Mark Twain or Stephen Colbert at their most ingenious couldn’t conceive of a wackier scenario than President Donald Trump’s recent visit to Saudi Arabia.
Anointing the Saudi royal family the de facto bosses of global Islam and naming them America’s closest allies in the war against terror, Trump declared that the real sponsors of worldwide terrorism are the Iranians. It was Through the Looking Glass squared for anyone familiar with geopolitics, particularly regarding the Middle East.
After all, it is these same friendly Saudis who financed the Sept. 11 attacks (all but three of the hijackers were citizens of Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab satellites), who sponsor the Taliban in Afghanistan, and fund and train armed extremists throughout the Muslim world, including ISIS.
In some cases, the Saudi government doesn’t directly fund the terrorists; they rely on wealthy Gulf Arab oil sheikhs who contribute billions through “charity organizations” while Saudi Arabia and company turn a blind eye.
In spite of all this, Trump also expanded our policy of arming Saudi Arabia to the teeth, signing over more sophisticated U.S. military gear that will eventually be worth $350 billion.
At first, this outrageous spectacle made me laugh out loud, but then I found myself getting angry. I thought of my friends and acquaintances killed by Saudi-backed groups over the years:
Dr. Tom Grams, from here in Durango, gunned down by Taliban-linked terrorists in Afghanistan; Sgt. Bob Paul, my teammate and buddy in Baghdad, killed by a Taliban suicide car bomber in Kabul; Professor Majrooh, head of the pro-Western progressive Afghan refugee community in Pakistan during the Soviet occupation, assassinated in front of his house by a hitman from a Saudi-backed radical Muslim group.And there are more.
Put bluntly: In return for arms industry profits and oil, we are perfectly willing to watch our own fellow Americans, military and civilian, and foreigners around the world who share our values, be killed by fanatics backed by Saudi Arabia.
And if the goal of this charade is to “Make America Great Again,” flash back to Iran under the Shah. Iran was our great regional ally back then, giving us oil in return for billions of dollars in weaponry, keeping the region safe from communism and Islamic radicalism.
At the same time, totally unnoticed by our diplomats and intelligence experts, the Iranian people had grown to hate the Shah, largely because he was seen as an American puppet (in fact, his family was originally put into power by a CIA-organized coup).
I saw America’s version of Iran beginning to come apart when I traveled there in the early 1970s; on the street you heard angry mutterings everywhere, against the government and, inevitably, Americans. On one train trip from Teheran to Istanbul (impossible today), I awoke in the night to see agents of Savakh, the Shah’s dreaded secret police, drag a distinguished-looking elderly couple from their compartment and drag them away: a glimpse of tyranny in action. A few years later, of course, the Shah was deposed and his regime totally collapsed.
Saudi Arabia is not Iran, but it would be incredibly foolish to ignore the parallels. The Saud family are absolute dictators who gained power by brute force, and who preside over the cruelest, most politically backward nation in the Islamic world. Saudi women have virtually no rights; by official government policy, no Jews are allowed to enter the country.
Recently a young man was sentenced in a Saudi religious court to 10,000 lashes for daring to blog that astronomy is a science. When he nearly died during his initial 10 lashes, the court ruled that he remain in prison long enough to recover and then go on to receive all the rest of his 9,990 lashes, no matter how many years, or decades, it takes.
That’s our friend and ally in a nutshell.
During Trump’s visit to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, polls taken among everyday Saudis showed that 84 percent of them hate our president, largely because of his anti-Muslim immigration policies, and a majority have developed negative feelings about the United States for the same reason. I doubt if Trump’s all-out endorsement of the Saud family enhanced their standing among their own restive citizens any more than our love of the Shah helped him secure the hearts and minds of his countrymen.
“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it” is a moldy old cliché ... but it happens to be all too true.
Rob Schultheis has covered Afghanistan and the Middle East for Time, CBS, NPR and The New York Times. He also writes about climbing, the arts and environment from his home in Telluride, where he has lived since 1973. Reach him at robschultheis1@gmail.com.
