The US relationship with Saudi Arabia does more than probably any other US tie to destroy the illusion that the US’ sphere of alignment is based on anything other than economic opportunism. If the US market didn’t have access to Saudi oil, or if Saudi and American targets for oil prices diverged too much, or if the Saudis weren’t willing to tolerate the US’s number one Middle East investment, Israel, the Saudi rap sheet is so long and treacherous that they would be the number one target every single night on the news.
They’re a monarchy, and a Wahhabist fundamentalist one at that. Their ruling class funds a lot of the Wahhabist insurgent groups, like al Qaeda, al Nusra, and ISIS, and has exported their extremism via madrassas to places like West Africa, where new Islamic State groups, and similar groups like Boko Haram, have caused a lot of devastation. The US “War on Terror” is largely a puppet show. Saudi royals, as well as their cousins from the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar, fund and organize projects that promote sectarian violence.
Those groups either attack and knock out governments that the US would rather see gone anyway, like in Syria, where the former leader of al Nusra is now the President, and go figure, is doing more sectarian violence. Or they cause a ruckus in US-aligned states, which is a great pretext for increasing US presence and spending there. And they terrorize their own people as much as anyone else.
Saudi Arabia is right at the top of the list for (known) executions year after year, and many of their executions are of dissidents, including women’s liberation and queer liberation activists, and people critical of the government. There’s nothing redeemable there. They don’t check any box on the US’s supposed list of priorities by which they judge the countries on the Hot Seat. There’s no democracy; they actively work to undermine democracy abroad, as they have in Egypt, Sudan, and Yemen.
Their domestic human rights record is abysmal, and they export their atrocities throughout the region, again notably in Yemen, where the Saudi blockade once caused the largest known cholera outbreak in human history. The only thing the Saudis have to offer is economic value, and that’s good enough for Uncle Sam.
Check out Elrond Hubbard on Youtube for new episodes of the Hastening about the Iran War coming soon.
Learn more about Community Broadcasting Network
Watch us on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/@CommunityBroadcastingNetwork
Watch Us on Peertube:
https://vod.newellijay.tv/c/archives/videos
Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/CommunityBroadcastingNetwork
Leave a Reply