Saudi–US relations: does time settle everything?

In the USA it is now being discussed that Trump, for the sake of protecting Saudi Crown Prince MBS, has both squandered at one stroke American values that cost centuries, and risked discrediting his own intelligence agency, the CIA, one of the founding institutions of the American legend.

It is impossible for it not to be discussed. The "America first" that the Washington Post says Trump expressed in precisely this context in fact refers to an America that has been slaughtered, lost, through his very efforts. Because although we know and recognize America by its imperialist side, by the corruption, oppression, exploitation and death it spreads to the world, the American people naturally know their country and state by the values that keep them standing, and want to go on knowing them that way.

However pragmatist he may be, for an American citizen it is not easy to accept that the idea that murders, massacres, or all the wrongs of dictators in international relations can be protected by America in return for a certain price is voiced so openly.

This frankly means the collapse of the whole legend that America, whatever it does in practice, has told its own citizens in theory until now. The Khashoggi affair may be nothing other than an ordinary example of a series of networks of relations or a body of actions in which America plays similar roles.

Khashoggi is only one, no more, of the thousands and millions of murders committed in the past and today by many regimes that America openly supports. But what makes him special is the manner in which it was done and the fact that it washed off all the makeup that covered, masked or embellished all the murders committed until now.

Indeed, attempts have not been lacking to present even this murder as ultimately legitimate and pleasant. Trump reported that MBS told him Khashoggi was a dangerous Islamist and Ikhwanist. Moreover, what could be the reason for inserting this information in between, mentioning even the possibility that what MBS told him about the murder might be a lie?

This is, unfortunately, clearly a typical discourse that makes attractive to the West the systematic human rights violations and the heavy war against democracy in which MBS, together with MBZ, has recently been involved. If a person is an Islamist, and especially an Ikhwanist, he fully deserves to be killed in this way. This tells us that there is sufficient reason to ultimately disregard the sensitivity the world has shown about the Khashoggi matter.

In fact even this situation very well expresses to the American public how the inhuman, despotic and criminal regimes imposed in the Middle East by these teams can be made to appear justified and legitimate.

The Khashoggi murder makes it possible to ask who or what could be more dangerous than these regimes supported by the USA in the Middle East. The actors supported supposedly to protect the American people from those dangers cut up a journalist with saws in broad daylight in state buildings. They commit crimes against humanity by destroying their opponents in the most merciless, most savage and most inhuman ways. What could be beyond the danger that these criminal friends pose to humanity?

Do they think this question will not be asked? Khashoggi is making both the American people and the whole world ask this question today, and as this question is asked we can expect many things to begin to change in America as well. Of course one should not dream too much about the probable direction and extent of the change.

Of course human memory is afflicted with forgetfulness, and unfortunately the killers of Khashoggi, and US politicians like Trump who are ready to ignore their murder for a small bribe, rely on this side of human memory. They trust that everything will be forgotten with time and that after a while no one will remember Khashoggi, or the savagery of the manner of his killing, or the crime against humanity, and for this reason they play for time.

But still, it must be known that on one hand the opposition shown by the US public and institutions against Trump in this affair exerts pressure for the matter not to be brushed aside in this way, and that this pressure can change many things. Being humiliated in this way by its own president may bind the CIA more passionately to the position it has taken on this affair. In that case the outcome would be very different.

At the very least, against Trump's reducing Saudi Arabia to MBS, the question of why he is obliged to him will be asked seriously. After all, Saudi Arabia-America relations have continued this way for 70 years. It did not begin with MBS, so why is it said that he should be tolerated to the end, even in the face of such a scandal.

Those who say this can convince Trump that Saudi Arabia-USA relations can continue in the same vein with those who could be alternatives to MBS too.

Whether that is really so is the debate we will be watching with interest in these days.