Seriously, those Rothschild space lasers are a bitch! They zapped me a couple of years ago, and I’ve been incredibly stupid ever since.
So here’s the deal. A couple of days ago, the Atlantic ran a long article by Graeme Wood on Saudi Kingfish Mohammed Bin Salman, Absolute Power, based, according to Wood, on three years’ experience in the “new” Saudi Arabia, as well as a recent interview with the big sheikh himself, conducted with Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg along in tow. The article failed to knock the socks off of WashPost columnist Karen Attiah, who responded sharply, writing The Atlantic’s elevation of MBS is an insult to journalism, and long-time AV fave rave Daniel Larison seconded the emotion with a post on his own substack site Eunomia, The Rehabbing of Mr. Bonesaw. But what really caused my antennae to perk up (and, believe me, post zapping, I do have ‘em) was a post in my old buddy Eugene Volokh’s Volokh Conspiracy by Volokh, quoting, and linking to, Graeme Wood’s riposte to his critics, Of course Journalists Should Interview Autocrats.
But why? Why would Eugene do that? Well, once again, here’s the deal. Back in the Obama years, Jeff Goldberg seemed to be setting himself up as the new Marty Peretz—that is to say, the new liberal champion of Israel, though not so noisy as Marty, implicit rather than explicit. Back in the 20th century, Marty was owner/editor in chief of the New Republic, once actually something of a big deal in DC, though now so long ago that only geezers like me can remember it. Marty turned NR into a continuous cheering section for Israel, something not everyone in DC was crazy about. As I say, Jeff never went full Marty, at least not so that I ever noticed, but he pretty much went three-quarters Marty, particularly, I think, on the occasion when he had a “debate” on the Obama Administration’s nuclear agreement with Iran, which, as I noted in a post labeled I guess no Muslims were available, consisted of three Jews—Jeff himself and two guys who worked for him, David Frum and Peter Beinart.
I don’t know if that was a dealbreaker for me or what, but anyway I stopped paying much attention to the Atlantic until recently, when I started subscribing so I could disagree with Anne Applebaum intelligently. Even with my subscription, I found the Atlantic just wasn’t doing much for me, so I didn’t read it, but now, as I say, all this hullabaloo, and the Volokh Conspiracy connection in particular, has activated my antennae once more, and my conspiracy theory demons are definitely hoppin’, because, as I said in a long, feverish post a few months back, Passive-aggressive hypocrisy hath made its masterpiece: The Volokh Conspiracy’s conspiracy against the rule of law, Eugene Volokh himself is quite a bit of a closet Likudist. So the question is, what are all these two Likudist closet queens Jeff n’ Gene up to?
Now, Wood is, he tells us elsewhere, half Chinese, and, as far as I know, not Jewish, so my conspiracy theory has its limitations, but that I’m not going to let that stop me. Here’s the bottom line: Goldberg ran the story, and Volokh defended its publication (and thus publicized it), because they wanted to push Goldberg’s bottom line: MBS is here to stay, and the U.S. better get over that, and they also ought to realize that the U.S. needs MBS and Saudi Arabia and its oil, and the Biden administration ought to knock off all its limp-wristed, sissy britches moral posturing and 1) let the Saudis bomb the shit out of Yemen if they want to, because who cares about Yemen? and 2) stop trying to revive Obama’s shameful deal with Iran and fucking realize that fucking Iran is the fucking enemy whose monstrous hegemonic plans for the Middle East it is America’s sacred duty to resist!
So, anyway, that’s my theory. To continue:
If you read Graeme Wood’s defense of his article—which I guess you definitely should since I’m trashing it in such a long-winded manner—he points out that, among other things, the Saudis, when translating his article for reprinting in that country, changed his language in a number of places, “proving” that he’d been tough on El Sheiko, and that he wasn’t just a patsy. Then he goes on to say
Various journalists complained that I described MBS as personally “charming” and “intelligent.” To this my reply is twofold. First, MBS was indeed charming and intelligent, and if you want me to say otherwise, then you want to be lied to. Second, if you think charm and intelligence are incompatible with being a sociopath, then your years in Washington, D.C., have taught you less than nothing.
Ooohhh! Bitchy much, Graeme? Well, let’s have a look for ourselves as to what Graeme has to say. After telling us that he found Mohammed Bin Salman “charming and intelligent”, Wood goes on to say
Difficult questions caused the crown prince to move about jumpily, his voice vibrating at a higher frequency. Every minute or two he performed a complex motor tic: a quick backward tilt of the head, followed by a gulp, like a pelican downing a fish. He complained that he had endured injustice, and he evinced a level of victimhood and grandiosity unusual even by the standards of Middle Eastern rulers.
Uh, how “charming and intelligent” is that? Sounds just a little bit frightening to me, and, quite frankly, not at all “charming” or “intelligent”. When the topic of the grisly murder of Jamal Khashoggi, which earned Salman the sobriquet “Mr. Bonesaw” applied by Mr. Larison, comes up Bin Salman goes off on an extended riff to the effect that, “Hey, if I wanted to have someone killed, it wouldn’t have been Khashoggi!” [cue rimshot] Wood clearly indicates his disbelief in Bin Salman’s act, but doesn’t bother to point out, either to Bin Salman or us the extensive evidence file affirming the facts that 1) Khashoggi most definitely was brutally murdered, and his corpse dismembered, by Saudi operatives and that 2) the murder couldn’t have occurred without Bin Salman’s explicit approval. Instead, Bin Salam is allowed to claim, uncontradicted, that he punished the guilty parties, and yet he's the one who gets blamed for it! He's the good guy, not the bad guy!
Later in the piece, Wood “explains” how Bin Salman got the top position in Saudi Arabia, even though, while a member of the Saudi royal family (which is quite large), he was not the “closest to the throne”—in Saudi Arabia, kings are not chosen by simple hereditary succession, as in Great Britain. Instead, the current king, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, aka “Salman of Saudi Arabia”, selected Bin Salman as next in line. According to Wood, Salman passed over two lesser candidates, one with a Ph.D. and one a pilot. Why? The answer is, you know, gripping:
But Salman had an inkling that the next king would need a certain grit and fluency with power that cannot be acquired in a seminar or a flight simulator. The new generation, born into luxury, tended to be soft, and the next king would need to be a modern version of a desert warlord like his grandfather.
How can Wood possibly know any of this? He can’t. He can’t know what “inklings” Salman had, if he ever had any, and can’t know that Bin Salman is “a modern version of a desert warlord like his grandfather,” if indeed he is one, and if indeed his grandfather was one—and even if being a “desert warlord” is, you know, a good thing. This is pure unadulterated bullshit, pure and simple, bullshit propaganda that was fed to him by one of Salman’s toadies, bullshit that he regurgitates for the dubious benefit of his readers. It’s true, as Wood points out in his response, that the Saudis censored his piece, but they didn’t lose the line about Salman being a “modern version of a desert warlord”. Who doesn’t like being called a bad ass?
Earlier in the article Wood provides an overview of Salman’s rule:
Even MBS’s critics concede that he has roused the country from an economic and social slumber. In 2016, he unveiled a plan, known as Vision 2030, to convert Saudi Arabia from—allow me to be blunt—one of the world’s weirdest countries into a place that could plausibly be called normal. It is now open to visitors and investment, and lets its citizens partake in ordinary acts of recreation and even certain vices. The crown prince has legalized cinemas and concerts, and invited notably raw hip-hop artists to perform. He has allowed women to drive and to dress as freely as they can in dens of sin like Dubai and Bahrain. He has curtailed the role of reactionary clergy and all but abolished the religious police. He has explored relations with Israel.
He has also created a climate of fear unprecedented in Saudi history. Saudi Arabia has never been a free country. But even the most oppressive of MBS’s predecessors, his uncle King Faisal, never presided over an atmosphere like that of the present day, when it is widely believed that you place yourself in danger if you criticize the ruler or pay even a mild compliment to his enemies. MBS’s critics—not regicidal zealots or al Qaeda sympathizers, just ordinary people with independent thoughts about his reforms—have gone into exile. Some fear that if he keeps getting his way, the modernized Saudi Arabia will oppress in ways the old Saudi Arabia never imagined. Khalid al-Jabri, the exiled son of one of MBS’s most prominent critics, warned me that worse was yet to come: “When he’s King Mohammed, Crown Prince MBS is going to be remembered as an angel.”
Let me have a few quibbles with the first paragraph. I can wonder if all of Salman’s critics “concede” all that Wood says they concede. This is common journalistic sleight of hand to “prove” a point without really bothering to go to the effort of proving it. I also question his word choice when describing “old” Saudi Arabia as one of the “weirdest” countries. Would one describe Nazi Germany or Stalin’s USSR as “weird”? Because, you know, they were pretty “weird”! I think of old Saudi Arabia as being a deeply reactionary, misogynistic, anti-Semitic, mullah-ridden autocracy. More words, to be sure, but less isn’t always more.
The second paragraph, I will concede, pretty much lays it on the line. The thing is, most of Wood’s article, other than the interview with Salman himself, is devoted to “atmosphere”—what it’s like living in Saudi Arabia today. And here is where the Washington Post piece by Karen Attiah finds its traction. All of the “local color” that Wood provides affirms his first paragraph, not his second—Riyadh swings, baby! 24/7!
In Riyadh I found, effortlessly, young people thrilled by the reforms. Like the other major Saudi cities, Dammam and Jeddah, Riyadh has specialty coffee shops in abundance—little outposts of air-conditioning and caffeine, in an environment otherwise characterized by heat and boredom.
…
In another café, in the northern city of Ha’il, a man pointed to a mural, freshly painted, of the Lebanese singer Fairouz, her hair flowing beautifully over her shoulders. Next to her were her lyrics (in Arabic): “Bring me the flute and sing, for song is the secret to eternity.”
“One year ago,” he said, “that would not be possible.” By “that,” he meant pretty much everything: a woman’s hair; a celebration of song; a celebration of a song about singing; and, on top of all this, the music playing in the café as we spoke. Before the rise of MBS, every component of this scene would have violated long-standing canons of Saudi morality enforcement. The religious police, known in Arabic as the hay’a or mutawwi’in, would have busted the joint. They used to show up in ankle-length white thobes, their beards curly and unkempt. They yelled at people for dressing immodestly, or thwacked at them with sticks to goad them to the mosque for one of the five daily prayers. For the flagrancy of the Fairouz sins, the café’s managers would have been detained, questioned, and punished. “Screw those guys,” the man said, in a succinct expression of the most common sentiment I heard about the religious police.
Yeah, screw those guys! Who needs ‘em? Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf? Sure, but what happened to that “climate of fear unprecedented in Saudi history”? Where’d that go? Sounds like Salman has just traded theocratic tyranny for the secular brand, but Wood is too busy rockin’ it with the young folk to care. As long as you can party, who needs freedom of speech?
When Wood comes to the end of his lengthy piece, he comes up with a “hard nosed” (my words) conclusion:
Since reality has handed us MBS, the question for America is how to influence him. This question is practical rather than moral: If your moralism drives him into a partnership with China, what good will it have been? A fundamental principle of Chinese foreign relations is butting out of other countries’ internal affairs and expecting the same from them. Certainly Beijing will not reprimand him for his treatment of dissidents.
In effect, both the Saudis and the Americans are now in the Ritz-Carlton, forced to bargain with a jailer who promises us prosperity if we submit to his demands, and Mad Max if we do not. The predicament is familiar, because it is the same barrel over which every secular Arab autocrat has positioned America since the 1950s. Egypt, Iraq, and Syria all traded semitribal societies for modern ones, and they all became squalid dictatorships that justified themselves as bulwarks against chaos.
In 2017, Salman had hundreds of high level Saudis, including members of the royal family, rounded up and held prisoner in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton. In his article, Wood makes it sound like they were given rooms at the Ritz and told if they didn’t sign over much of their wealth to Salman and behave themselves thereafter, they wouldn’t regain their freedom.
Shockingly, it appears that conditions were just a bit worse than Wood implies. Here’s an account provided by a November 2020 article in the Guardian by Max Chulov:
“On the first night, everyone was blindfolded and nearly everyone was subjected to what Egyptian intelligence calls the ‘night of the beating’”, said a source with intimate knowledge of what took place. “People were asked if they knew why they were there. No one did. Most were beaten, some of them badly. There were people tied to the walls, in stress positions. It went on for hours, and all of those doing the torturing were Saudis.”
So there’s that, but there’s more: We aren’t in the Ritz-Carlton. We aren’t going to be beaten up and tortured if we don’t do Bin Salman’s bidding. It is still true that Saudi Arabia can affect the world price and supply of oil like no other nation, and recent events have demonstrated, once more, just how important that power can be, but we still aren’t at the Saudi’s mercy. We don’t have to beg for their support. We don’t have to indulge their every whim. We don’t have to bomb Iran for them. According to Wood, if we don’t make Iran happy, well, the Chinese will. Well, sure, China will buy Iran’s oil, and sell them weapons, but are they going to bomb Iran for them? I don’t think so.
Furthermore, I don’t think Wood, and, by extension, Goldberg and Volokh, have any idea of how far this sort of “transactional” thinking can go. Isn’t the argument Wood advances for “accepting” Bin Salman the same one used by Trump’s apologists? “Sure, he’s rough around the edges, he cuts corners, but he gets the job done!” And, uh, couldn’t we use the same argument for “accepting” Iran?
But that’s only the beginning. Once you start thinking transactional, where exactly do you stop? What’s the deal with Israel, after all? Why should we be nice to them? Where’s their oil?
For Goldberg and Volokh, the “correct” U.S. policy towards Israel is based entirely on morality: Thanks to the world’s unconscionable neglect—neglect and outright evil—the Jews have suffered as no people have ever suffered in history. The moral debt the world owes to the Jewish people is literally infinite, and the U.S. has an infinite moral duty to support Israel, and the nature and extent of that support can and must be defined entirely by Israel itself.
Well, that’s one way of thinking. But if you start playing by Wood’s “Big Boy” rules, all that goes out the window.
I can disagree with what Mr. Wood has to say, and I do, and still defend to the death (figuratively speaking, of course) his right to say it, but I can also point out that he engages, on numerous occasions, in dishonest and disingenuous journalism. Now, if Mr. Wood wants to write such stuff, and Mr. Goldberg wants to publish it, and Mr. Volokh wants to publicize it, in his usual passive-aggressive style, well, again, that is their right, and I defend that right. But I also deprecate and ridicule the manner in which they exercise that right.
Afterwords
A couple of afterwords. First of all, serious tip of the hat to Eugene for fighting for “good” free speech in his post “Free Speech and the War in Ukraine,” from the National Coalition Against Censorship, praising, and linking to, the Coalition’s post Free Speech and the War in Ukraine, denouncing the stupid culture war currently being waged against everything Russian. As Spinoza, always my go to guy when the going gets rough, put it “Hatred can never be good.” (Proposition XLV, Part IV, Ethics)
Poor Marty Peretz, still kickin’ at 83, has lived too long, something I may be saying about myself if things don’t pick up soon. Marty’s vision of Israel was of a purely secular state, and had almost nothing in common, culturally, with the contemporary Likudist reality that prevails there today.
UPDATE
Saudi Arabia has just executed 81 people, the largest one-day total in modern times. I wonder what Gene n' Jeff n' Graeme think of this one.
