John Chuckman
COMMENT ON POSSIBLE BREAKING EVENTS IN SAUDI ARABIA
Is something big about to happen in Saudi Arabia, big, as in the replacement of the Crown Prince?
In Paris, Le Figaro reports Saudi King Salman wants to replace Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
In Britain's Guardian, a former head of MI6 said all the evidence suggests Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was behind the death of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and that the theory of rogue (a word Trump has used) elements was “blatant fiction”
Sir John Sawers’ remarks are extraordinary for a man of his past position, and they are not likely to be received well in Washington. In American power establishment circles, the ruthless Crown Prince is much valued as a key player in bloodily rearranging the Middle East to please their vision of how things should be.
The Prince has amply demonstrated that he doesn’t hesitate when it comes to killing lots of people. Israel’s government, whose chief members are cut from the same cloth as this wealthy thug, just loves the guy.
It is said that Trump’s administration officials are pressing the Crown Prince to blame one of his favourite generals, the deputy head of Saudi intelligence.
That ruse is thought to provide a way out of the embarrassing crisis, but I’m not so sure that would work at this point. The horses are out of the barn, so to speak.
We already know enough, thanks to leaks from Turkey, to be confident the Crown Prince himself was involved. And Turkey, for its own reasons, is “out there” dropping more clues and hints.
Could the ugly Crown Prince be the victim of a plot? Not an innocent victim of course, but a guilty victim in the same sense that Saddam Hussein was a guilty victim of the H W Bush administration which secretly led him to believe they would wink at an invasion of Kuwait. He didn’t have to take the bait, but he did, as they knew he would, and he paid the price.
The ruthless, likely psychopathic, Crown Prince, good friend to Washington and Israeli power interests, may well have been offered the same kind of temptation by someone with regard to eliminating Khashoggi, assured it would be winked at if he did a thorough job.
Who might do that? The Prince has many powerful enemies, including, importantly, other major branches of the Royal Family whose relatives he kidnapped, imprisoned, and from whom he extracted tens of billions in ransom.
Clearly, there are also interests in Turkey who are hostile, or we would never have learned anything about this affair beyond the fact Khashoggi disappeared. Turkey has certainly heavily bugged Saudi government facilities for the reason that it does not trust the Crown Prince, and with good reason. Some of these bugs captured the whole ghastly event. Although Turkey claims not to have let any foreign source actually hear the material, there is an ongoing flow of hints and leaks.
This is one of the more fascinating episodes of dirty work to come along for watchers of international affairs in years, revealing as it does so much hypocrisy and flat-out lies from actors, especially from the United States, hypocrisy which is quite the norm but is usually kept well hidden from the public, as in Syria or Yemen or Libya or, indeed, in Israel.
The threat to the stability of so important an American imperial friend in the Middle East is serious stuff.
By the way, on the secret friendship and alliance between Israel and Saudi Arabia, I recently listed in a comment some of the realities supporting that relationship. Well, here’s another. Saudi Arabia has become Washington’s biggest customer for armaments, overwhelmingly so with hundreds of billions committed to sophisticated weapons.
Even fifteen years ago, Israel would not have permitted that to happen. It would have pulled out all stops to halt such sales to a potential “existential threat,” but that is no longer the case. The Crown Prince has earned Israel’s overwhelming confidence through all his blood-letting and his refusal even to speak against Israel’s atrocities, as Saudi Arabia commonly used to do years ago.
AFTERWORD:
It will be of continuing interest to see whether the phony story Saudi Arabia has just put out to explain the killing - one suggested earlier by Pompeo, such is America's keenness not to see justice done when it means losing their beloved Killer Crown Prince, and one Trump immediately warmly embraced - will be able to stand.
Anyone who thinks about just the facts we know, understands that it simply cannot be true.
But we do now live in a nightmarish world where fairly obvious lies are regularly solemnly recited and supported when they have a bearing on American imperial power. We see Theresa May's contrived Skripal Affair, America's "Israel's Army is showing restraint," American forces openly encamped in Eastern Syria where they have no business, America's insane mantra about Russia and influencing the election, etc, etc, etc.
Interestingly, here is a new bit of information. I think Khashoggi, in his last interview, makes it clear what his killer's motives were, blindingly clear:
https://sputniknews.com/world/201810201069059153-khashoggi-secret-interview-death-confirmed/
