THE DEATH OF JAMAL KHASHOGGI AND ITS MESSAGE ABOUT THE GEOPOLITICAL CLIMATE WE LIVE IN

By now, there can be little doubt in any realistic person’s mind that Saudi-born journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, where he was briefly tortured and interrogated before being brutally murdered by agents of the Saudi government, his body apparently later cut up and removed from the consulate in several containers and disposed of in an as yet undisclosed location.

The original Saudi government narrative that Khashoggi visited the consulate and then left was swiftly exposed by Turkish authorities as a lie, when they publicly declared that they had security camera footage and audio that proved the Washington Post editorialist had been murdered inside the consulate. The Saudis didn’t bother to ask how Turkey’s Erdogan government had come by this evidence. It was obvious that they had it and that the jig was up regarding the lie about Khashoggi’s having left the Saudi diplomatic mission. It was a story that wasn’t going to fly.
So, many days after the journalist’s disappearance, the Saudi regime admitted that Khashoggi had been killed inside the consulate in Istanbul, but claimed (shockingly enough anyway) that Khashoggi had died in “an interrogation gone wrong”, later expanding that invention to claim that the 59-year-old journalist had engaged “in a fistfight” (with as many as a dozen trained Saudi agents) and had been accidently killed when they tried to bring him under control. Furthermore, the Saudis claimed, it was a “rogue operation” carried out without the knowledge or consent of the veritable head of the Saudi regime, Prince Mohammed bin Salman—better known as MBS.

But there were other things the Turks knew and they made them public in real time, as the Saudis sought to build a narrative that would provide cover for any direct involvement of the regime. For instance, it was known that the 15 agents who took part in the incident had arrived together on the same day from Riyadh aboard private aircraft, and that a bone saw and a forensics expert had been involved in the alleged “interrogation”/“fistfight”.

And even as the Saudis were floating their “interrogation gone wrong” narrative, video footage was leaked through the US media that proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that Khashoggi’s murder and disappearance had been so premeditated that one of the agents, who bore a certain resemblance to the writer, had put on the dead journalist’s clothing and a fake goatee to try and deceive the security cameras and pass for Khashoggi leaving the consulate. The fact that Khashoggi’s shoes didn’t fit the agent and that he had to wear his own with the dead man’s clothing, quickly drew attention to the fact that while the journalist could definitely be seen going into the consulate, the man who came out was a body double. And there was excellent further security footage to prove it, showing the agent shedding his disguise, disposing of the journalist’s clothing, and returning to his own identity.

Shocking though this tale of cold-blooded murder might be, even more shocking has been the widespread realpolitik that has been applied by the West in dealing—or not—with the Saudi regime in general and MBS in particular. Despite the heinous nature of the crime, its international implications—since Khashoggi was a permanent resident in the US and a prominent member of the American press—there has been little indication that any sort of truly effective measures will be taken to punish Saudi Arabia and the MBS regime for such a gross violation of human rights and freedom of expression.

While most Western leaders, including US President Donald Trump—who has strong public and private ties to the Arab nation—must wish that the Saudi regime had never done something so blatant, so high-profile and so stupid, it seems apparent that money and power talk. And while the West as a whole might declare righteous indignation—Trump later rather than sooner, and only after media pressure made the incident impossible to ignore without his party’s suffering permanent political harm in the run-up to mid-term elections that are only days away—strategic and commercial considerations would appear to weigh a great deal more than moral and ethical ones.

The fact is that Saudi Arabia is one of two Middle East superpowers, the other being Iran. The Arab and Persian states are archenemies and are opposing each other in proxy wars on several fronts. These actions play as well into the geopolitical objectives of global superpowers Russia and the United States, and, as such, elicit their opposing backing for the two regimes.

In the case of Vladimir Putin’s government in Russia, there is no moral issue in this regard. Putin’s regime is the epitome of realpolitik. He is a politically resilient strongman who likes to deal with other strongmen who, like him, needn’t answer to legislatures or the courts. His lack of any sort of moral conscience is clear in his unconditional material and political support for the regime of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who, in his war on opposition popular movements, has slaughtered more than a half-million of his own people. And without the strategic aid of Russia—whose Middle East war fleet is based in Syria—Assad never would have been able to keep his grasp on power.

Trump himself has expressed his admiration for numerous despots (including, but not limited to Putin and MBS), but no matter how much he might like to, he still cannot completely ignore his people, his party, his opposition or the ethical standards that continue to characterize—if perhaps to an ever lesser degree—the democratic system of the Unites States. Still, however, the condemnation being aimed at Saudi Arabia over the Khashoggi slaying by the West in general would appear to be more lip service than reality.

Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s largest oil producers and the country combines this economic strength with also being a major arms purchaser. Although the US, for instance, no longer necessarily needs Saudi oil to survive, the US government knows full well that simply by cutting their oil production, the Saudis can raise the price of oil overnight, and oil and gasoline prices in the US are a key political pressure point. Other Western nations, meanwhile, are indeed dependent on Saudi oil, and are highly influenced politically by the price for which the Saudis sell them that oil.

Meanwhile, arms sales are one of the least talked about and most lucrative businesses on earth. The West knows that if it imposes embargoes on arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Russia and China will jump at the chance to take up the slack.

There was a time, however, when these factors would have taken a backseat to issues of human rights and freedom of expression. But that time is not today. Today the world is an increasingly cynical and hypocritical place in which lip service is paid to the higher principles of democracy, while money and power rule. The vile murder of Jamal Khashoggi is a reminder of that sad truth, as well as being a symbol of the ever-increasing assault on such democratic values as freedom of expression and human rights and of the impunity with which they are being violated.