Andre Damon
On Friday, US President Joe Biden will meet with Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. The visit is a reversal of Biden’s categorical promise on the campaign trail to make the theocratic dictatorship a “pariah” in response to the Saudi royal family’s murder of dissident Jamaal Khashoggi.
In February of last year, the Biden administration issued a report concluding that bin Salman personally “approved” the 2018 murder of Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist whose writings had been published by the Washington Post.
Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul, Turkey to obtain documents related to his upcoming marriage. Once inside, he was killed by a group of assassins. A recording subsequently released by the Turkish government appeared to document his body being dismembered with a saw.
At a Democratic presidential debate in November 2020, Biden was categorical that were he to be elected president, his administration would stop selling weapons to Saudi Arabia for use in its war against Yemen and “punish” the Saudi officials who had killed Khashoggi.
“Khashoggi was, in fact, murdered and dismembered,” Biden said, “and I believe on the order of the crown prince. And 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, in fact, the pariah that they are…”
Biden added that he would “end the sale of materiel to the Saudis where they’re going in and murdering children, and they’re murdering innocent people.”
In addition to the murder of Khashoggi, Biden was referring to the war in Yemen in which Saudi Arabia has, with US bombs, deliberately targeted the civilian population, including through mass starvation. As one United Nations official concluded, “Civilians in Yemen are not starving, they are being starved.” He called on Saudi Arabia to be referred to the International Criminal Court.
According to the US State Department, “significant human rights issues” in Saudi Arabia include:
unlawful killings; executions for nonviolent offenses; forced disappearances; torture … substantial interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association … inability of citizens to choose their government peacefully through free and fair elections; violence and discrimination against women … criminalization of consensual same-sex sexual activity; and restrictions on workers’ freedom of association, including prohibition of trade unions and collective bargaining.
In March, just four months before Biden’s trip, Saudi Arabia executed 81 people on a single day, the most in the kingdom’s modern history.
Despite his promises upon taking office, Biden continued to expand US arms shipments to Saudi Arabia to carry out its war against the civilian population of Yemen, selling a further $650 million in missiles in 2021.
In meeting with bin Salman and continuing to fund the homicidal war in Yemen, while discussing an intensification of threats against Iran, Biden is also further repudiating his lying pledge to “close this period of relentless war.”
Even as Biden was making his empty statements about Saudi Arabia while a candidate, far-reaching plans were already underway to systematically arm Ukraine in preparation for the current US-backed proxy war with Russia. In the name of this war, Biden has justified the total abandonment of any pretense of distancing himself from Saudi Arabia’s mass murder in Yemen and its killing of Khashoggi.
One of the most striking characteristics of the propaganda surrounding the US war against Russia is the total exclusion of any discussion of the material interests guiding the US intervention in the war.
The one premise that cannot be challenged in the media is that the war is driven purely by altruistic motives and that the United States is willing, through sheer benevolence, to expend limitless resources in the prosecution of a just war in defense of “democracy.” Any other explanation is labeled Russian propaganda.
This reality makes the op-ed published by Biden in the Washington Post on Saturday all the more significant. While attempting to justify his trip to Saudi Arabia, Biden dismissed any discussion of human rights, explaining US goals in the Middle East entirely through the lens of American geopolitical ambitions.
To this end, Biden used the words “human rights” and “Khashoggi” only once in the piece. Rather, the entire justification of the trip was framed in terms of US commercial and military strategy, or, as Biden put it, to “advance important American interests.”
He explained, right off the bat, that he is traveling to the Middle East because “its waterways are essential to global trade and the supply chains we rely on. Its energy resources are vital for mitigating the impact on global supplies of Russia’s war in Ukraine.”
In an op-ed published last month in the Washington Post, Hatice Cengiz, Khashoggi’s fiancée, appealed to the Biden administration to “cancel your trip and uphold your promise to pursue justice for Jamaal,” saying the trip “will significantly compound our grief and hopelessness.”
She asked Biden, ”You condemn Russia for persecuting dissidents and committing war crimes in Ukraine,” yet why is the Saudi Royal Family “being given a pass? Is that the price of oil?”
Clearly, it is.
Biden adds that while his “views on human rights are clear and long-standing,” military and economic imperatives are primary.
As president, it is my job to keep our country strong and secure. We have to counter Russia’s aggression, put ourselves in the best possible position to outcompete China, and work for greater stability in a consequential region of the world. To do these things, we have to engage directly with countries that can impact those outcomes. Saudi Arabia is one of them, and when I meet with Saudi leaders on Friday, my aim will be to strengthen a strategic partnership going forward that’s based on mutual interests and responsibilities.
In other words, the United States has an interest in war with Russia, and Saudi Arabia has an interest in killing dissidents and committing war crimes against the people of Yemen. America’s “strategic partnership” is predicated on the mutual pursuit of these “mutual interests.”
The conclusions that are to be drawn from Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia are clear. Humanitarian concerns have in fact no relevance in US foreign policy. They are mere packaging and public relations.
US foreign policy is driven by American imperialism’s drive for global hegemony, and its single-minded focus on destroying and subjugating Russia is the prelude to a military conflict with China.
To maintain its position as global hegemon, the US conquered Iraq and Afghanistan, killing over 1 million people in bloody decades-long wars. As part of this “war on terror,” the American military and intelligence agencies carried out a policy of torture and mass slaughter.
Now, it is giving its Saudi allies free rein to commit war crimes and kill and torture their domestic opponents.
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