary and enemy no matter how democratic it was in
its ascension to power and in its governance.
In sum, human rights abuses are never the reason the U.S. acts against
another country. Human rights abuses are the pretext the U.S. uses - the
propagandistic script - to pretend that its brute force retaliation against
noncompliant governments are in fact noble efforts to protect people.
The examples proving this to be true are far too long to chronicle in any
one article. Entire books have been written demonstrating this. In May,
journalist Vincent Bevins released an outstanding book entitled The Jakarta
Method. As I wrote in my review of it, accompanied by an interview with the
author:
The book primarily documents the indescribably horrific campaigns of mass
murder and genocide the CIA sponsored in Indonesia as an instrument for
destroying a nonaligned movement of nations who would be loyal to neither
Washington nor Moscow. Critically, Bevins documents how the chilling success
of that morally grotesque campaign led to its being barely discussed in U.S.
discourse, but then also serving as the foundation and model for clandestine
CIA interference campaigns in multiple other countries from Guatemala,
Chile, and Brazil to the Philippines, Vietnam, and Central America: the
Jakarta Method.
When people who want to believe in the core goodness of the U.S. role in the
world are confronted with those facts, they often dismiss them by insisting
that this was a relic of the Cold War, a necessary evil to stop the spread
of Communism which no longer applies. But the fall of the Soviet Union did
not even minimally retard this tactic of propping up and embracing the
world's worst despots. It remains the strategy of choice of the permanent
bipartisan Washington class known as the U.S. Foreign Policy Community.
And nothing makes that point clearer than the long-standing and ongoing
support the U.S. provides to the Saudi regime, one of the most savage and
despotic tyrannies on the planet. As the Biden administration is now
demonstrating, not even murdering a journalist with a large U.S. newspaper
who resided in the U.S. can ruin or even weaken the tight, loyal friendship
between the U.S. government and the Saudi monarchy, to say nothing of the
brutal repression which Saudi monarchs have imposed on its own population
for decades.
________________________________________
An intelligence report released by the U.S. Government on Friday claims what
many have long assumed: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman personally
and directly approved the gruesome murder in Turkey of Washington Post
journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the subsequent carving up of his corpse with
a buzzsaw for removal to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis continue to deny this
allegation, but it is nonetheless the official and definitive conclusion of
the U.S. Government.
But beyond a few trivial and inconsequential gestures (sanctioning a few
Saudis and imposing a visa ban on a few dozen others), the Biden
administration made clear that it intends to undertake no real retaliation.
That is because, said The New York Times, "a consensus emerged inside the
White House that the cost of such a breach, in terms of Saudi cooperation on
counterterrorism and in confronting Iran, was simply too high." Biden
officials were also concerned, they claimed, that punishing the Saudis would
push them closer to China.
Not only is the Biden administration not meaningfully punishing the Saudis,
but they are actively protecting them. Without explanation, the U.S.
withdrew its original report that contained the name of twenty-one Saudis it
alleged had "participated in, ordered, or were otherwise complicit in or
responsible for the death of Jamal Khashoggi" and replaced it with a
different version of the report that only named eighteen - seemingly
protecting the identity of three Saudi operative it believes to have
participated in a horrific murder.
Even worse, the White House is concealing the names of the seventy-six Saudi
operatives to whom they are applying visa bans for participating in
Khashoggi's assassination, absurdly citing "privacy" concerns - as though
those who savagely murder and dismember a journalist are entitled to have
their identities hidden.
Worse still, the U.S. is not imposing any sanctions on bin Salman himself,
the person most responsible for Khashoggi's death. When pressed on this
refusal to sanction the Saudi leader on Sunday, White House Press Secretary
Jen Psaki claimed - falsely - that "there have not been sanctions put in
place for the leaders of foreign governments where we have diplomatic
relations and even where we don't have diplomatic relations." As the foreign
policy analyst Daniel Larison quickly noted, that is blatantly untrue: the
U.S. has previously sanctioned multiple foreign leaders including
Venezuela's Nicolas Maduro, currently targeted personally with multiple
sanctions, as well as North Korea's Kim Jong Un, Iran's Supreme Leader Ali
Khamenei, and the now-deceased Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe.
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It cannot be disputed that Biden has quickly and radically violated his
campaign pledge: "I would make it very clear we were not going to, in fact,
sell more weapons to them, we were going to, in fact, make them pay the
price and make them the pariah that they are." As even CNN noted: "It was a
far cry from a comment in November 2019, in which Biden promised to punish
senior Saudi leaders in a way former President Donald Trump wouldn't." Even
the new administration's early announcement that they would cease helping
the Saudis wage war in Yemen was accompanied by a vow to continue furnishing
the Saudi regime with "defensive" weapons.
It is in instances such as now - when U.S. propaganda becomes so
unsustainable because the government's actions diverge so glaringly from the
mythology, such that the contradictions cannot elude even the most partisan
and gullible citizens - that White House officials are forced to be candid
about how they really think and behave. When they see the Biden
administration protecting one of the most despicable regimes on the planet,
they are left with no choice: nobody will believe the standard fictions they
typically spout, so they have to defend their real mentality to justify
their behavior.
And so that is exactly what Psaki did on Monday when confronted with the
glaring disparities between Biden's campaign vows and their current reality
of coddling the Saudi murderous despots. She admitted that the U.S. is
willing to tolerate and support even the most barbaric tyrants. "There are
areas where we have an important relationship with Saudi Arabia" and Biden,
in refusing to harshly punish the Saudis, is "acting in the national
interest of the United States."
Now, there are some who believe that the U.S. should be indifferent to the
human rights practices of other governments and should simply align and
partner and even install and prop up whatever dictators are willing to serve
U.S. interests, regardless of how tyrannical and repressive they are (what
constitutes "U.S. interests," and who typically benefits from their
promotion, is an entirely separate question). In the past, many have
advocated this view explicitly. Jeane Kirkpatrick catapulted to Cold War-era
fame when she insisted that the U.S. should support pro-U.S. right-wing
autocrats because they are preferable to left-wing ones. Henry Kissinger's
entire career as an academic and foreign policy official was based on his
"realist" philosophy which was explicitly welcoming of despotic regimes that
were of use to "U.S. interests" as defined by the ruling class.
At least if there is that sort of candor, the real scheme of motives can be
engaged. But the laughably false conceit that the U.S. is motivated by a
genuine and profound concern for the freedom and human rights of others
around the world and that this noble sentiment is what animates its choices
about who to attack, isolate and sanction, or befriend, support and arm, is
so blatantly propagandistic that it is truly stunning that anyone continues
to believe it.
And yet not only do they believe it, it is the predominant view in the
mainstream press. It is the script that is non-ironically hauled out every
time the U.S. wants to go to war with or bomb a new country and we are told
that nobody can oppose this because the leaders being targeted are so very
bad and tyrannical and the U.S. stands opposed to such evils.
________________________________________
Biden's protection of bin Salman is not, to put it mildly, the first
post-Cold-War example of the U.S. lavishing praise, support and protection
on the world's worst tyrants. President Obama sold the Saudis a record
amount of weapons, and even cut short his state visit to India - the world's
largest democracy - to fly to Saudi Arabia along with top officials in both
political parties to pay his respects to King Abdullah upon his death. Our
Snowden reporting in 2014 revealed that the Obama-era NSA "significantly
expanded its cooperative relationship with the Saudi Ministry of Interior,
one of the world's most repressive and abusive government agencies," with
one top secret memo heralding "a period of rejuvenation" for the NSA's
relationship with the Saudi Ministry of Defense.
When she was Obama's Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton notoriously gushed
about her close friendship with the brutal Egyptian strongman supported for
30 years by the U.S.: "I really consider President and Mrs. [Hosni] Mubarak
to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in
the United States." As Mona Eltahawy noted in The New York Times: "Five
American administrations, Democratic and Republican, supported the Mubarak
regime."
Both the Bush and Obama administrations took extraordinary steps to conceal
what was known about Saudi involvement in the 9/11 attack. Indeed, one grand
irony of the still-ongoing War on Terror is that the U.S. has bombed close
to ten countries in its name - including ones with no conceivable
relationship to that attack - yet continued to hug closer and closer the one
country, Saudi Arabia, which even many D.C. elites believed had the closest
proximity to it.
When President Trump hosted Egyptian dictator Gen. Abdul el-Sisi in the
White House in 2017, and then did the same for the Bahraini autocrat (to
whom Obama authorized arms sales as he was brutally crushing a domestic
uprising), a huge outpouring of contrived indignation spewed forth from the
media and various foreign policy analysts, as if it were some radical,
heinous aberration from U.S. tradition, rather than a perfect expression of
decades-old U.S. policy to embrace dictators. As I wrote at the time of
Sisi's Washington visit:
In the case of Egypt and Bahrain, the only new aspect of Trump's conduct is
that it's more candid and revealing: rather than deceitfully feign concern
for human rights while arming and propping up the world's worst tyrants - as
Obama and his predecessors did - Trump is dispensing with the pretense. The
reason so many D.C. mavens are so upset with Trump isn't because they hate
his policies but rather despise his inability and/or unwillingness to
prettify what the U.S. does in the world.
And all of this is to say nothing of the U.S.'s own despotic practices. The
U.S. has instituted policies of torture, kidnapping, mass warrantless
surveillance, and due-process-free floating prisons in the middle of the
ocean where people remain in a cage for almost 20 years despite having never
been charged with a crime. The Biden Justice Department is currently trying
to imprison Julian Assange for life for the crime of publishing documents
that revealed grave crimes by the U.S. government and its allies, and is
attempting to do the same to Edward Snowden. One need not look toward the
barbarism of U.S. allies to see what propagandistic dreck is the claim that
the U.S. stands steadfastly opposed to authoritarianism in the world: just
look at the U.S. Government itself.
And yet, somehow, not only do large numbers of Americans and most corporate
journalists believe that mythology, they are well-trained to divert their
attention away from the abuses of their own government and its allies -
which they could do something about - and instead obsess over repression by
governments adversarial to the U.S. (which they can do nothing to change).
That's what explains the U.S. media obsession with denouncing Putin and
Maduro and Assad and Iran while devoting far less attention to the equal and
often-more-severe abuses of their own government and its "allies and
partners." Nobody captured this dynamic and the motives behind it better
than Noam Chomsky, when asked why he devotes so much time to the crimes of
the U.S. and its allies rather than those of Russia and Venezuela and Iran
and other U.S. adversaries:
My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own
state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger
component of international violence. But also for a much more important
reason than that: namely, I can do something about it. So even if the US was
responsible for 2% of the violence in the world instead of the majority of
it, it would be that 2% I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a
simple ethical judgment.
That is, the ethical value of one's actions depends on their anticipated and
predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of
someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities
that took place in the 18th century.
But this propagandistic mythology that holds that the U.S. only embraces
democrats and not despots is too valuable to renounce - even when, as Biden
is doing now with the Saudis, the glaring falsity of it is rubbed in
people's faces. It remains a key ingredient to:
. justify wars and bombings (how can you oppose our bombing of Syria
when Assad is such a monster or why would you object to our war in Libya
given all the bad things Gaddafi does?);
. keep people satisfied with protracted and dangerous conflict with
chosen adversaries (of course Russia is our enemy: look at what Putin does
to journalists and dissidents);
. allow citizens to feel good and righteous about the U.S. Government
(sure, we're not perfect, but we don't hang gays from cranes like they do in
Iran); and, most importantly of all,
. distract Americans' attention away from the crimes of their own
ruling class (I'm too busy reading about what's being done to Nalvany - by a
government over which I exercise no influence - to care about the civil
liberties abuses by the U.S. Government and those government with whom it
aligns and supports).
What's most remarkable and alarming about all this is not how dangerous it
is - though it is dangerous - but what it reveals about how easily
propagandized the U.S. media class is. They can watch Biden hug and protect
Mohammed bin Salman one minute, send General Sisi massive amounts of arms
and money the next, announce that his DOJ will continue to pursue Assange's
imprisonment, and then somehow, after seeing all that, say and believe that
we have to go to war with or bomb or sanction some other country because
it's the role of the U.S. to protect and defend freedom and human rights in
the world. If the U.S. Government can get people to actually believe that,
what can't they get them to believe?
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