SAUDI CONNECTION

PETER KOENIG—Why does it take the assassination of a journalist – granted, a horrendous and grisly murder by his own country’s government – no matter how controversial Jamal Khashoggi was, he has been writing for our western MSM, for the truth tellers, such as the Washington post and the NYTimes. That may have helped making him more important than 50,000 slaughtered and maimed Yemeni children – more important in the sense that only through his abject murder, the European – maybe – will react and ‘sanction’ the Saudis.

GHASSAN KADI—Prince Bandar Bin Sultan was Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador to Washington from 1983 to 2005. He became the Saudi royal who best understood the Western mind and how the West regarded the Arab World, and especially Saudi Arabia. He had his own evil agenda he wanted to use to catapult himself into ascending to the throne as the first grandson of founding King Abdul-Aziz.

ANDREW LEVINE—So far, the country has gotten through nearly two years of Trump and is still, for the most part, not too seriously damaged. But there are at least two more years to go, and even if fortune smiles upon us and that longed for “blue wave” materializes, it won’t help much.

If our luck nevertheless holds, future historians will wonder why the Khashoggi murder, but not, say, the more outrageous and far more lethal war that the Saudis are waging, with American help, in Yemen, or the many other greater and lesser assaults on international law and basic human morality that have always been the stock and trade of the Saudi royal family, get a pass.

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS—President Putin has complained for years, and warned of the consequences, of Washington establishing ABM missile sites in Poland and Romania under cover that their purpose is to protect Europe from Iranian missile attack. Putin has pointed out repeatedly that these missile sites can easily, without anyone knowing, be converted into a nuclear cruise missile attack posture against Russia. Yet, the crazed US National Security Advisor claims, illogically, that it is the Russians, who have nothing to gain from violating the treaty, who are cheating.

GHASSAN KADI—Jamal Khashoggi was no fool. He knew the modus operandi of the Saudi Government too well. He knew that what he had said was tantamount to a death sentence in the brutal Kingdom of Sand. So what incited him to walk into the Consulate? To receive a divorce certificate so he could remarry as the reports are trying to make us believe? Not a chance.