John Chuckman
COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN RUSSIA INSIDER
“Gabbard Campaign Video Slams Trump for Making US 'The Prostitute of Saudi Arabia'”
She's a clever, attractive politician.
'The Prostitute of Saudi Arabia' is an extremely well-chosen epithet.
First, it just contains a lot of ugly truth, but there is a deeper level of truth behind it.
If she had said, 'The Prostitute of Israel,' a phrase truer still, she would have called down a massive storm on her head.
You see, Trump's relationship with Saudi Arabia is directly related to his relationship with Israel. He embraces a bloody murderer Crown Prince because Israel embraces him, and rather warmly. The Crown Prince helps with a lot of dirty work nowadays in the region – the bloodbaths in Yemen and Syria and his brutal suppression of Saudi Arabia’s own Shia population - and none of the powerful care in the least about the fate of a journalist who was critical of him.
The Crown Prince is effectively Israel’s man in Saudi Arabia, tested and proven now through his many dirty tasks, and for his sake, Israel allows all kinds of things it would not have years ago, as America’s selling tens of billions in arms to Saudi Arabia.
So, from Trump’s point of view, he gets to make Israel happy - of course, making its lobbyists in the United States happy – he gets to sell tens of billions in new weapons to Saudi Arabia, and he secures what he sees as the stability of one of the world’s most important oil producers, the one, owing to the nature of its production, in a position to most easily turn spigots up or down and drive oil prices in a direction favored by the United States at the moment. It’s quite a deal, a genuine deal with the devil.
Saudi Arabia has no fan club in the United States, except a rather quiet one among the exclusive membership of the American power establishment, one even quieter since the Khashoggi butchery.
Outside elite circles, the Saudis suffer from the Islamophobia which characterizes much of American society. American Christians and Jews, almost instinctively, do not like Islam. Apart from resentment over the growth and vibrancy of Islam as a religion worldwide, in their minds, Islam is just kind of automatically lumped in with the notion of enemies of Israel.
And, of course, American politicians and press have provided a steady diet of Islam-hate to boost popular support for the terrible Neocon Wars in the Middle East, wars which have claimed about two million lives, created millions of desperate refugees who came close to destabilizing Europe, and cost America unholy amounts of money. But ideologues with an idée fixe, such as those driving America’s policies, care not a bit about costs, either human or financial, because they never pay them.
There are also the carefully planted and nurtured notions about Saudi responsibility for 9/11. These started at a time when Saudi Arabia was not such a faithful friend of Israel. And they continued until not very long ago with controversy over releasing the short secret preface to the official 9/11 report, a preface which ended up proving nothing against Saudi Arabia, but that fact didn’t stop the press and some politicians from playing endless games of suggestion and innuendo. All that, of course, serves to remind Saudi Arabia that it had better keep to the “true path,” that is, Washington’s.
In addition, absolute monarchs tend to be frowned on by the general American public, even though America itself is no great democracy. A common attitude in parts of the United States about monarchs is summed up in an expression I’ve heard, “He thinks his shit don’t stink!” This is even said sometimes about non-absolute monarchs from friendly states, such as Britain’s Elizabeth.
But America’s establishment carefully, although somewhat quietly, supports and grooms all of the absolute monarchs in the Middle East who toe the American policy line, especially with regard to Israel.
Remember the little story of American soldiers seen repairing the solid gold toilet plumbing of the Emir of Kuwait during the First Gulf War? Likely it wasn’t supposed to get out, but it did in all that chaos, and it serves as a very fitting symbol of Official America’s relationship with the region’s authoritarian princes and kings.
Israel closely embraces all the region’s absolute monarchs, as it does its absolute dictators such as the one in Egypt, because it likes neighboring rulers who tightly control their populations, as these monarchs certainly do, and keep any wild notions of democracy among large Arab populations suppressed.
So, you can attack Saudi Arabia in public almost with impunity, something certainly not true of the country for which Saudi Arabia now often plays the role of proxy and serves as a secret close ally, Israel.
