The U.S.-Saudi relationship was already attracting fierce criticism in some quarters because of the carnage of the war in Yemen; now the gruesome suspicions surrounding the fate of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who lived in the United States and wrote for The Washington Post, have brought a bipartisan chorus demanding answers and threatening sanctions. Meanwhile, both the kingdom and, it seems, President Donald Trump are scrambling for a way out of the crisis. Trump declared Monday that King Salman had told him he knew nothing about the incident, and the president speculated that it could have been the work of “rogue” actors.[...]
Yet the shared interests remain powerful, and have sustained the relationship through numerous crises in the past—including a 1973 oil embargo during the Arab-Israeli war and the revelation in the wake of the September 11 attacks that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi. Since then, the Saudis have positioned themselves as a key ally in the fight against al-Qaeda and then isis (albeit too slowly for many officials and analysts), in particular when terrorists targeted the kingdom itself. The 9/11 Commission Report noted in 2004 that “cooperation had already become significant, but after the bombings in Riyadh in 2003”—in which more than 30 people died when Islamic militants attacked residential compounds in the city—“it improved much more. The Kingdom openly discussed the problem of radicalism, criticized the terrorists as religiously deviant, reduced official support for religious activity overseas, and publicized arrests.” The report added that in 2004, the Saudi ambassador to the United States called for a “jihad” against terrorists.
The period highlighted what the counterterrorism expert Daniel Byman has called in congressional testimony the “paradox” of U.S.-Saudi counterterrorism cooperation: “On the one hand, the Saudi government is a close partner of the United States on counterterrorism. On the other hand, Saudi support for an array of preachers and nongovernment organizations contributes to an overall climate of radicalization, making it far harder to counter violent extremism.”
No comments:
Post a Comment