Hugh Eakin: The Khashoggi Killing: America’s Part in a Saudi Horror. New York Review of Books, Oct. 18, 2018
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/10/18/the-khashoggi-killing-americas-part-in-a-saudi-horror
Excerpt:
Shortly after I met al-Qahtani and al-Khair, I asked President Obama’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James B. Smith, if the US could help men like them [i.e., people wanting political reforms in a liberal direction]. He explained that human rights were not one of the pillars of the US–Saudi relationship. The ambassador was not being controversial. Since its legendary enshrining by President Franklin Roosevelt and King Abdul Aziz more than seventy years ago, the terms of the unlikely Washington–Riyadh alliance have been clear: in exchange for unfettered access to Saudi oil, the world’s leading advanced democracy would guarantee the security of the world’s most hidebound monarchy. Almost nothing else mattered.
In earlier decades, however, Washington was not shy about using the alliance to promote liberalization. Through the mid-1960s, successive US administrations pushed the monarchy to make modernizing reforms, and in 1962, President Kennedy persuaded the Kingdom to abolish slavery. So active was the State Department in urging the Kingdom to open up politically that King Faisal asked then-US Ambassador Hermann Eilts, “Does the US want Saudi Arabia to become another Berkeley campus?”
All this came to an end with the specter of Arab nationalism and then the 1973 oil embargo. The US needed a reliable partner in Riyadh, regardless of its political coloration. And with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Saudis’ ultraconservative religious establishment became a convenient engine for the US-backed mujahideen.
Paradoxically, the Saudis proved equally indispensable in counterterrorism efforts after September 11, since it was on their soil that extremists like Osama bin Laden had germinated and the US needed Saudi cooperation to hunt them down. At the same time, the monarchy provided a formidable bulwark against Iran, as well as an almost bottomless market for the US defense industry. In return for all that, Washington was more than willing to look the other way when it came to human rights abuses and a political ice age inside the Kingdom.
