ANDRE VLTCHEK—The country of Syria is standing tall. It did not crumble like Libya or Iraq did. It never surrendered. It never even considered surrender as an option. It went through total agony, through fire and unimaginable pain, but in the end, it won. It almost won. And the victory will, most likely, be final in 2019.
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MoA—The pressure on Saudi Arabia, and on Trump, will not recede. The CIA will insist to act on its assessment. The military industrial complex will demand real weapon sales. The media onslaught will also continue. The Washington Post, for which Khashoggi wrote, reports today of torture against women activists in Saudi prisons.
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GARY LEUPP—Actually if one looks at Iran one sees a country with a far better human rights record than Saudi Arabia. Whether you look at women’s rights, or press freedom, or the operation of the legislature and judiciary, religious rights of Christians and other religious minorities including Zoroastrians and Jews, you find that Iran is light years ahead of Saudi Arabia. Only a fool would deny that. But here is the president of the United States, whom (foolish) parents tell their kids is leader of the country, worthy of respect. He is now plainly an accomplice, an enabler, a liar, an object of well-deserved contempt.
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There are new developments in the scandal surrounding the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi writer who was a columnist for the Washington Post, and was a longtime royalist and a key figure in the royal family, who was killed in a gristly assassination in Turkey. The CIA now says that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, personally ordered the killing of Khashoggi. Mohammed bin Salman has denied this, and President Donald Trump has also cast aspersions on this and actually cast doubt on the CIA’s assessment. Here’s a clip of Donald Trump.
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ERIC ZUESSE—In 2017, in Saudi Arabia’s capital of Riyadh, Trump sold, to the Saudi Crown Prince, initially, $350 billion of U.S.-made weapons over a ten-year period (the largest weapons-sale in world history), and $110 billion in just the first year. That deal was soon increased to $404 billion. For Trump publicly to acknowledge that Salman had “ordered Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination” would jeopardize this entire deal, and, perhaps, jeopardize the consequent boom in America’s economy. It also would jeopardize the U.S. alliance’s war against Shiites in Yemen.
