Thanks. I hadn’t seen anything like that before.
Not sure it excuses killing & dismembering someone in your own embassy, though.
As Eran Lerman, the vice president of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies and a former deputy national security council head, said: “It is certainly not in our interests to see the status of the Saudi government diminished in Washington.”
But, as it increasingly appears that the Saudi government – even the reformist Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS – had a hand in Khashoggi’s disappearance, that is exactly what is starting to happen: the shine is coming off MBS’s luster.
It didn’t start with this incident. Already in August, when Saudi Arabia expelled Canada’s ambassador and froze new trade deals because of Canadian criticism of Saudi human rights violations, voices were raised in the US asking whether MBS is the right leader to cozy up to.
The one positive fallout from the Khashoggi affair, Lerman said, might be that it will force MBS to be more cautious.
“For all the good that he has been doing from our perspective on the balance of power in the region, there is one after-effect that I hear all too often from people watching – that he is impetuous, reckless, doing too much, too fast and that he is not careful enough about the consequences. So if this ends up adding a dimension of caution,” Lerman said, “it will not be a bad thing.”
https://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Khashoggi-and-the-Jewish-question-569256