Fossil fuel drama: "Absolutely not," said Abdulaziz bin Salman, the Saudi Arabian minister of energy, on TV when asked if his country would agree to the fossil fuel phase-down currently being drawn up at the United Nations' COP28 climate talks in Dubai. Abdulaziz "called out countries pushing for a phase out of fossil fuel for hypocrisy, saying that if they believed in it they should just get on with it," reports Bloomberg.
"I'm not naming names," added Abdulaziz, whose country has been exploring carbon capture technology as a possible solution. "But those countries who really believe in phasing out and phasing down hydrocarbons, you should come out and put together a plan for how in starting 1st of January 2024."
Meanwhile, the COP28 president is being raked through the coals for a soundbite questioning "the scientific basis for calls to phase out fossil fuels in order to keep global warming to 1.5 C," per Bloomberg, part of comments Sultan Al Jaber—an oil executive who is leading this climate summit—made in late November during a debate with the former Irish president.
"A phase down and a phase out of fossil fuel in my view is inevitable—it is essential," said Al Jaber, "but we need to be real, serious and pragmatic about it. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase out of fossil fuel is what's going to achieve 1.5."
Into the caves we go: Al Jaber also said that a full phase-out of fossil fuels would "take the world back into caves." Some scientists and activists have not welcomed Al Jaber's blunt realism, but have said his comments are "verging on climate denial."
To be sure, Al Jaber has been properly criticized for a possible conflict of interest, as he is also the CEO of the Emirati state-owned oil and gas company, ADNOC. But he's correct to weigh tradeoffs and to point to the fact that world leaders need a more concrete plan, since toothless U.N. agreements don't really cut it.
It was only back in 2015 that 195 countries agreed, at an earlier summit in Paris, to limit global temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius to blunt the very worst impacts of climate change. But the agreement "lack[ed] an enforcement mechanism," and "an analysis by Climate Action Tracker found that, as of 2021, none of the nations with large-scale emissions had instituted climate pledges in keeping with the 1.5-degree target," per a New York Times analysis.
Chris Christie erasure? Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has just barely met the threshold to be present on the GOP debate stage tomorrow, per an announcement by the Republican National Committee yesterday. He will join former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, current Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and TikTok user Vivek Ramaswamy on the debate stage. Frontrunner Donald Trump will be skipping this debate, as he has done for all others this season, in favor of a fundraising event. If you have masochistic tendencies, tune in at 8 p.m. ET tomorrow.
Scenes from New York:
I wanted to bring some holiday cheer, and write something festive, but the Columbia crazies keep derailing my plans with their straight-up Hamas apologism:
We will be having our second teach-in this Wednesday the 6th at 12pm, in room C-03 of the Social Work building! We will discuss the significance of the Palestinian counteroffensive on October 7th and the centrality of revolutionary violence to anti-imperialism. See y'all there! pic.twitter.com/PnAwMQwIx2
— Columbia Social Workers 4 Palestine (@CSSW4Palestine) December 3, 2023
Did you know? pic.twitter.com/gWvJoxTwYb
— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) December 4, 2023
Protesters "Flood Brooklyn for Gaza" marched around Williamsburg and have now begun marching over the Williamsburg bridge pic.twitter.com/j6tfNReVvY
— Timcast News (@TimcastNews) December 4, 2023
The post Back to the Caves appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Canada and India are at odds over the Canadian government's claims that Indian agents assassinated Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh separatist leader, in British Columbia. The crime has damaged relations between the two countries, and it may be part of a growing and very troubling trend. If the hit really was state sponsored, it's one of a wave of such acts taken by governments against critics and dissidents who seek refuge on foreign soil.
"Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is accusing the government of India of involvement in the fatal shooting of a Canadian Sikh leader — a claim that will have seismic effects on an already shaky bilateral relationship," the CBC reported September 18. "Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar was brazenly shot dead outside a Sikh temple in Surrey, B.C. on June 18."
Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who moved to Canada from India in 1997, was long of interest to the Indian government. A supporter of a separate state for Sikhs, Nijjar was accused of terrorism by Indian officials who offered a cash bounty for information leading to his arrest. They may not have stopped there; Canadian Security Intelligence Service officers apparently warned Nijjar that his life was in danger and the U.S. Ambassador to Canada says the Five Eyes intelligence alliance of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand supported Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's claim that Nijjar was targeted by Indian agents.
If he was targeted in his country of refuge by a government he'd offended, Hardeep Singh Nijjar is far from an isolated case.
"All over the world, individuals brave enough to speak out against repression are being targeted by autocrats who reach across borders to silence their voices," Freedom House warned this year. "Tactics of transnational repression—including assassinations, unlawful deportations, detentions, renditions, physical and digital threats, and coercion by proxy—are used by governments to stamp out dissent among diasporas and exiles living beyond their borders."
The Washington, D.C.-based organization claims to have "information on 854 direct, physical incidents of transnational repression committed by 38 governments in 91 countries around the world since 2014."
This isn't an entirely new phenomenon. Critics of Russia's government, in its old communist version and its current generically authoritarian flavor, have long had a habit of running afoul of poison, radioactive substances, open windows, and other lethal mishaps—often outside Moscow's jurisdiction.
"Russia was responsible for the killing of Alexander Litvinenko, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has found," the BBC reported in 2021. "Litvinenko, a former Russian spy who became a British citizen, was fatally poisoned with radioactive polonium-210 in London in 2006."
But the practice of reaching beyond borders to target dissidents has become more common in recent years, with the Chinese government a major offender.
"The Chinese Communist regime, often with the aid of other governments, is systematically hunting down its political and religious exiles, no matter where in the world they seek refuge," Nate Schenkkan and Sarah Cook reported in 2021 for The Diplomat.
"Fox Hunt is a sweeping bid by General Secretary Xi [Jinping] to target Chinese nationals whom he sees as threats and who live outside China, across the world," FBI Director Christopher Wray charged in a 2020 speech. "We're talking about political rivals, dissidents, and critics seeking to expose China's extensive human rights violations. Hundreds of the Fox Hunt victims that they target live right here in the United States, and many are American citizens or green card holders."
In April of this year, authorities arrested two men accused of helping establish a secret Chinese "police station" in New York's Chinatown. "The PRC, through its repressive security apparatus, established a secret physical presence in New York City to monitor and intimidate dissidents and those critical of its government," according to U.S. Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen.
Likewise, the Saudi government is implicated in the infamous 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey. "American officials listened to a recording obtained by Turkish intelligence that not only captured Mr. Khashoggi's struggle against Saudi agents and his killing, but also the sounds of the saw being used on his body," reported The New York Times.
Turkey's government, it should be noted, cooperates with Beijing to silence Muslim Uyghur refugees who fled to Turkey, and it has sought assistance in muzzling its own dissidents. "Uzbekistani security services helped abduct a man from his apartment in Tashkent and return him to Turkey," notes Freedom House.
This is where matters get more disturbing. While increasingly illiberal, Turkey still has elections and (eroding) domestic debate. The same can be said of India, which is drifting in an autocratic direction but is not (yet) explicitly authoritarian. If India's elected government is responsible for Nijjar's assassination, that means transnational repression isn't just a vice of central-casting dictators.
Even countries usually considered free are guilty. Journalist Julian Assange was seized by the U.K. at the behest of the United States on what Amnesty International describes as "politically motivated charges." Then-Bolivian President Evo Morales's plane was forced to land in Austria in 2013 by European governments cooperating with the U.S. on suspicion that whistleblower Edward Snowden was aboard.
Freedom House rightfully complains, "because so many democratic countries have adopted policies that harden their borders and discourage asylum seekers, people who advocate for human rights or defend democratic principles in harsh environments are often forced to remain in parts of the world where autocrats make the rules." On the assumption that some countries are true safe harbors for peaceful dissenters, the organization wants free countries to be more welcoming and protective to refugees.
But democratic countries are only refuges if they're not actively assisting other regimes in acts of transnational repression or engaging in the practice themselves. As it is, while peaceful dissidents and critics of all sorts are certainly better off in more-open societies than under explicitly authoritarian regimes, their safety is relative. How much protection they enjoy is subject not only to the competency of local authorities, but also to how well-disposed they are to specific asylum-seekers.
Canada's government may be doing its best to bring Hardeep Singh Nijjar's assassins to account. But government officials are always jealous of their power, and no place is truly safe for those who cross thin-skinned officials.
The post India's Alleged Assassination of a Dissident in Canada Highlights Repression Across Borders appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A court in Saudi Arabia has
The post Brickbat: The King and I appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The promise of cities is that they have a lot more stuff to do, things to buy and sell, places to work, and people to meet than towns and villages. It's why large metros manage to be richer, more attractive places than smaller, isolated communities, despite all the traffic, noise, crime, pollution, and general urban dysfunction that inevitably comes with them.
It's strange then that all across the world, city planners and the politicians under their sway keep trying to replace the interconnected, agglomerated city with sealed-off, self-contained urban villages no one will have to leave.
Last week, the Scottish Parliament overwhelmingly approved a new national planning framework that prioritizes the creation of "20-minute neighborhoods" where residents can access jobs, housing, shopping, health and education facilities, and even food-producing gardens in a 20-minute walk or bike ride.
This national framework serves as a guideline for local councils that produce more precise plans of where new development is allowed and approve individual development applications.
Scottish national authorities are hoping that by encouraging local authorities to reject out-of-town retail outlets and other projects people would be willing to drive to, they can cut emissions and create more "sustainable and fair" cities.
Scotland's 20-minute neighborhood plan is a slightly more modest version of its intellectual inspiration—the 15-minute city.
The term was first coined by Sorbonne professor Carlos Moreno in 2016, and riffs off preexisting ideas of an "urban village" or "smart city" where travel and emissions can be reduced or eliminated through the creation of planned neighborhoods that contain everything one might need within a few blocks.
"The idea is to design or redesign cities so that in a maximum of 15 minutes, on foot or by bicycle, city dwellers can enjoy most of what constitutes urban life: access to their jobs, their homes, food, health, education, culture, and recreation," said Moreno during a 2020 TED Talk.
A March 2022 article published by the World Economic Forum traces the "surprising stickiness" of the 15-minute city all the way back to 19th-century Scotsman Patrick Geddes' vision for "Eutopia." Through proper planning, Geddes hoped that Eutopian towns and cities could transition society away from "money wages" and the messy individual plans they encouraged and toward a more communal, energy-conserving built environment of "folk, work, and place."
Geddes' contemporary countrymen aren't the only ones taking to the idea.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo made the creation of a 15-minute city the centerpiece of her 2020 reelection campaign. Former Obama administration Housing and Urban Development Secretary and failed 2021 New York City mayoral candidate Shaun Donovan ran on the idea as well. Seattle has long pursued a similar urban village strategy to guide its planning and zoning decisions, all the in name of reducing car travel and emissions.
Saudi Arabia's much-publicized The Line takes the 15-minute city idea to its extremely silly logical end-point. The $500 billion pet project of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman would create a brand new, linear city in the middle of the desert in which every destination is reachable by a 20-minute train ride, and all the necessities of daily life (schools, grocery stores, pharmacies, etc.) can be reached within five minutes.
Part of the "stickiness" of the 15-minute city is pretty easy to understand. Access to everyday amenities within a short trip is something most people prize. Fortunately, it's easy to find these neighborhoods where zoning regulations don't make them illegal.
In a 2022 response to Moreno, New York University's Marron Institute of Urban Management researcher Alain Bertaud notes that most Parisians have already achieved access to a wide number of grocery stores, bakeries, and the like within walking distance without the help of invasive planners.
"The abundance and variety of bakeries are not due to meticulous municipal planning but to market mechanisms," he writes. "If Parisians were to prefer herring to croissants for breakfast in the future, the market would adjust, and herring merchants will gradually replace the bakeries without any 'redesign' of Paris."
Paris lacks zoning rules that exclude commercial uses like bakeries and food stores from residential areas. It's also a very dense place. That means bakers and grocers can legally establish themselves within walking distance of many, many customers.
But even in sprawling, tightly zoned America, the median distance to the nearest food store is just under one mile. That's on the outer edge of walking distance for most people and a very convenient bike or car trip for everyone else.
If the U.S. had fewer zoning restrictions that cap densities and separate residential and commercial uses, odds are there'd be a lot more neighborhoods like central Paris where most amenities could be reached just by walking.
So, the main benefit of the 15-minute city could be achieved without planners' grand designs, whether in Scotland or the United States. Most other elements of the 15-minute city would fail because the concept misunderstands the purpose of cities.
Cities are labor markets, as Bertaud likes to say.
Their primary function is to connect people with highly particular skills to employers with highly particular demands for labor. You need a wide universe of workers and firms for this division of labor to be successful. (If that matchmaking of capital and labor could happen on the scale of a neighborhood, there'd be no need for cities at all.)
Given this, 15-minute city proponents' plan of clustering jobs and residents together is doomed to fail at the stated goal of reducing travel. Living next to an office complex doesn't guarantee that there's a job for you there. You also might not want to rent an apartment next to your work or move every time you change jobs.
In his book Order Without Design, Bertaud gives an example of a mixed-use urban village built on the outskirts of Seoul, South Korea, that was supposed to eliminate residents' need to commute. In reality, the people who moved into the village's housing continued to commute to their jobs in the city center, while the village's office space was rented by companies whose workers traveled in from downtown.
A similar dynamic is at play for other urban amenities.
While variety is nice, grocery stores are relatively interchangeable. Unless someone has very particular tastes or needs, they'll be willing to settle for shopping at the closest one. But more specialized retail outlets and service providers that serve a smaller percentage of the population need a wider universe of customers to draw on to be profitable. Absent extreme levels of density, they'll need customers coming from outside that 15-minute walkshed to stay viable.
So, while there's certainly nothing objectionable about mixed-use neighborhoods of offices, shops, and homes, the idea that the existence of these neighborhoods will eliminate, or even substantially reduce, commuting is wrong. That means plans to substantially cut emissions just by creating these neighborhoods are also destined to fail.
These doomed schemes to create 15-minute cities and 20-minute neighborhoods aren't costless either if they're paired with restrictive regulations.
If Scotland's new planning framework forces cities and towns to reject new suburban office parks and outlet malls, they won't necessarily be reducing driving. But they will be increasing the scarcity, and therefore cost, of the existing offices and outlet malls people are already driving to.
Scotland's national framework also endorses restrictions on housing production that make the realistic elements of 20-minute neighborhoods less feasible.
Its "quality homes" plank says that new market-rate development will only generally be supported where 25 percent of new units are provided at affordable rates. Similar inclusionary zoning policies in the U.S. act as a major tax on new development.
Scotland's planning framework also says that developments of 50 or more units have to produce a Statement of Community Benefit detailing the improvements they'll make to local infrastructure, amenities, and affordable housing. Individual development in existing neighborhoods will be allowed if they "do not have a detrimental impact on the character or environmental quality of the home and the surrounding area in terms of size, design and materials."
Making new housing development a more expensive, cumbersome process means fewer homes get built and fewer people end up living within the "20-minute neighborhoods" Scottish planners and politicians are trying to encourage.
There's an incredible paternalism to the idea of the 15-minute city and the idea that planners can organize people's lives on such a minute level.
Bertaud, in his response to Moreno, notes that the distance one travels to work each day is the product of the tradeoffs an individual makes between employment options, residential environment, housing prices, school quality, and more.
From Scotland to Saudi Arabia and Paris, planners have become convinced that the right tradeoff for everyone ends up with all these things being 15 minutes (or 20 minutes or 5 minutes) away. Cities, and the people who live in them, are a little more complicated than that.
The post The International Idiocy of the 15-Minute City appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Gasoline prices that had been drifting downward over the past three months have now reversed and risen this past week to a national average of $3.79 per gallon, according to the American Automobile Association. Last week, at a meeting of the White House Competition Council, President Joe Biden hectored oil companies and gasoline retailers telling them: "Bring down the prices you're charging at the pump to reflect the cost you pay for the product. Do it now. Do it now. Not a month from now—do it now."
Well, at least the president did implicitly acknowledge that there is a relationship between the cost of crude oil and the price of gasoline at the pump. In fact, the correlation between the two is quite close. Basically, when the price of a barrel of oil rises by $10, the price of a gallon of gasoline increases by 25 cents, calculates the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.
To see the correlation between oil and gasoline prices, let's take a look at two charts. The first is from The Real Economy Blog economist Joseph Brusuelas.
The second chart is from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
So what has happened to the price of the benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil in the past couple of weeks? It rose from a recent low of about $77 to about $87.
Not surprisingly, so too have prices at the pump. But the $10 per barrel rise has resulted in a more than 25-cent increase at the pump. Blame "rockets and feathers." As the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank explained in a 2014 report, gasoline retailers, in order to maintain their profit margins, rapidly increase (rocket) their prices when they see crude oil prices rising. However, because consumers have gotten used to higher prices, retailers are generally slower (feathers) to reduce prices as crude oil prices decline. The study did note that retail prices tended to fall faster when competing gasoline stations were clustered close to one another.
Remember when Biden traveled to Saudi Arabia in July to beg that murderous regime to increase oil production in order to bring down global petroleum prices? Now the Saudis and other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) are repaying his groveling by planning to cut their production by 2 million barrels per day beginning in November. Other issues are contributing to the recent increase in the price of gasoline, including the fact that several West Coast refineries have been taken offline for maintenance and anticipation that more Russian oil will be withheld from global markets.
The upshot: It's very likely that gasoline prices will "rocket" this fall.
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]]>Oil, the State, and War: The Foreign Policies of Petrostates, by Emma Ashford, Georgetown University Press, 365 pages, $34.95
It doesn't take a Ph.D. to see that oil drives conflict. Just looking at the recent history of America's interventions in the Middle East will do.
During the Tanker War of the 1980s, the U.S. Navy fought Iran to protect Iraq's oil. Then, during the first Gulf War, the U.S. military fought Iraq to protect Kuwait and Saudi Arabia's oil. After three decades of war in Iraq, the United States came full circle, with the Trump administration threatening Iran while Iran threatened Saudi Arabia's oil.
Less understood is how oil drives conflict. The popular view, espoused both by many anti-war critics and by violence enthusiasts like former President Donald Trump, is that larger countries go to war to steal the oil wealth of smaller ones. Strong consumers take what they can; weak producers provide what they must.
Emma Ashford, a foreign policy scholar at the Stimson Center, makes the opposite claim in Oil, the State, and War. It isn't the need for cheap energy that drives foreign policy, she argues; it's the economics of energy production that make petrostates more trigger-happy. On one hand, control over energy markets removes constraints on warmaking. On the other hand, the "resource curse" warps political institutions. And of course, oil money helps governments buy fancy weapons.
Oil is unique in how it influences state behavior. Like many other natural resources, petroleum is scarce and expensive. Unlike those other resources, oil is necessary for the world economy to keep running. And all oil is bought and sold on the same global market, priced in U.S. dollars, meaning a change anywhere affects prices everywhere.
But not every petrostate is created equal. Oil plays a very different role in Saudi, Norwegian, Iranian, and Mexican societies. While most countries have put their oil resources under government control since the mid-20th century, the United States—the world's largest oil producer—has a private and competitive oil industry.
Rather than discussing petrostates as one bloc, Ashford draws three overlapping categories of oil producers. In oil-dependent states, a large chunk of government revenue is tied up in the petroleum sector. Oil-wealthy states earn a significant amount of income, whether or not they depend on it, from oil production. Finally, super-producers and super-exporters control a substantial percentage of the global oil market.
An oil-dependent nation is the classic image of a petrostate. Rather than providing services to earn the trust of taxpayers, leaders manage a firehose of unearned income, which they use to buy loyalty or pay for the tools of repression. Many scholars have theorized how the "resource curse" damages a country's political culture. Ashford skillfully illustrates those theories with specific, detailed examples of Saudi and pre-2003 Iraqi government dysfunction.
Timothy Mitchell's 2011 book Carbon Democracy contrasts coal-based labor unions' successes in Europe with worker power's failure in societies that are dependent on oil income. In the latter societies, he argues, it is hard for ordinary people to inflict pain on elites, which slows democratic development. Ashford makes a similar argument about the private sector, suggesting that the lack of a business lobby in oil-dependent countries quashes dissent within the ranks of the elite.
Ashford also delves into how great powers use military aid and protection for dictators as a form of "indirect control" over oil-producing states. Yet her book does not ask an obvious follow-up question: Does foreign intervention have an effect on the "resource curse"? The history of U.S.- and U.K.-sponsored coups in the Middle East certainly suggests that it does. When powerful outsiders are interested in local political disputes, it tends to inflame those disputes.
Where Ashford excels is linking the effects of the oil curse to producers' foreign policy processes. Oil dependency concentrates power in the hands of small cliques or single dictators. It discourages the development of diplomatic institutions or intelligence agencies that can provide those leaders with good advice.
Unlike politicians in democratic republics or even well-developed one-party states, petro-tyrants like Saudi Arabia's Mohammed bin Salman or Iraq's Saddam Hussein have been free to act on their wildest impulses. And oil-rich states, dependent or not, have a glut of free money they can spend on large militaries. In fact, Ashford found that high oil prices correlate to increased levels of military spending on a global level. She suggests they have a similar impact on proxy warfare, when states like Iran fund foreign militants or allied countries to do their bidding.
Saudi Arabia's purchases of American-made arms and support for militant groups might be the most infamous example. (Iran was also a major customer for American weapons before an anti-American government took power in 1979.) Russia dumped so much cash into military "modernization" during the last decade, Ashford observes, that "it was near-impossible for Russia's defense sector to absorb the spending." In Carbon Democracy, Mitchell argues that Britain, the Soviet Union, and, above all, the United States were willing to feed petrostates' weapon addiction as a way to keep them using pounds sterling, rubles, or dollars.
Powerful military capabilities are a dangerous temptation for trigger-happy leaders. Iraq and Libya, for example, repeatedly attacked their neighbors. Americans themselves are quite familiar with how a large army makes politicians more eager to go to war.
Armies bloated by oil money also become a source of fear for non-oil-rich neighbors, who build up their own forces in an attempt to keep up. Although neither Israel or Turkey export oil, the cold war between oil-rich Saudi Arabia and Iran has sucked them in all the same.
The combination of oil wealth and oil dependence is especially toxic. Petrostates buy flashy new toys when oil markets are booming, then end up in debt when oil prices fall. The same effect applies to oil-funded social spending, as Venezuela demonstrates. As Ashford puts it, any government spending in an oil-wealthy or oil-dependent state is "a bet on the future price of oil."
The resource curse is not "solely responsible for poor foreign policy decisions," Ashford writes. But in many cases, it clearly contributes to "a chaotic and generally poor foreign policy process."
Oil is most directly linked to foreign policy when it comes to super-producers and super-exporters. Again, because all oil is sold on the same market, changes in supply anywhere affect prices everywhere.
Turning market effects into political leverage is harder than it seems. The one big historical example of the "oil weapon" is the 1973 oil embargo, when Arab states decided to punish international supporters of Israel by cutting oil supplies. While American consumers suffered shortages, which were severely exacerbated by the U.S. government's attempts at price controls, the embargo failed to force Israel or its supporters to make any policy changes. Arab leaders gave up after they realized they were hurting their own economic interests more than anything else.
Russia has been more successful at coercing its neighbors using natural gas, because Soviet-era pipe infrastructure and the fragmented nature of gas markets give Moscow power over supply chains. Even so, this blackmail has undermined Russia's economic power by encouraging Europe to look for alternative energy suppliers.
Beyond their practical impact, the 1973 crisis and the Russian threats have had a psychological effect, making politicians in rich countries obsessed with energy security. While the "oil weapon" is ineffective in reality, Ashford argues, politicians' belief in the danger of oil embargos has given energy producers much more clout—an effect she calls "soft oil power"—and driven international powers to offer their protection to oil producers.
In the 1980s, the small petrostate of Kuwait backed an Iraqi invasion of Iran by opening its ports (and a financial lifeline) to Iraq. When Iran retaliated by attacking Kuwaiti shipping, Kuwait extracted promises of protection from both the Soviet Union and the United States. Thus began a four-decade stretch of U.S. military intervention in the Persian Gulf.
The world may have passed what Ashford calls its "peak petrostate" era. Technological advances such as fracking have opened up new petroleum sources outside of traditional oil-producing regions. At the same time, the fight against climate change has prompted industrialized countries to move toward less carbon-intensive energy sources.
So the trend is toward an economy that does not value or rely on petroleum products as much. But the damage done by oil-fueled rulers may last much longer.
The post Are We Past 'Peak Petrostate'? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Saudi court has sentenced Salma al-Shehab to 34 years in prison after she was found guilty of using the Internet to "cause public unrest and destabilize civil and national security" for following and retweeting dissidents and activists on Twitter. The trial court sentenced her originally to three years in prison, but at the prosecutor's urging, an appellate court increased the sentence.
The post Brickbat: America's Ally appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Joe Biden is currently visiting with heads of state in the Middle East in an attempt to strengthen ties in the region. But one of the moves Biden may be on the verge of making, according to previous reports, could put American lives and money on the line for a questionable ally.
Several current and former U.S. government officials told Axios in June that the Biden administration and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were "discussing a possible strategic agreement that would give the Gulf country certain U.S. security guarantees." Those talks reportedly began last November and became more serious this spring. Brett McGurk, the White House's Middle East coordinator, visited Abu Dhabi in late May to discuss what the Biden administration calls a "Strategic Framework Agreement."
It isn't yet clear exactly what the U.S. will promise the UAE. An Axios source noted that the draft agreement "includes a component on defense and security but also covers economic, trade, science and technology issues." Still, it's possible that the agreement could involve a defense guarantee that might see American lives and resources helping protect the UAE in times of conflict.
If that's the case, it "will come with real costs for the United States," says Dan Caldwell, vice president of foreign policy at Stand Together. "It will require the permanent deployment of more U.S. troops and military assets to the Middle East at [a] time when we should be drawing down in the region."
A security commitment to the UAE "could also raise the risk that the United States gets sucked more into the war in Yemen, which the UAE has been one of the main participants in, or a conflict with Iran," notes Caldwell.
The U.S. is already deeply involved in the UAE's security, with American military forces present there since 1990. The U.S. accounted for 68 percent of the UAE's arms imports from 2015 to 2019. After Yemen's Houthi rebels carried out missile and drone strikes in the UAE earlier this year, the U.S. deployed fighter jets and transferred a guided-missile destroyer to help. Plus, the two nations already have several defense cooperation agreements, which date back to 1987.
In spite of that assistance, the UAE has proven to be a shaky ally. It's refused to increase its oil output, even as global prices soar. In a United Nations vote, it abstained from condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Emirati officials have reportedly even refused to take Biden's calls. None of that begins to touch on the UAE's "significant human rights issues," in the words of the State Department, or the atrocities it's committed in Yemen as it wages war there alongside Saudi Arabia.
That track record may be indicative of what a security guarantee between the U.S. and UAE could involve. Much like the uncomfortable U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia, forging a security agreement with the UAE would further intertwine the U.S. with an authoritarian, untrustworthy regime. There would be no clear incentive for good behavior on the part of the UAE. Rather, with the backing of a power like the U.S., the Emiratis may be more willing to take risky actions, knowing that the U.S. will bail them out if a conflict escalates.
Worse, the Biden administration has reportedly taken these steps without input from Congress. "Offering security guarantees on behalf of the American people is a serious undertaking—one that requires the engagement with, and approval of, the people's representatives in Congress," one senior Democratic Senate aide told Jon Hoffman, a George Mason University political science Ph.D. candidate writing for Foreign Policy. "I'm not aware of any such engagement thus far."
Last week, Reps. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) and Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) introduced amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act that would place limits on new defense agreements in the Middle East. One amendment would classify "any written United States commitment to provide military security guarantees" to either Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates as a treaty, thus requiring it to receive a supermajority in the Senate. Another would require Congress to approve "any new security agreement" with the two countries before American funds could be allocated to their defense.
Such checks are important when the executive branch takes foreign policy matters into its own hands. Ideally, though, the Biden administration would realistically assess the risks that come with security guarantees. A defense commitment doesn't simply involve words on paper—it represents a broadened U.S. military mandate that could one day require the nation and its soldiers to take on extreme and unjustified risks, with little clear benefit to be gained.
The post The U.S. Says the UAE Has 'Significant Human Rights Issues.' They Might Enter a Defense Agreement Anyway. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Joe Biden will travel to Egypt, Israel, and Saudi Arabia in July as part of an effort to rebuild relationships in the Middle East and North Africa. Human rights groups aren't pleased.
"Biden should not normalize the killing and jailing of journalists, but should instead demand accountability and the release of journalists behind bars," said the Committee to Protect Journalists, a group that fights for press freedoms. On his stop in Saudi Arabia specifically, 13 human rights organizations warned that "efforts to repair the U.S. relationship with the government of Saudi Arabia without a genuine commitment to prioritize human rights are not only a betrayal of your campaign promises, but will likely embolden the crown prince to commit further violations of international human rights and humanitarian law."
Outrage about Biden's visit to Israel stems from the recent death of Shireen Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American reporter for Al-Jazeera who was shot in the head while covering an Israeli military operation in Jenin, a large Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank. Eyewitnesses have alleged she was intentionally killed and targeted by Israeli soldiers, despite wearing a press vest.
The Israeli government has stonewalled an investigation into Akleh's death due to disagreements with the Palestinian Authority about custody of the bullets recovered at the scene. "We saw around four or five [Israeli] military vehicles on that street with rifles sticking out of them and one of them shot Shireen. We were standing right there, we saw it," one eyewitness told CNN. The same eyewitness also attested that no Palestinians present at the scene were armed, a claim which contradicts official Israeli reports that both sides were carrying guns that morning.
Akleh's death has complicated the Biden administration's messaging around the Israel visit. "We've made clear our view to Israel and the Palestinian Authority that we expect…[a] thorough, transparent, and impartial investigation into the circumstances of her killing and in a manner that culminates in accountability," said Ned Price, a spokesman for the State Department, stopping short of condemning the soldiers who had allegedly opened fire on a group of unarmed journalists.
"[The Abu Akleh case] is just another example of the administration's deferential approach to the Bennett government," Dov Waxman, UCLA professor and director of the Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, tells Reason. In Waxman's view, the Biden administration has focused on preserving the government of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who appears to be a more even-keeled geopolitical partner than former right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Bennett's coalition, which has united right-wing Jewish parties with Arab parties for the first time in Israel's history, is also fragile.
"They've been very careful to avoid doing anything that would create a kind of public dispute between themselves and the Bennett government, or doing anything that could put the Bennett government in a precarious position domestically," Waxman says.
"At the end of the day, the priority for the Biden administration is the survival of the current Israeli government and keeping Netanyahu out of power," Waxman says. "That comes at the place of its relationship with the Palestinian Authority and the [Palestinian Liberation Organization]."
Human rights groups, meanwhile, want to see more action by the United States on the Abu Akleh case. "It feels like a betrayal giving this crowd meetings," Sherif Mansour, a journalist and human rights activist, says. "This has always been a test for Biden's rhetoric on human rights and democracy."
Because she was an American citizen, Abu Akleh's murder could be investigated by the FBI. Mansour wants the Biden administration to pursue this option in addition to pressuring both Israel and Palestine to share information so a proper investigation can take place.
Last summer, during a wave of protests, the Israeli government bombed the office building that housed the Associated Press's Gaza bureau. Since 1992, the Committee to Protect Journalists has reported over 20 journalist deaths in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, some that seemed intentionally targeted like Abu Akleh.
The U.S. response to Abu Akleh's murder has drawn comparisons to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi Arabian journalist and American resident employed by The Washington Post. Khashoggi was killed in 2018 by Saudi agents in Turkey at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, allegedly over his reporting, which was critical of Saudi foreign policy and the crown prince's style of governance. With Biden expected to make a stop in Saudi Arabia as well as Israel, the comparison between the two murders has become all the more salient.
Though Biden appears willing to overlook Khashoggi's death in order to shore up America's access to Saudi oil, he is at least on record as explicitly having condemned that murder. At a November 2019 primary debate, Biden said he would "make [Saudi Arabia] the pariah that they are" and stop arms sales to the Middle Eastern nation. A month after Biden took office, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines released a government report confirming that the Crown Prince directed the assassination. The administration also delayed most weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, in light of its continued involvement in Yemen's brutal civil war.
Jon Alterman, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, notes that there are issues on the agenda that go well beyond oil prices. He points to the administration's Iran strategy, especially as the U.S. attempts to limit the expansion of Iran's nuclear program, and Saudi Arabia's work on hydrogen extraction as examples of complex issues that U.S. and Saudi officials will discuss.
For many Middle East analysts, Biden's trip signals pragmatism. "A successful foreign policy for a global power such as the US cannot choose values over interests," wrote Council of Foreign Relations president Richard Haass in a recent article. "What the Biden administration is contemplating in Saudi Arabia appears to be righting the balance."
In Alterman's view, Khashoggi's murder must be weighed like all other factors. "As long as [abuses] continue, they are going to inhibit Americans' willingness to engage with the kingdom broadly and Americans' confidence that the system in Saudi Arabia is transparent and fair and represents an opportunity for them."
"But that's not to say that abuses in Saudi Arabia automatically disqualify the United States [from] having anything to do with the kingdom," he continues. "That strikes me as not the right response."
The post Biden's Middle East Trip Pits Human Rights Against Realpolitik appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>President Joe Biden's announcement two weeks after taking office that he would end "all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales," was welcome. It was also inexcusably ambiguous, and when lawmakers sought clarity into the scope of the policy change, the administration mostly declined to give it. Biden's announcement "includes the suspension of two previously notified air-to-ground munitions sales and an ongoing review of other systems," wrote the State Department in a letter. But beyond that, the administration didn't indicate what military support would continue to flow to the Saudi-led coalition intervening in Yemen's grueling civil war.
An extensive new report from The Washington Post this week confirms that skepticism of the drawdown was warranted and the specification of "offensive operations" was deceptive. While rightfully decrying Russian aggression against civilian targets in Ukraine, the U.S. government continues to be implicated in the same kind of brutality against civilians in Yemen, the site of the world's most acute humanitarian crisis. This Post report is fresh evidence that we need to know exactly how the U.S. government is backing the Saudi-led coalition and its war crimes in Yemen—and that this backing needs to stop.
The Post story is not the first to suggest that U.S. involvement in Yemen continues to be significant. We already knew, for instance, that other weapons deals had proceeded during Biden's tenure. The president and Congress signed off on a $650 million sale of missiles and other arms to Saudi Arabia in late 2021, and the State Department approved millions more in February—using language of rationale copied and pasted from a Trump administration sale completed before Biden's ostensible policy change, Responsible Statecraft reports.
We also knew the administration had yet to cancel military maintenance contracts which, per the Post article and previous reporting by Vox, are crucial for continuing airstrikes in Yemen. "If we don't sell [Saudi Arabia a] particular ammunition, they can still fly. They have got a lot of munitions stockpiled. They might be able to find replacements," Rep. Tom Malinowski (D–N.J.) told the Post. "But there's no replacement for the maintenance contract and no ability to fly without it." These "contracts fulfilled by both the U.S. military and U.S. companies to coalition squadrons carrying out offensive missions have continued" since the "offensive operations" announcement, the Post found, even though the air campaign is responsible for most direct civilian deaths and Biden couched his comments in concern for civilians.
And we knew that the Biden administration had not pushed for an immediate end to the Saudi blockade of Yemen, officially intended to intercept Iranian weapons but in practice a major contributing factor to the country's famine conditions and severe shortages of necessities like medicine and fuel. The State Department letter didn't answer lawmakers' inquiry about transfers of naval equipment, which could be used to prolong the blockade, and "the U.S. Navy occasionally announces it has intercepted smuggled weapons from Iran," the Brookings Institution notes, "suggesting a more active role [in the blockade] than the administration admits."
The crucial new information of the Post report, then, is the identification "for the first time [of the] 19 fighter jet squadrons that took part in the Saudi-led air campaign in Yemen." While the Pentagon had claimed it could not reliably distinguish which units were engaged in the precluded offensive operations, the Post investigation was able to do exactly that. It was also able to determine that the U.S. military conducted training exercises, some of them on U.S. soil, "with at least 80 percent of [coalition] squadrons that flew airstrike missions in Yemen." These continued after Biden claimed to end offensive operations support. A round of training in March 2022, for example, would "concentrate on three primary themes," said an Air Force write-up. One of them was "offensive" techniques.
These revelations come, on several counts, at an opportune moment for U.S. policy to change course. The United Nations last week announced a two-month extension of a truce begun in April, the first such nationwide ceasefire since the civil war began in 2014. This truce is not only an immediate relief for Yemeni civilians but also an important step toward a negotiated peace, one which suggests even the partial U.S. drawdown may be having some effect on the coalition's appetite to continue the war.
Here in the States, a bipartisan resolution introduced in the House this month would direct the president to more comprehensively end "U.S. military participation in offensive air strikes," including—particularly in light of the Post's squadron identifications—canceling maintenance contracts.
Meanwhile, Biden is reportedly considering a trip to Saudi Arabia in July. He's been widely castigated for the plan, which would mark a major reversal of campaign-era talk about making the regime a "pariah." But the visit has yet to be formally announced, which means Biden could still cancel or reconfigure it to push the Saudi government toward a more permanent peace in Yemen.
The president doesn't need to wait for Congress to pass that resolution to wind down U.S. military support for the coalition; constitutional constraints on presidential war powers are all on the side of joining wars, not leaving them. Nor does Biden need congressional permission to give the American people full information on what our government has done in Yemen and how it can—and should—stop working with the Saudi-led coalition going forward. He can speak plainly to the public and Riyadh whenever he likes.
We've had weasel words enough about the U.S. role in Yemen for three presidencies now. It's time for transparency—and peace.
The post Why Aren't We Out of Yemen Yet? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In this week's Reason Roundtable, editors Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Katherine Mangu-Ward, and Nick Gillespie scrutinize Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' style of conservatism and touch on President Joe Biden's upcoming visit with the House of Saud.
1:28: DeSantis and his approach to governance
30:36: Weekly Listener Question: You guys occasionally talk about the Libertarian Party, and you might be aware of the recent convention which saw power go to one faction that many describe as quite alienating. This has led to many of the traditional libertarians leaving the party altogether. My question for you all is do you think that the Libertarian Party is necessary for facilitating more libertarian representation in politics? If not, how do you see libertarian ideals grow in the traditional duopoly?
38:39: Biden's forthcoming visit to Saudi Arabia
52:30: Media recommendations for the week
This week's links:
"The Death of Walt Disney's Private Dream City?" by Zach Weissmueller and Danielle Thompson
"Anti-LGBT Panics Are Bad for Everyone's Liberty," by Scott Shackford
"Blame Biden for High Gas Prices," by Nick Gillespie and Regan Taylor
"Saudi Prince's Plan for 'Walkable' City of Single-File Buildings Could Be Two Miles-Long Skyscrapers Instead," by Christian Britschgi
"Alex Epstein: Why the Future Needs More Fossil Fuels," by Nick Gillespie
Send your questions to roundtable@reason.com. Be sure to include your social media handle and the correct pronunciation of your name.
Today's sponsor:
Audio production by Ian Keyser
Assistant production by Hunt Beaty
Music: "Angeline," by The Brothers Steve
The post Is DeSantis a Principled Governor or a Retaliatory Culture Warrior? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Members of the House introduced a resolution yesterday that would help end U.S. military involvement in the Yemeni Civil War if passed.
The Yemen War Powers Resolution is sponsored by Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D–Wash.), Peter DeFazio (D–Ore.), Nancy Mace (R–S.C.), and Adam Schiff (D–Calif.). Dozens of other representatives have signed on as co-sponsors, including progressives like Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) and conservatives like Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.).
America's involvement in the Yemeni Civil War began in March 2015 and has proven controversial among many lawmakers across three presidential administrations. Congress never authorized U.S. military action against the Houthis, the group currently fighting against the international coalition led by Saudi Arabia for control of Yemen. The Constitution explicitly requires such authorization, given that Congress has the sole power to declare war under Article 1, Section 8. Presidents have nonetheless introduced the U.S. armed forces to hostilities in Yemen and have provided logistical and intelligence support to the Saudi-led coalition.
Lawmakers are now citing a provision in the 1973 War Powers Resolution that says forces "engaged in hostilities outside the territory of the United States…without a declaration of war or specific statutory authorization" must be removed by the president "if the Congress so directs." They point out that U.S. armed forces have been involved in "sharing intelligence for the purpose of enabling offensive coalition strikes" and "providing logistical support for offensive coalition strikes, including by providing maintenance or transferring spare parts to coalition members." If passed, the resolution would direct the removal of those troops. Congress would reclaim its constitutional say in military engagement in Yemen, rather than permitting the president to continue involvement without proper oversight.
"We will not sit by as the Constitution is ignored and the Yemeni people suffer seven years into this unauthorized war," wrote Jayapal and DeFazio in a February piece for The Nation. "If the administration refuses to act, Congress will force them to."
U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition has helped wreak havoc in Yemen. American involvement isn't just limited to providing intelligence and logistical support: The U.S. sold over $1 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia last year, despite President Joe Biden's campaign-trail promise that he would end weapons sales to the kingdom. A September 2021 United Nations report noted that "the continued sale of weapons to both sides of the war has exacerbated the fighting," pointing a finger at Canada, France, Iran, the United Kingdom, and the United States for supplying arms.
Though presidents have painted that assistance to Saudi Arabia as being performed in the service of a critical regional ally—a label that human rights advocates rightly question—it's enabled the destruction of Yemen and devastation of critical infrastructure. Due to limited access to food, clean water, and health services, it's estimated that a child under the age of 5 died every nine minutes in Yemen in 2021. The Campaign Against Arms Trade estimates that nearly 15,000 Yemeni civilians have been killed in attacks on civilian gatherings or buildings, with 60 percent of those deaths caused by airstrikes carried out by the Saudi-led coalition.
Lawmakers have sought to halt weapons transfers to Saudi Arabia before but have been met with resistance from the president. So too have war powers resolutions. Still, yesterday's resolution and the broad bipartisan support it has garnered signal that many in Congress still condemn U.S. involvement in the war and the fact that the president has been acting without proper authorization.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) is expected to introduce a companion version of the resolution in the Senate next week. Time will tell if the Biden administration will continue to assert that Saudi Arabia is an important and reliable partner, all while stripping lawmakers of their constitutional war powers.
The post House Resolution Seeks End to U.S. Military Involvement in Yemen appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Saudi Arabia's plan to build a linear city stretching out into the middle of the desert has perhaps gotten even dumber.
On Tuesday, Bloomberg reported that the kingdom's The Line project—a proposed million-person, 170-kilometer-long city in the remote portion of the country's Tabuk province bordering the Red Sea—is getting a redesign. Instead of the initial concept of building a long single-file line of buildings connected by a high-speed train, several anonymous sources working on the project told Bloomberg the plan is now to build two parallel 1,600-foot-tall skyscrapers that will stretch for dozens of miles.
The Line is just one of several components of the Neom project, the $500 billion endeavor spearheaded by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to turn a sparsely inhabited part of the country into a world-class financial, tourism, and tech hub.
Salman has described The Line as a utopian attempt to liberate city dwellers from long car commutes and all the pollution and traffic deaths that come with them. Instead, it would be an ultra-walkable paradise where all essential services would be a five-minute jaunt away and the longest intracity trip wouldn't exceed 20 minutes.
"We need to transform the concept of a conventional city into that of a futuristic one," he said in January 2021 when The Line was first unveiled, describing it as a city "with zero cars, zero streets and zero carbon emissions."
It all sounds pretty great.
But if history and free market urban theory are any guide, the city will be a dismal, expensive failure. Utopian projects to design new cities on virgin land rarely succeed.
"The trouble is: Who wants to be first?" Alain Bertaud, a senior research scholar at NYU's Marron Institute of Urban Management, told CityLab back in April.
"New city projects often start by highlighting their nice infrastructure," he said, specifically referencing Neom as an example. "But nobody will move to a city with a good sewer system but no jobs. Historically, infrastructure follows the market, not the other way around."
In short, people don't really want to move to places where there's nothing for them to do.
Rather, cities are labor markets that primarily exist to connect lots of workers with lots of places to work. The upshot of that intense intermingling of capital and labor is that new ideas can spread more quickly and production can become more specialized than if those urban workers and firms were distributed across smaller communities.
These "agglomeration" effects explain why cities, once they get started, tend to grow and attract more people—even though that growth brings with it congestion, pollution, and other problems of urban living The Line is supposed to cure.
The trouble is that agglomeration is hard to kickstart. Some marriage of geography, resources, and preexisting industry is usually needed to get things going.
Most of the wholly invented cities that have stuck around are new national capitals like Washington, D.C., Canberra, or Brasilia, which bring their own initial job market of bureaucrats and politicos with them. Even then, they tend to survive in spite of the elaborate urban planning that went into trying to make them look a certain way.
This brings us to the second problem with Saudi Arabia's The Line: It's a big long line.
No other city in the world is shaped like that, and for good reason.
The agglomerative effects that cities thrive on can only happen when businesses and workers can cluster together or reach each other within reasonable travel times. This is why cities in capitalist countries all have a similar development pattern: an ultra-dense urban core surrounded by lower-and lower-density neighborhoods radiating outward.
The central city is in the most demand because it has the quickest access to the rest of the urban area. That demand pushes up land prices, which developers respond to by building taller buildings that use less land. As you move outward, access to the rest of the city gets harder, demand and land prices fall, and densities start to fall with them.
This "density gradient" is a constant observable fact in all but the most regulated urban areas in the world.
The Line, at best, would have an incredibly inefficient version of this density gradient.
One could imagine a dense center on the line where homes and businesses are in the most demand, with lower-density wings on either side. But if there is such demand for living or working in the center of the line to justify that densities are that high, that would imply there's also demand for living or working immediately above or below the center of this linear city. But the whole design requires that that land be left vacant.
The latest rumored design for The Line—two 1,600-foot-tall buildings stretching for miles—gets things even more mixed up by assuming demand for density would be nearly uniform across the line. But obviously, more people would rather live in the central parts of the building with quicker access to more locations, than on the edges where it will take a lot longer to reach a lot more stuff.
Lastly, The Line is an unworkable utopian idea because there will be no room for dynamism and change. It's dubious that the designers of the city will perfectly predict the best place to put every possible business or home. Even if they could, unique people with their own interests, needs, and desires moving around will change what's demanded where.
An influx of families into one part of The Line might generate a need for additional homes and schools and fewer pharmacies and nightclubs. If The Line sticks to its exquisite master plan, it will soon get overcrowded housing in one location and underutilized retail elsewhere.
Even comparatively far less planned American cities have suffered a version of this problem during and after the pandemic.
Low-density, residential-only zoning prevents apartments or commercial buildings from being added in suddenly high-demand suburbs, where prices are spiking. Meanwhile, dense downtowns have a glut of underutilized office space that zoning likewise prevents from being turned into retail or residential developments.
And American urban planning is practically anarchic compared to what is envisioned for The Line.
Of course, one doesn't need technical urban theory to understand why The Line is a dumb idea. Every pizza restaurant that sells radial pies rather than a long line of single slices is grasping a fundamental truth of geometry that has eluded the Saudi monarchy.
Preliminary construction work on The Line started in October. The first residents are expected to move there in 2024.
The post Saudi Prince's Plan for 'Walkable' City of Single-File Buildings Could Be Two Miles-Long Skyscrapers Instead appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>On February 4, the U.S. State Department approved new proposed weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. If the deals aren't blocked by Congress, the three nations will receive fighter jets, guided missile tail kits, and reinforcements for missile defense systems, among other spare parts and munitions. The UAE transfer, the Pentagon said, "will support the foreign policy and national security of the United States."
While officials in Washington were approving those deals, bombs were falling half a world away on Sana'a, Yemen. Jets constantly buzz over the city, with airstrikes hitting rebel areas and civilian neighborhoods alike.
Sukaina Sharafuddin is a mother and humanitarian aid worker who lives in Sana'a with her 6-year-old son, Elias. For Elias' whole life, Sharafuddin has been trying to keep him safe from the chaos outside. "I feel that I'm protecting him somehow, although that's not true," she explains. "But at least if I hear warplanes hovering still close by, or louder than usual, I would move him to our other location, which is the kitchen floor…inside and as far away from windows as possible."
Since the city's airport closed in 2016, only warplanes fly the sky over Sana'a. Sharafuddin's son used to jump up and down excitedly whenever he heard them. "But now that he is six," says Sharafuddin, "he hears the explosions and asks a lot of questions that I don't know how to answer."
Sharafuddin found out she was pregnant with Elias just one week before a conflict embroiled her country. She had to go to three different hospitals before finding one with electricity. As doctors were about to perform a cesarean section, she explains, "I asked to have a general anesthetic because I didn't want to hear the sound of bombs when my son was born. So war has been part of his life, right from the start."
The strikes Sharafuddin and so many of her countrymen dread are part of Saudi Arabia's campaign in the Yemeni Civil War, which has raged for over seven years. But they are also a product of American involvement, through weapons transfers, logistical support, and financial assistance.
On the campaign trail, then-candidate Joe Biden promised to "end our support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen." A year into his presidency, however, little has changed. The U.S. continues to arm the Saudi-led coalition, and Yemen is teetering on the brink of collapse. Under Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and now Biden, American military support has enabled the destruction of an entire country.
"Things are just escalating very quickly day by day," says Sharafuddin, "and [Biden] doesn't seem to be doing anything."
The Yemeni Civil War began in 2014 and has since evolved from a domestic struggle for the country's presidency into a complex, multipronged conflict that has drawn in some of the world's major military powers—including the U.S.
In the wake of a struggle for the presidency of Yemen, the Houthi rebels, an Iran-backed armed Islamist militant movement known formally as Ansarallah, began to fight against a Saudi Arabia–led coalition that had Western backing. The Saudi-led coalition included 10 countries upon its formation and hoped to return its preferred man to Yemen's presidency. Former President Obama offered American military support. U.S. forces were present on the Saudi Arabia–Yemen border for a time, but America's role has for the most part been limited to logistics and intelligence support rather than boots-on-the-ground involvement.
At first, Obama justified U.S. support as a necessary move "to defend Saudi Arabia's border"—coming to the aid of a historical, albeit questionable, ally—and "to protect Yemen's legitimate government," a less straightforward U.S. security interest. Washington's support for the coalition soon came to involve significant arms assistance, a hallmark of U.S. involvement in the Yemeni Civil War that continues through the current administration.
Over seven years ago, Saudi officials guessed that it would take only a few weeks to quash tensions in Yemen. Not so.
Freelance journalist Naseh Shaker, who is based in Sana'a, points to some issues behind ongoing tensions. The former Yemeni president's regime "used to set up camps and rocket storerooms on the outskirts of the capital," in areas like "Noqm Mountain and inside neighborhoods like Al-Hafa camp. Launching airstrikes targeting these camps is to intimidate and terrorize civilians." But the Houthi movement "no longer uses these camps," he says, even though they have "been targeted monthly since March 2015."
"Neighboring countries are fighting us and cannot accept us as refugees or do as Turkey did with Syrians," he continues. "Saudis and [the] UAE want to fight in Yemen using Yemenis and are not ready even to welcome civilians as refugees nor ready to open Sana'a airport for sick people."
"East or West, home is best," he says. "Not because living conditions are better, rather I think because no country can welcome us in a hospitable way as we generously welcome others." Yemenis must make do where they are because "there's no other option."
The past seven years, Shaker explains, have turned his country into "hell on earth."
"There's no escape," says Sharafuddin. "People like me—civilians who just want to live a peaceful life with their family—they cannot escape it, because Yemenis are not wanted around the world. We cannot go anywhere without a visa, even Arab countries. Even if you get out, no country will let you seek asylum."
American politicians have pointed to many reasons as to why the U.S. should remain involved in the Yemeni Civil War. Some have argued that it is an opportunity to "prevent Yemen from turning into a puppet state of the corrupt, brutish Islamic Republic of Iran." Others stress that the Houthis have endangered American soldiers in the region, while some have emphasized the importance of maintaining the alliance with Saudi Arabia.
No matter the explanation, Yemeni civilians are hopelessly caught in the middle of warring forces that have a great appetite for conflict.
And American weapons have, in large part, enabled the destruction of Yemen.
Throughout Obama's presidency, the U.S. approved more than $100 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia. His administration oversaw the transfer of "everything from small arms and ammunition to tanks, attack helicopters, air-to-ground missiles, missile defense ships, and warships" to the kingdom. "But as the death toll and reports of human rights violations in the Saudi-led war on Yemen began to rise dramatically," reported Vox, "the Obama administration nixed the sale of the precision-guided munitions it had originally agreed to put in the deal to try to coerce the Saudis into curbing those atrocities."
Former President Trump had no such reservations. His administration approved a litany of massive weapons sales. On his first presidential trip abroad in 2017, Trump announced a deal with Saudi Arabia worth $110 billion immediately and $350 billion over the following decade. The administration notified Congress of its intent to send almost $500 million of precision bombs to Saudi Arabia in December 2020, despite strong resistance among lawmakers to similar deals.
Obama and Trump's support for the Saudis wasn't exactly unprecedented. The U.S.-Saudi relationship has official roots in 1945, making it the longest American relationship with an Arab nation. During a high-level meeting that year, America committed to providing security, while the kingdom promised access to its oil resources. U.S. presidents have been reluctant to challenge the relationship, seeing Saudi Arabia as a key ally in a neighborhood where America isn't always welcome. This has also made them reluctant to challenge the kingdom's nasty conduct—its involvement in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, its oppressive blockade of Qatar, and its chaotic military engagement in the Middle East.
From 2016 to 2020, Saudi Arabia accounted for 24 percent of all U.S. arms sales, while the U.S. supplied 79 percent of the kingdom's major conventional weapons. Saudi Arabia is America's top weapons buyer, and America is Saudi Arabia's top weapons supplier. Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners have used American arms to strike Houthi targets, killing thousands of rebel fighters. But civilians have disproportionately borne the costs of these campaigns. In 2017, the U.N. Human Rights Council reported that the Saudi-led coalition had caused more than 60 percent of civilian deaths in the conflict.
In her capacity as a humanitarian aid worker for Save the Children, Sharafuddin witnessed the aftermath of one of the most infamous coalition strikes on civilians: a 2018 attack on a school bus that left at least 26 kids dead. Her team visited the survivors and tried to help however it could, but she notes that "the help is always limited due to the shortage of funding and because the needs are always high." When they met the surviving kids again a year later, "some of them still had shrapnel in their head."
In October 2016, the Saudi-led coalition carried out an airstrike on a funeral ceremony in Sana'a, killing at least 100 people and wounding over 500. Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that U.S.-produced weapons were used in this attack and in an April 2016 strike on a market that killed at least 97 civilians, including 25 kids. HRW wrote two years later that American arms were found at the sites of dozens of "other unlawful coalition attacks in Yemen." All the while, arms deals funneled money into the pockets of American defense firms like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin.
Every Yemeni profiled in this piece says these weapons are major fuel in the fire destroying their nation. "The US can't be a peace advocate while selling weapons to UAE and Saudi Arabia," says Shaker. The "administration—not the people—needs to change its words into actions because the world is watching."
"The American audience should hear that they have to…ask their government to stop this war, to stop selling arms to Saudi [Arabia]…and the UAE," says Ahmad Algohbary, a freelance journalist and founder of the grassroots humanitarian aid organization Yemen Hope and Relief. "They have to stop this. I know that people will lose their jobs when this war ends," due to scrapped arms contracts. "We know that will not build their economy, but what about us?"
American weapons have been dangerous enough in the hands of allies—but our enemies have acquired them, too. A 2019 CNN investigation found that "Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners have transferred American-made weapons to al Qaeda-linked fighters, hardline Salafi militias, and other factions waging war in Yemen, in violation of their agreements with the United States." Iran-backed rebels also acquired American arms, putting U.S. military technology at risk. Saudi Arabia and the UAE used U.S.-made arms "as a form of currency to buy the loyalties of militias or tribes, bolster chosen armed actors, and influence the complex political landscape," according to CNN's sources.
It looked as though things might change under the Biden administration. In a November 2019 presidential debate, then-candidate Biden cast Saudi Arabia as a "pariah," criticizing Trump's coziness with the kingdom. "I would make it very clear we were not going to in fact sell more weapons to them," he explained. He said he would end "the sale of material to the Saudis where they're going in and murdering children." Upon taking office, he announced the end of U.S. support for the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen.
Sharafuddin says that just about everyone she knew followed the election as carefully as if they were in the U.S., watching it unfold over television, radio, and social media. "We were so excited when Biden said that if he was elected as the president of the United States, he would stop the war in Yemen and he would stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia," Sharafuddin recalls. "We were so hopeful, and we were praying so hard, everyone was praying that Biden would be selected, thinking that he would come to the rescue."
But in December 2021, "the Biden administration pushed an additional sale of missiles to Saudi Arabia through Congress, arguing that the weapons would be used for 'defensive' purposes," the Quincy Institute's Trita Parsi and Annelle Sheline wrote in The New Republic. That supposedly comported with Biden withdrawing U.S. support for Saudi "offensive operations" in Yemen. His administration, seemingly committed to holding Saudi Arabia accountable and helping ease tensions in Yemen, condemned a December Houthi attack—but has not commented on the Saudi-led coalition's bombings of Sana'a. As recently as last month, the coalition has killed civilians in internationally condemned strikes. A controversial January attack on a prison involved a bomb manufactured by Raytheon. Despite Biden's campaign trail promises, America is still enabling the murder of civilians in Yemen.
"Honestly, I don't know what to say. Now what?" asks Sharafuddin. "We thought that he would be better than the former presidents. But it is just disappointing, and it's such a big lie."
A September 2021 United Nations report "said the continued sale of weapons to both sides of the war has exacerbated the fighting." Nations "that have continued arms transfers to Yemen are Canada, France, Iran, the United Kingdom and the United States."
According to a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimate, the conflict led to 377,000 deaths by the end of 2021. Nearly 60 percent of those stemmed from unreliable access to food, water, and health care. Airstrikes only added to the death toll—in September 2021, a U.N. panel estimated that at least 18,000 Yemeni civilians had been killed or wounded by airstrikes since 2015. U.N. experts informed the Human Rights Council that Yemenis had endured roughly 10 airstrikes per day since March 2015, amounting to over 23,000 total attacks.
A devastating cholera outbreak infected over 1 million Yemenis and killed 3,000 between 2016 and 2021, and COVID-19 has ripped through the largely unvaccinated population, killing thousands. Due to the ravaged medical system, it is extremely difficult to ascertain infection rates and death tolls with any precision.
The worst of the war has disproportionately landed on Yemen's most vulnerable. Early last year, the U.N. projected that "half of children under five in Yemen" could suffer from acute malnutrition in 2021, with 400,000 expected to endure severe acute malnutrition. Minimal access to routine immunization and health services, malnourished breastfeeding mothers, and unstable sanitation systems all put Yemeni kids in danger. In 2021, a child under the age of five died every nine minutes in Yemen due to the ongoing war. These factors combined have made Yemen "one of the most dangerous places in the world for children to grow up," per the U.N.
Algohbary has a deep understanding of his country's suffering. "I have seen death. I have seen hunger. I have seen everything," he says. When visiting attack scenes of airstrikes to offer assistance, he says, "I saw blood. I saw body parts. I saw very horrible things."
His organization has provided food baskets, blankets, and school supplies to thousands of suffering families—but it all started with just one.
A famine ripped through Yemen after the war began. "Once, I decided to stay with a family, to know what they are suffering from," he says. "I stayed from the morning until the night with them, and I slept there. Imagine, they had only flour and they mixed this flour with water, and after they mixed it, they ate it." Algohbary says he saw the family "eating tree leaves to survive." He returned home crying.
"Every day since that day, I swear that I'm always thinking about them when I eat anything," says Algohbary.
He began to tweet the stories of his suffering countrymen, and his devastating photos and documentation garnered international attention. "I didn't think that people would help me," he recalls—but he started receiving donations from far and wide. With those funds, he and his team at Yemen Hope and Relief have distributed food and conducted "more than 20 water well projects."
Even as Algohbary recovers from a surgical procedure outside Yemen, his team is carrying on humanitarian work. Especially critical these days are the organization's efforts to bring malnourished children back to health. "For a kid, it's really hard," he explains. A baby born in Yemen "is born to a hunger ward…in a warzone, in the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, in the worst place to live as a child."
Algohbary has helped heal 360 malnourished Yemeni children and brought critical supplies to many communities. He says he has been happy to provide so much help. More importantly, though, he hopes for remedies to the war's deep, complicated roots.
"As Yemenis, we want this war to be over," he says. "We want these countries—the U.S. and other Western countries—to stop…refueling this war."
"I really believe that the Yemeni war will be over when the U.S. decides to stop it," says Algohbary. "They have to stop this."
Until then, his work continues.
Last year, the U.S. sold more than $1 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia. The Biden administration continues to offer the kingdom logistical support in the form of maintaining and servicing Saudi fighter jets. The line between "defensive" and "offensive" support, it turns out, is easy to manipulate.
In the last month alone, Yemen has faced reduced food assistance, airstrikes on hospitals and critical infrastructure, and a nationwide four-day internet outage. A yearslong land, sea, and air blockade imposed by the Saudi-led coalition has kept critical goods from reaching the Yemenis who need them. Peace advocates have called on the U.S. to pressure Saudi Arabia into relaxing these measures—but Biden officials aren't pushing the matter. "It is not a blockade," a State Department spokesperson argued last April. January was the deadliest month in Yemen since 2018, with nearly one civilian injured or killed every hour.
"What has been happening during the last few days [in Sana'a] is similar to what has been happening since 2015. Hearing warplanes hovering overhead has become part of our daily routine," says Shaker. "I don't know if a military camp, a civilian object, or myself may be targeted."
Some American lawmakers realize that little has changed on the ground in Yemen, even as three different presidential administrations have overseen U.S. involvement in the conflict. In September, a bipartisan majority in the House voted to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia's campaign through the National Defense Authorization Act—the third year running. However, the provision did not end up in the final bill.
Last week, Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D–Wash.) and Peter DeFazio (D–Ore.) wrote in The Nation that they intended "to pass a new Yemen War Powers Resolution" in order "to reassert Congress's constitutional war powers authority, terminate unauthorized US involvement in this endless war, reinvigorate diplomatic efforts, and ease this devastating humanitarian disaster."
Seven years' worth of damage has left Yemenis weary. "I think if the U.S. wants to stop this war, they can do it in just one call—to call Saudi Arabia and the UAE to end it," Algohbary emphasizes. Gather all the warring factions in Yemen and begin the peace process, he implores the Biden administration. "I lost friends, I saw famine, I saw blood. I have lived through every bad thing happening in Yemen."
"Our message to the Americans themselves, to the international community, is that enough is enough with Yemen," says Sharafuddin. "It is already bad enough as it is. It will take us years and years ahead to overcome the things we've been through."
"We need peace," says Algohbary. "We need peace."
The post Biden's Hidden War Is Destroying Yemen appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi journalist formerly favored by the royal family, left his native country in 2017 and moved to the United States. He began writing a Washington Post column that criticized Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a.k.a. MBS, for squelching even the mildest dissent, arbitrarily arresting perceived enemies, and prosecuting a genocidal war in Yemen. A year after Khashoggi launched his column, Saudi intelligence agents lured him to the country's consulate in Istanbul under false pretenses, killed him, and dismembered his body.
The Showtime documentary Kingdom of Silence, which traces the deadly evolution of Khashoggi's attitude toward the Saudi regime, poses a couple of puzzles. Despite his oppressive and murderous tendencies, MBS successfully passed himself off in some Western circles as an enlightened reformer. And despite his history as an Osama bin Laden confidante, self-censoring journalist, and apologist for his country's rulers, Khashoggi eventually embraced a political agenda, including freedom of expression and equal rights for women, that was completely at odds with the Saudi government's fundamental illiberalism.
Credulous Americans' positive portrayal of MBS looks like an attempt to prettify the U.S. government's longstanding coziness with loathsome autocrats, always justified by "national interests." It is harder to understand Khashoggi's abiding loyalty to a state that is synonymous with a brutal and corrupt clique of plutocrats.
Khashoggi, who chafed at government control of the news media, was inspired by the Arab Spring, alarmed by arrests of his friends, and disappointed by MBS. But to the end, the insider-turned-outsider imagined that he could nudge the Saudi leader in the right direction through carefully calibrated criticism and praise. That illusion was shattered at the consulate in Istanbul, where Khashoggi warmly greeted an old acquaintance—one of the assassins who had been sent to silence him.
The post Kingdom of Silence appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Speaking at the State Department this week for the first foreign policy speech of his term, President Joe Biden laid down a marker: the United States will no longer be doing Saudi Arabia's bidding.
The offensive military support Washington has provided to the kingdom during its ongoing air war in Yemen is now coming to a halt. "This war has to end," Biden told the staff and diplomats assembled in the Benjamin Franklin Room. The announcement was a belated but welcome shift in policy for those who have long believed that showering Riyadh with air-to-ground munitions and diplomatic backing was exacerbating Yemen's conflict, hindering the United Nations-facilitated diplomatic process and violating U.S. interests and values.
How the announcement will impact the bilateral U.S.-Saudi relationship as a whole is yet to be determined. As Biden reiterated, Washington will continue to assist the kingdom on defensive security measures, which suggests that the basic tenets of the 76-year-old arrangement will survive to some extent. Biden's change in Yemen policy, however, is an opportunity for the administration to conduct a comprehensive review of U.S.-Saudi relations. While it would be a mistake for the U.S. to arbitrarily throw its entire relationship with the Saudis overboard, there is no question the old oil-for-security transactionalism that was first cemented between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud near the end of the Second World War is past its sell-by date. As geopolitics change, America's security partnerships must change along with it.
The Biden administration should rest its review of U.S. policy on Saudi Arabia upon three pillars.
First, Washington needs to place relations with Riyadh on an accurate baseline. As much as Saudi officials may wish otherwise, the monarchy is not a formal treaty ally of the United States and is thus not entitled to unconditional U.S. security privileges whenever it finds itself in trouble. Regrettably, if the monarchy believes it holds special status with the U.S., it's because Washington has done little to disabuse Riyadh of this assumption. The U.S. has been all too willing to give Saudi Arabia the benefit of the doubt across successive administrations—in the case of Yemen, this took the form of mid-air refueling of Saudi combat aircraft, providing intelligence on Houthi targets, diplomatic cover at the United Nations, and the export of the bombs and spare parts needed to prosecute the war. The Biden administration's contention that the U.S. will cooperate with Riyadh when U.S. and Saudi interests coincide and "not shy away from defending U.S. interests and values where they do not" is an encouraging evolution in Washington's approach that must be operationalized if it's to have any meaning.
Second, the U.S. should stop approaching the Middle East through a black-and-white frame. The common perception in the Beltway is that in the broader regional power struggle between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the former is irreplaceably good while the latter is indisputably bad. The real answer, however, is that Saudi Arabia and Iran have both done their fair share to destabilize the Middle East. Tehran's material support for proxies in multiple Arab countries is a key facet of its foreign and security policy, while Riyadh's multiple infractions during the era of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—kidnapping the former Lebanese prime minister, launching a misguided military stalemate in Yemen, and boycotting neighboring Qatar for over three years—have introduced serious fissures into the region's security architecture. The U.S., therefore, should stay out of the Middle East's internal squabbles as a general principle, avoid picking winners in those fights, and begin the process of diversifying its diplomatic relationships with other states so the Saudis don't have an undue influence over U.S. policy.
Third, the Biden administration should support critical voices in the region who are seeking a new security architecture for the Middle East—one that relies less on the force of arms and more on direct diplomacy and confidence-building measures. On January 31, Saudi researcher Abdulaziz Sager and former Iranian diplomat Hossein Mousavian put forth an approach calling for exactly that. "The first step toward a tolerable modus vivendi would be for each side [Saudi Arabia and Iran] to recognise the other's threat perceptions…and embrace a set of foundational principles upon which to build." Those principles would include a joint commitment from Riyadh and Tehran that sovereignty will be respected, a prohibition on the use of force to resolve disputes, and dropping the pursuit of hegemony as a policy objective. A stable balance of power is the system that best serves U.S. interests. While establishing a workable security architecture in the region should ultimately be left up to those who live in the region, Washington can offer assistance in such discussions if deemed helpful.
The Biden administration's decision to pull the United States out of Yemen's six-year-long civil war was a highly prudent act. But it's merely a first step. Washington's Middle East policy must be anchored in restraint and humbleness. This simply won't happen until U.S. policy makers realign the U.S.-Saudi Arabia relationship with the realities of the world today—not on how the world looked during the Cold War.
The post Biden Cuts Support for Saudi War in Yemen, But It Should Only Be the First Step appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In October 2018, the world learned of the brutal murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
Khashoggi had been a government insider in his home country of Saudi Arabia, but his relationship with the ruling family—and particularly Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—soured as Khashoggi became an influential advocate for free speech and human rights within the kingdom. In September 2017, fearing retaliation, he fled to the United States.
In 2018, Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, to obtain marriage papers and was ambushed by a team of operatives allegedly deployed by Prince Mohammed. As Khashoggi's fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, waited outside for him to return, the Saudi team went to work.
"The global response, the U.S. response, the U.N. response, is basically 'bad boy, we're gonna let you get away with this one,'" says Bryan Fogel, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind the 2017 Netflix documentary Icarus.
His new film, The Dissident, out now on most major VOD platforms, contains shocking audiotapes, transcripts, and video surveillance footage of the operation that ended with Khashoggi being strangled to death and his body disposed of in several trash bags.
The documentary features damning revelations, such as the Saudi team's alleged efforts to cover up the murder after the fact by dressing a Khashoggi body double in the slain man's clothes and parading him in front of security cameras. But surveillance footage featured in The Dissident also shows the alleged body double removing his fake mustache and clothes shortly thereafter.
Using a spyware tool called Pegasus that had been loaded onto Khashoggi's phone in order to eavesdrop on his conversations with other activists, Saudi operatives allegedly discovered that he was communicating with a young dissident living in Canada named Omar Abdulaziz. According to the film, Prince Mohammed also went after Abdulaziz, attempting to lure him back to Saudi Arabia with promises of fame and fortune, and sending a rendition team after him.
Fogel says he's most passionate about seeking justice and accountability for whistleblowers, dissidents, and other victims of totalitarian governments. The film for which he won an Oscar in 2017, Icarus, provided crucial evidence on the Russian Olympics doping scandal based on revelations from the former head of Moscow's internationally certified drug-testing laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, who worked with Kremlin officials to implement the scheme.
The Dissident exposes widespread efforts by the Trump administration and political leaders around the world to cover up or gloss over the Saudis' alleged involvement in Khashoggi's killing. Though Fogel was fresh off an Oscar win for Icarus, he says it proved difficult to find partners willing to make his new documentary, and it was only made possible through the backing of the Human Rights Foundation.
Though the documentary premiered at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival to rave reviews, it was rejected by all major distributors before being picked up by Briarcliff Entertainment. Fogel says his experience making and distributing the film has convinced him that the fight for press freedoms around the globe must be led by a grassroots movement because it won't come from governments or corporations.
"I'm not mad at them," Fogel says of the distributors who declined to take on the film. "I understand the predicament. I just wish that we, as a society, were valuing human rights and valuing stories like this."
Produced, written, and edited by Justin Monticello. Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Music: Which Way Is Up? by Silent Partner and The Path Starts Here by Cooper Cannell.
Photos: POOL New/REUTERS/Newscom; Abaca Press/Balkis Press/Abaca/Sipa USA/Newscom; Balkis Press/ABACA/Newscom; Ron Przysucha/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Anita Bugge/Geisler-Fotopress; AHMET SEL/SIPA/Newscom; Everett Collection/Newscom; Balkis Press / Sipa USA/Newscom; White House via CNP/Sipa USA/Newscom; Ron Sachs/dpa/picture-alliance/Newscom; Owen D.B. / BlackStar Photos/Newscom; Hubert Boesl/picture alliance / dpa/Newscom; Mikhail Japaridze/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; SHEALAH CRAIGHEAD/UPI/Newscom; Louise MERESSE/SIPA/Newscom
The post How the U.S. Covered Up the Murder of Journalist Jamal Khashoggi appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Saudis and Russians have reportedly agreed to cut their petroleum production by 3.3 million and 2 million barrels per day, respectively, in a bid to shore up global oil prices. Other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) are supposed to cut an additional 5 million barrels by next month.
Owing to the free fall in the price of crude oil in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the price of regular gasoline at the pump in the U.S. now averages under $2 per gallon. My wife (using her Kroger points) just purchased premium gasoline at $1.40 per gallon.
"Good for the consumer, gasoline prices coming down!," tweeted President Trump on March 9. Just the day before, Saudi Arabia launched an oil price war against Russia because President Vladimir Putin refused to cut back his country's production. By then rising global supplies had already pushed the price of benchmark WTI oil down from $63.05 per barrel at the end of 2019 to just over $40 at the beginning of March. Toward the end of the month, the price of WTI oil had dropped to $21.50 per barrel before bouncing back to just over $26 now.
Of course, driving is way down as a result of pandemic lockdowns. In fact, vehicle miles traveled were down in March about 70 percent in major U.S. cities.
The oil consultancy IHS Market projects that the economic retrenchment in response to the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns will reduce global oil demand in the second quarter of 2020 by 16.4 million barrels per day, and that the decline in April steepened to 20 million barrels per day. The world was recently producing 100 million barrels per day, so that much of a decrease in demand roughly means that there are 20 million barrels per day in excess capacity.
No longer touting lower gasoline prices, Trump has instead begged the Saudis and Russians to cut their oil production. On April 2, the president tweeted: "Just spoke to my friend MBS (Crown Prince) of Saudi Arabia, who spoke with President Putin of Russia, & I expect & hope that they will be cutting back approximately 10 Million Barrels, and maybe substantially more which, if it happens, will be GREAT for the oil & gas industry!" He further tweeted: "Could be as high as 15 Million Barrels. Good (GREAT) news for everyone!" Everyone except American drivers and anyone else who uses petroleum products.
The next day, the Russian government denied that Putin had actually spoken with Trump's murderous friend Mohammed bin Salman. At that point, the president shifted from begging to threatening tariffs.
"I am a big believer in our great energy business, and we're going to take care of our energy business," Trump said during a Saturday press briefing. "If I have to do tariffs on oil coming from outside, or if I have to do something to protect—or thousands and tens of thousands of energy workers, and our great companies that produce all these jobs—I'll do whatever I have to do," he added.
Trump has denied that OPEC and Russia are demanding comparable cuts in the U.S. oil production. With respect to cutting domestic production, the president, much to his credit, said, "I think the cuts are automatic if you are a believer in markets."
In other words, Trump proposed imposing a tax that will end up increasing the price of gasoline for American consumers. Why? Because of the bigger role that energy companies are playing in the economy as the U.S. last year became the world's largest oil producer at 12.8 million barrels per day. As oil prices fell, the domestic industry began to shrink while layoffs swelled.
Trump has clearly calculated that paying less at the pump is no longer a vote-getter. Instead, the president is worried about the effect of the loss of tens of thousands of oil industry jobs on his re-election chances as higher cost U.S. oil production loses out to cheaper imported oil.
The post OPEC and Russia Agree To Cut Oil Production To Boost Prices appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Guardian newspaper reports that Saudi Arabia's three largest mobile phone companies have made millions of tracking requests since November 2019 that would allow them to locate Saudi phone users in the United States. The Guardian reports that such requests can be routine and can help, for instance, foreign phone companies register roaming charges. But it says security experts it consulted say the volume of requests indicates the Saudi government is spying on its citizens in the United States.
The post Brickbat: Snooping Saudis appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It was just four days ago that President Donald Trump explained his decision to move American troops out of one part of Syria by saying that it was "time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars…and bring our soldiers home."
On Friday, the Trump administration announced it would be sending about 1,800 additional troops to the Middle East.
In a statement, Pentagon spokesman Jonathon Hoffman said the new deployments were part of an overall strategy "to assure and enhance the defense of Saudi Arabia."At a press conference, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the new deployments were made in consultation with the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Defense.
BREAKING: Amid Pres. Trump's decision to remove US troops from northern Syria and his vocal criticisms of US military presence in Middle East, the Pentagon announces the deployment of more US troops and weapons to Saudi Arabia "to assure and enhance the defense of Saudi Arabia."
— NBC News (@NBCNews) October 11, 2019
Including the newly announced deployment, the U.S. will have increased the number of troops deployed to the Middle East by 14,000 since May, CNN reports.
Getting out? Bringing them home? Hardly. As Reason contributor Bonnie Kristian pointed out earlier this week, Trump's "haphazard half-measure" in Syria was not a meaningful step toward ending the endless wars. "If Trump is serious about liquidating unnecessary, failed, costly overseas missions," she wrote," he must actually end them."
But Trump says he has "no plans at all" to withdraw American forces from Iraq, where they've been fighting since 2003. His promise to withdraw from Afghanistan has so far failed to materialize (though the administration is involved in negotiations with the Taliban there). When Congress passed a bipartisan resolution that would have cut off American aid to Saudi Arabia's ongoing war in Yemen—a conflict that has triggered a famine, killing an estimated 50,000 civilians—Trump vetoed it.
And whether or not you agree with Trump's move this week in Syria, it should be obvious that moving a few dozen troops from one side of Syria to another is not the same as bringing them home.
Despite President Trump's bluster about ending endless war, he's not ending anything. Our troops aren't coming home; a small number were moved so Turkey could escalate the war. And the president has expanded our role in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and kept us in Afghanistan and Iraq.
— Justin Amash (@justinamash) October 9, 2019
Trump has said the right things about bipartisan support for endless wars, and so far he has resisted the urge to expand America's Middle East quagmire into Iran. But that's simply not good enough. Instead of extracting the country from these messy and unwinnable wars in the Middle East, Trump is sending more troops to boost an authoritarian regime—and risking that they'll be drawn into a head-on confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The post Bringing Them Home? Trump Commits 1,800 More Troops to the Middle East appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) has come out swinging against President Donald Trump's plan to send more troops to Saudi Arabia.
"This is the wrong decision that is more catering towards the interests of Saudi Arabia than it is to the interests of the United States of America and the American people," the Democratic presidential candidate told the Washington Examiner, arguing that this cycle of escalation "will lead us to an all-out inferno of a war in not only Iran, but across the region."
On Friday, following an attack on Saudi oil facilities that U.S. officials blame on Iran, the Pentagon announced that hundreds of troops would be deployed to help provide air and missile defense against future attacks on Saudi oil facilities. The same day, the Trump administration announced it was imposing additional sanctions on Iran's central bank.
Trump framed these sanctions and deployments as acts of restraint, not escalation, on the grounds that it would be easy for him to just bomb Iran.
"Going into Iran would be a very easy decision, as I said before, very easy," Trump said during a Friday press conference. "I think I'm showing great restraint. A lot of people respect it. Some people don't."
Following the attack earlier this month on the Saudi oil facilities, Trump tweeted that the U.S. military was "locked and loaded" and ready to strike the culprits following instructions from Saudi Arabia. That prompted Gabbard to say Trump was trying to "prostitute" U.S. troops to handle Saudi Arabia's problems. "Trump awaits instructions from his Saudi masters. Having our country act as Saudi Arabia's bitch is not 'America First,'" Gabbard tweeted.
The Trump administration's announcement Friday is only the latest round of deployments to the region. For the past several months, the U.S. has been sending additional group troops, aircraft, missiles, and ships to the Middle East to counter the threat supposedly posed by Iran.
The administration has been ramping up sanctions on Iran following the U.S.'s withdrawal from a 2015 nuclear deal.
A number of these actions were initiated or hyped by former National Security Advisor John Bolton, who has long been an advocate for war with Iran. But Bolton is now gone. The fact that Trump continues to escalate tensions with Tehran suggests that he doesn't require hawkish advisors to take a hard line with the country.
Don't buy into the Trump-as-restrainer argument. Most of Trump's advisers actually opposed withdrawing from the JCPOA. Part of the reason he hired Bolton and promoted Pompeo was to get some hawks in there that agreed with him. Trump owns his Iran policy. https://t.co/282fAOzg65
— John Glaser (@jwcglaser) September 23, 2019
The fact that the president keeps pulling back from a military strike on Iran suggests that he isn't eager for an all-out war. Gabbard is right, though, to warn that this continual brinksmanship could easily escalate into a foolish armed conflict that few people want.
The post Tulsi Gabbard Warns Trump's Iran Actions Could Lead to 'All-Out Inferno of a War' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the wake of an apparent drone attack targeting oilfields on the Arabian Peninsula, Congress should do everything it can to avoid getting America involved in a potential conflict between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The attack on the Abqaiq oil facility appears to have been carried out with drones operated by Houthi rebels in Yemen. They targeted a refinery owned by Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil monopoly. The attack is likely to cut Saudi Arabian oil production in half, reducing global supply of crude oil by about 5 percent, The Wall Street Journal reported, raising the possibility of higher gasoline prices. It did not take long for Saudi and U.S. officials—including President Donald Trump—to pin blame for the Saturday night attack on Iran, which has provided support and aid to the Houthi rebels.
On Monday night, NBC News reported that the attack was launched from within Iran, citing three anonymous sources familiar with American intelligence reports.
The question, then, becomes what America should do next.
In a tweet on Sunday, Trump gave the impression that he was willing to let the Saudis decide how America would react.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1173368423381962752
That response raises obvious constitutional concerns. Even if Saudi Arabia and Iran were heading for a military confrontation, it's not immediately clear how that conflict would jeopardize American national security. If there is a reason for the U.S. to be involved in a regional war in the Middle East, the Trump administration should make that argument to Congress and proceed only after Congress has approved military action.
"The whole situation is more complicated than the war hawks in town would have you believe," says Chris Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "It's simply not true that the Iranians call the tune and the Houthis dance. It's more complicated than that."
Indeed, the Houthi rebels have been fighting a Saudi-backed regime in Yemen for several years—a conflict that has turned into a brutal civil war that has killed an estimated 50,000 people; while at least 50,000 more are estimated to have died in a famine triggered by the conflict, though exact numbers of deaths are difficult to ascertain. Earlier this year, Trump vetoed a bill that would have ended American military involvement in the Yemeni civil war.
But in a follow-up tweet on Monday, Trump compared Iran's denial of involvement in the oil facility attacks to what the president called "a very big lie" regarding the downing of a U.S. drone earlier this year. At that time, Iran claimed the drone had entered its airspace, while the U.S. claimed it had not. Shortly afterward, Trump ordered a military strike against Iran before changing his mind at the very last second.
That moment aside, the Trump administration has seemed willing—and eager, at times—to start a war with Iran. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has pitched lawmakers on the idea that the 2001 Authorization of Military Force (AUMF)—passed in the wake of 9/11 to permit the U.S. to attack Al Qaeda—allows the U.S. to attack Iran without further congressional approval. And just last week, senior State Department advisor Brian Hook wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing Iran "is effectively extending its borders, enlarging its sphere of influence, and launching lethal attacks against rivals" via the Houthis.
But if Trump is going to remind the American public about the lies that Iranian leaders have told, it seems only fair to also point out that Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman has told a few lies himself. Salman, known by"MBS," apparently ordered the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year—and then lied about the murder for weeks after it took place at the Saudi consulate in Turkey. Trump sided with bin Salman during the controversy.
It's that sort of knee-jerk support for Saudi Arabia within American political ranks that makes a U.S. military response troublingly likely. To the extent that duplicitous Saudi behavior enters into the equation at all, it seems to be quickly pushed aside in favor of backing a long-time ally merely because it has been a long-time ally—in the way that Sen. Chris Coons (D–Conn.) did on Monday morning:
just two dudes hanging out, gassing up another american war in the middle east (maybe!) pic.twitter.com/EaDkwJk2Hf
— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) September 16, 2019
Even if members of Congress are cheering for a war with Iran, Trump should have to put the matter before them for a formal vote. And lawmakers should be measured in their approach. If you think a single attack that took 5 percent of the world's oil supply offline temporarily is a problem, you should also consider what a full-fledged conflict among some of the world's biggest oil-producing countries would mean.
"At a minimum, we should want to know more information before doing anything. Don't jump to conclusions," Preble says he would advise members of Congress. "And then, even once you've established the facts, you want to make sure that whatever action you're being asked to take is likely to make the situation better."
American involvement in a Saudi-Iran war would do little to protect the national security or economic interests of Americans. Congress should do everything in its power to avoid it.
The post The U.S. Shouldn't Rush to War With Iran Over Saudi Oilfield Attack appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For your because-2019 files:
Trump awaits instructions from his Saudi masters. Having our country act as Saudi Arabia's bitch is not "America First." https://t.co/kJOCpqwaQS
— Tulsi Gabbard ???? (@TulsiGabbard) September 16, 2019
So what fresh hell is this "locked and loaded" nonsense? That's what kicks off this week's Editors Roundtable edition of the Reason Podcast, featuring Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch. The quartet also discusses highlights and lowlights from last week's Democratic presidential debate, rages against the dying of the vape, and tries to fix Katherine's bad movie-watching instincts.
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
Music credit: "Complicate Ya" by Otis McDonald
Relevant links from the show:
"Yemen, Iran, and the War Powers Act," by Ilya Somin
"Is the U.S. Stumbling Towards an Accidental War With Iran?" by Christian Britschgi
"War With Iran May Have Been Avoided Due to Trump's Fondness for Fox News," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"Democratic Candidates Agree—Let's Get Out of Afghanistan," by Scott Shackford
"The Corruptions of Power," by Matt Welch
"Kamala Harris Does Not Understand Why the Constitution Should Get in the Way of Her Gun Control Agenda," by Jacob Sullum
"Andrew Yang Is the Anti–Elizabeth Warren," by Shikha Dalmia
"Vicious Scapegoating Is the Whole Point of Beto O'Rourke's Gun Grab," by Jacob Sullum
"On Trade, Democrats Continue Struggling To Differentiate From Trump," by Eric Boehm
"There's Only 1 Democrat Talking About the Constitution, and It's (Shudder) Joe Biden," by Matt Welch
"Banning Flavored E-Cigarettes Has Nothing to Do With the Hazards of Black-Market Cannabis Products," by Jacob Sullum
"The Ban on Flavored E-Cigarettes May Lead to More Smoking by Teenagers As Well As Adults," by Jacob Sullum
"Trump's Ban on E-Cigarette Flavors Endangers Public Health," by Jacob Sullum
"The Great Lost Rolling Stones Documentary Is Now a Museum Piece," by Kurt Loder
"Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and To Rome with Love," by Kurt Loder
The post No War for Saudi Arabia appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A measure passed by the House of Representatives on Thursday would largely end U.S. military involvement in the Yemeni civil war.
The final vote was 247-175, with 16 Republicans joining 231 Democrats in approving the resolution. Just one congressman voted present: the libertarian-leaning Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.), who has previously said he didn't support the bill because it includes an exception that he believes expands the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force.
The Senate passed the measure last month. It now heads to the desk of President Donald Trump, who has previously signaled he will veto it. While it's unlikely that either house of Congress can muster the two-thirds majority needed to override such a veto, the measure's passage is significant on its own. It's the first time ever a war powers resolution has reached a president's desk, according to Politico.
The measure cites the War Powers Act of 1973, which seeks to ensure that the president only commits U.S. military forces to conflicts abroad if he has congressional approval. While U.S. forces are not directly involved in the fighting, they have assisted the Saudi coalition by sharing intelligence and proving logistical support. U.S. forces also supported the Saudis with aerial refueling, but ceased doing so last year.
"The president will have to face the reality that Congress is no longer going to ignore its constitutional obligations when it comes to foreign policy, when it comes to determining when and where our military is engaged in hostilities," said House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Rep. Eliot Engel (D–N.Y.), according to The New York Times.
But Foreign Affairs Committee ranking Republican Rep. Michael McCaul (R–Texas) argued the measure misinterprets the War Power Act's true meaning of the word "hostilities."
"The fundamental premise of this resolution is flawed because U.S. forces are not engaged in hostilities against the Houthis in Yemen," McCaul said, according to the Washington Post. "If we want to cut off economic assistance or logistic assistance to Saudi, there's a way to do that…I think we're using the wrong vehicle here."
The War Powers Act encompasses "the assignment of members of such armed forces to command, coordinate, participate in the movement of, or accompany the regular or irregular military forces of any foreign country or government when such military forces are engaged, or there exists an imminent threat that such forces will become engaged, in hostilities." According to the measure passed Thursday, the "activities that the United States is conducting in support of the Saudi-led coalition, including aerial refueling and targeting assistance, fall within this definition."
The Yemen resolution first passed in the Senate in December. The House passed the measure in February, but Republicans added an anti-Semitism amendment that forced the Senate to do it all over again. This time around, House Republicans tried to amend the bill with a measure to condemn the global BDS movement to boycott the nation of Israel. However, most Democrats opposed the amendment.
Among the Republicans to vote yes on the Yemen resolution were Reps. Mark Meadows (R–N.C), Jim Jordan (R–Ohio), Thomas Massie (R–Ky.). While Amash has been a notable opponent of U.S. involvement in Yemen, he voted present, just as he did in February.
Back then, Amash pointed out on Twitter that the legislation expands the AUMF, which gives the president power to take military action against any nation or person he believes to have been involved in the 9/11 terror attacks. "The legislation makes an exception for 'Armed Forces engaged in operations directed at al-Qaeda or associated forces,'" Amash wrote at the time. "The notion of undefined 'associated forces' is not part of the 2001 AUMF and significantly expands it."
The post House Votes To End Unauthorized U.S. Involvement in Yemen (Again). Justin Amash Votes Present (Again). appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Senate yesterday approved a resolution to end U.S. support for bombings and other acts of war in Yemen. With a 54–46 vote, lawmakers said the U.S. must block further military support for Saudi Arabia's and the United Arab Emirates' bombings and other acts of aggression in Yemen.
Congress never authorized the U.S. to enter this conflict. Yet as Mike Lee (R–Utah) said, "We have been supporting and in some case actively participating in this war." He was one of seven Republicans in the Senate who voted for the resolution, which invokes the War Powers Act. (The others were Susan Collins of Maine, Steve Daines of Montana, Jerry Moran of Kansas, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Todd Young of Indiana.)
"Since March 2015, members of the United States Armed Forces have been introduced into hostilities between the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthis, including providing to the Saudi-led coalition aerial targeting assistance, intelligence sharing, and mid-flight aerial refueling," the resolution states.
Yet "no specific statutory authorization for the use of United States Armed Forces with respect to the conflict between the Saudi-led coalition and the Houthis in Yemen has been enacted, and no provision of law explicitly authorizes the provision of targeting assistance or of midair refueling services to warplanes of Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates that are engaged in such conflict."
"Nothing in this joint resolution shall be construed to influence or disrupt any military operations and cooperation with Israel," another section explicitly stipulates.
"Debate on the resolution, as in the past, centered on arguments that the US involvement isn't technically a war in and of itself, and that ending the war would be bad for Israel," writes Jason Ditz at Antiwar.com:
The resolution came with an amendment by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), which seeks to ensure that no language in the bill inadvertently authorizes any other wars. An alternative amendment by Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), aiming to keep the US involved in the name of saving American civilians from conceivable missile fire, narrowly failed.
This is the second time in a month that Congress has voted on a War Powers Act challenge to the Yemen War, with the House having had such a vote in mid-February. The House will still have to reconcile itself to another vote, however, because Senate leadership prevented debate on the House version and forced war opponents to start with a fresh challenge.
The White House has said President Donald Trump will veto the bill. As of now, it has far from the two-thirds majorities it would require in both houses to overcome the veto.
Police moonlight as art critics:
After last year's art controversy at Polk State College, @TheFIREorg and @ncacensorship wrote in.
Newly released records suggest Polk State *contacted law enforcement* to review the work and decide if it was obscene. (Spoiler alert: They claimed it was!)https://t.co/mflsF6sOOZ pic.twitter.com/F5i0GFLmDU
— Sarah McLaughlin (@sarahemclaugh) March 13, 2019
p.s. when we say the best response to controversial artwork is more speech, reporting it to law enforcement isn't really what we have in mind
— Sarah McLaughlin (@sarahemclaugh) March 13, 2019
Dick's Sporting Goods is pulling guns from 125 more stores. "Late last year, the sporting goods retailer stopped selling guns, ammunition and hunting gear at 10 of its 700-plus stores," reports Marketplace. "Now, it's going to do the same at 125 more stores." That's not necessarily a political move. "Dick's hopes replacing that merchandise with experiential things, like baseball batting cages, will combat sluggish store sales," Marketplace says.
Just how many journalists are jailed in China? CPJ's correspondent explains all the reasons why we have no idea. https://t.co/5OaJX8smZB via @pressfreedom
— Elana Beiser (@ElanaBeiser) March 12, 2019
• Beto O'Rourke is officially running for president. Here's Matt Welch's take.
• Here's just one quote to entice you into an all-around fascinating interview with documentary filmmaker and Richard Pryor's ex-wife Jennifer Lee Pryor:
It was the '70s! Drugs were still good, especially Quaaludes. If you did enough cocaine, you'd fuck a radiator and send it flowers in the morning.
• "Until now, the excessive-fines clause in the Constitution's Eighth Amendment had languished in obscurity, the Rodney Dangerfield of constitutional rights," Institute for Justice lawyers write in The Atlantic. But a recent Supreme Court decision related to civil asset forfeiture "has gone some distance to restoring its prominence." Here's where they suggest we go next.
• In other good news on asset forfeiture reform:
And the Arkansas House just unanimously approved (93-0) civil asset forfeiture legislation with a conviction requirement—two unanimous votes! The bill now beads to the Governor for his signature. So huge! https://t.co/FATeVrc57e
— Lauren Krisai (@laurenkrisai) March 13, 2019
• Facebook is under criminal investigation.
The post The U.S. Must Stop Supporting War in Yemen, Says Senate appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In January, The New York Times reported that free speech had suffered a setback when Netflix restricted access to an episode of a comedy act at the request of the government of Saudi Arabia. The episode of Hasan Minhaj's Patriot Act, which included impolitic remarks about the Saudi crown prince, remains available to Netflix subscribers elsewhere.
The Times underscored its displeasure by publishing an opinion piece attacking "Netflix's supine compliance" in the face of a "dictatorial crackdown," with a historical Hitler reference tossed in for good measure. A few days later, the Times published a second opinion article lamenting that the "streaming giant has set a disturbing precedent" and has "lent some legitimacy to the claim that it is wrong for Saudis to ever hear their leaders criticized."
It's true, of course, that the absolute monarchy ruling Saudi Arabia lacks a sense of humor, tolerates no criticism, and has a disturbing affinity for bonesaws. Human Rights Watch says its authorities repress anyone who dares to express "views against government policies." Offenders may be detained, abused, and flogged. Blasphemy is illegal. So are public gatherings. Religions other than Islam are unlawful and Christians are persecuted: In Saudi Arabia, celebrating Christmas is, literally, a crime.
It's also true that tech companies, whose execs generally view a partial product as better than no product at all, are required to comply with the laws of the countries in which they operate. Otherwise they risk their employees being imprisoned, or worse.
This happened a few years ago to Facebook's vice president for Latin America, Diego Dzodan, when police in Brazil concluded the social network was being less than helpful in providing users' communications to the government on request. Dzodan was released on a technicality after a night in jail, but by then the legal threat was clear. French authorities delivered a similar warning when they arrested Uber France's CEO and Uber Europe's general manager on charges of running an illegal taxi company. A Brazilian judge ordered the arrest of a Google executive when the company balked at removing a YouTube video that criticized a local mayoral candidate.
Netflix, Facebook, Google, and other platforms would be delighted if these country-by-country restrictions vanished. But until that happens, internet companies that don't comply are likely to find their websites blocked and their executives imprisoned. Surprisingly, regional vice presidents are not known for volunteering to become free speech martyrs.
Netflix followed the same broad path—call it the least-worst option—that the Times itself follows when complying with laws in Persian Gulf nations that impose censorship requirements.
Take the wealthy enclave of Qatar, which prohibits newspaper articles that talk favorably about sex and alcohol or unfavorably about the government and ruling family. The allure of doing business in Doha, which boasts an I.M. Pei–designed Museum of Islamic Art and is spending $200 billion on the 2022 World Cup, can apparently overcome scruples about censorship. The Times began publishing operations in the country in 2007, then launched a Qatar-specific style magazine three years later.
Last July, ABC News noticed that about a dozen Times news articles and at least one advertisement had been censored in Qatar: They were replaced with blank rectangles and a printer's note saying they were "exceptionally removed." The Times did not respond by pulling out of the lucrative Qatari market. Instead, a spokesman offered a statement to ABC News acknowledging, delicately, that "we understand that our publishing partners are sometimes faced with local pressures." Full-throated condemnation this was not.
We might expect more than a soppy, milquetoast statement from an influential American newspaper when its reporting is censored. Even so, the Times should not be savaged for continuing to operate in Qatar; a partially censored paper may be better than no paper at all. But, and this is a point that one hopes Times editors will recognize, the same rule should apply to Netflix as well.
Threatening any company because it posted what most of us—in freer societies, at least—would call political speech is an affront to human dignity and the individual rights that flow from it. Unfortunately, in too many countries, it's also the law of the land.
The post Netflix Bows to the Saudis appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The House of Representatives approved a resolution Wednesday that would largely end U.S. military involvement in the Yemeni civil war.
Eighteen Republicans joined the vast majority of House Democrats in approving the resolution, which serves as a rebuke to the Trump administration's policy of providing, without congressional authorization, some military aid to the Saudi Arabian-led coalition fighting Iran-backed Houthi rebels. Republican support for the bill came largely from the House Freedom Caucus, though Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.), an outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in the Yemen conflict, notably voted "present" rather than "yes."
The resolution itself cited the War Powers Act of 1973, which seeks to ensure that the president only commits U.S. military forces to conflicts abroad if he has congressional approval. The resolution reads:
Congress hereby directs the President to remove United States Armed Forces from hostilities in or affecting the Republic of Yemen, except United States Armed Forces engaged in operations directed at al-Qaeda or associated forces, by not later than the date that is 30 days after the date of the enactment of this joint resolution (unless the President requests and Congress authorizes a later date), and unless and until a declaration of war or specific authorization for such use of United States Armed Forces has been enacted.
While U.S. forces are not directly involved in the fighting, they have assisted the Saudi coalition by sharing intelligence and proving logistical support, according to the Washington Post. U.S. forces also supported the Saudis with aerial refueling, but ceased doing so last year.
"More than 14 million Yemenis—half the country—are on the brink of famine, and at least 85,000 children have already died from hunger and disease as a result of the war," the bill's lead sponsor, Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.), said after the vote, reported Politico. Khanna previously introduced the resolution in 2017.
The bill argues that U.S. involvement in Yemen falls under under the War Powers Act, which encompasses "the assignment of members of such armed forces to command, coordinate, participate in the movement of, or accompany the regular or irregular military forces of any foreign country or government when such military forces are engaged, or there exists an imminent threat that such forces will become engaged, in hostilities." According to Khanna's resolution, the "activities that the United States is conducting in support of the Saudi-led coalition, including aerial refueling and targeting assistance, fall within this definition."
The Trump White House disagrees. In a statement Monday, the administration claimed the resolution's premise is "flawed" because U.S. forces in the area have not been "introduced into hostilities." The resolution would also "harm bilateral relationships in the region, negatively affect our ability to prevent the spread of violent extremist organizations…and establish bad precedent for future legislation by defining 'hostilities' to include defense cooperation such as aerial refueling for purposes of this legislation," the statement reads.
But Khanna is bringing up valid points. Congress has indeed never voted to authorize U.S. involvement in Yemen. And Saudi aggression in the country has caused a horrific humanitarian crisis. According to one United Nations report, the Saudi-led coalition was responsible for 370 of 552 recorded child casualties in 2017. In total, more than 57,000 people have been killed in the conflict since the start of 2017, the Associated Press reported in November. When you include the casualties from the last nine months of 2015, that number will likely reach 70,000 or 80,000.
Members of Congress from both parties—including Sens. Mike Lee (R–Utah), Rand Paul (R–Ky.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—have called for an end to U.S. involvement in the conflict. But Amash, who's long been one of those critics, did not vote "yes" on Khanna's resolution. On Twitter, he explained why.
Amash pointed out that the legislation expands the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which gives the president power to take military action against any nation or person he believes to have been involved in the 9/11 terror attacks. "The legislation makes an exception for 'Armed Forces engaged in operations directed at al-Qaeda or associated forces,'" Amash wrote. "The notion of undefined 'associated forces' is not part of the 2001 AUMF and significantly expands it."
Amash also voted "present" on a motion that added an amendment condemning anti-Semitism to the Yemen bill. The motion ended up passing 424-0 anyway, though libertarian-leaning Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.) also voted "present" before voting "yes" on the resolution itself. Both lawmakers later explained they did not support the amendment because it was totally unrelated to the Yemen bill. In the end, most of the Republicans who voted to add the amendment rejected the bill as a whole.
The resolution now moves to the Senate, which passed a similar measure in December. Even if the bill does get a majority of the votes in the upper chamber of the Congress, Trump is likely to veto it. A two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate would be needed to override his veto and make the resolution binding.
The post House Passes Bill To End U.S. Support for Saudi Involvement in Yemen; Rep. Justin Amash Votes 'Present' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Mohammed bin Salman had been crown prince of Saudi Arabia for only a few months, but he was already on his second U.S. visit. In March 2018, the young monarch (usually known as "MBS") spent three weeks on a whirlwind P.R. tour of America, meeting everyone from Jeff Bezos to Morgan Freeman.
But the trip was about more than photo ops and hobnobbing. In the month leading up to the visit, the Saudi government had retained three American law firms—David Kultgen, King & Spalding, and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman—to advise it on and lobby for a potential bilateral agreement on nuclear research. On March 7, a Canadian law firm called Gowling WLG likewise signed a $66,000-per-month contract with the Saudi government related to "the development of a civil nuclear program." (As of press time, none of these firms has responded to requests for comment.)
Saudi Arabia and the United States are engaged in negotiations over just such a program: Under a proposed plan, American companies would build nuclear reactors for the Saudi government.
On March 18, MBS told CBS News that Saudi Arabia intended to build nuclear weapons "as soon as possible" if its enemy Iran acquired them. In November, The New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence has investigated the possibility of an already existing secret Saudi nuclear weapons program.
On October 31, Sens. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.), Todd Young (R–Ind.), Cory Gardner (R–Colo.), Rand Paul (R–Ky.), and Dean Heller (R–Nev.) signed a letter stating that the negotiations "should be suspended immediately and indefinitely." In so doing, they broke from President Donald Trump, the leader of their own party, who had begun the talks.
Although the rapport between Trump and MBS is as warm as ever, congressional discontent with the crown prince has been growing. In particular, the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on October 2 seriously damaged MBS's reputation. (Khashoggi had been an outspoken critic of the Saudi government and of MBS in particular.) In response to the slaying, members of Congress have threatened to cut off everything from military aid to atomic research cooperation.
But congressional debates, diplomatic cables, and lobbying disclosures reveal that the tensions run far deeper than one journalist's disappearance. Between an increasingly restive faction of Republicans in the Senate and Democrats—including a cohort of foreign policy skeptics—taking control of the House of Representatives in January, Saudi Arabia may have a much harder time maintaining its influence on Capitol Hill going forward. From changing energy markets to the spread of Sunni Muslim militancy worldwide, a variety of factors will force the new Congress to make hard calls about America's closest Arab ally. And that wouldn't affect just the Middle East. Lawmakers' willingness to take an increased role in shaping U.S. foreign policy could be a blow against decades of expanding executive power and long-unquestioned "national security" dogma justifying military interventions abroad.
The "post-Khashoggi moment" was an opportunity for legislators "to make their displeasure known" about foreign policy trends, according to Emma Ashford, a research fellow at the Cato Institute who has written about Saudi-U.S. relations.
President Barack Obama believed that it "would be more stabilizing in the long run" to balance between Middle Eastern powers by engaging with both Iran and Saudi Arabia, says Ashford. But the Trump administration has switched to "a military-heavy approach" to root out Iranian influence abroad. This strategy is informed by Saudi leadership's belief "that Iran is the biggest problem" in the region.
"The Trump administration has really pinned their strategy of confronting Iran on Saudi Arabia," adds Kate Kizer, director of the Win Without War policy program at the Center for International Policy.
Trump was at first reluctant to confront Saudi Arabia over Khashoggi's disappearance. On October 12, the president stated, "It's in Turkey, and it's not a citizen." (Khashoggi was a U.S. green card holder.) But evidence soon mounted that the journalist had been killed and dismembered with a bonesaw by Saudi special forces waiting inside the consulate. On November 17, U.S. officials leaked the conclusions of a secret CIA report, which found that MBS likely ordered Khashoggi's murder.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia's explanations changed from day to day: Khashoggi was killed by a fight he started, or a kidnapping gone wrong, or a plot by rogue elements. Members of Congress began demanding punitive measures, including sanctions on MBS himself.
On November 20, President Trump released a statement on Khashoggi: "It could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event—maybe he did and maybe he didn't!" Criticizing unnamed "members of Congress," the president added that Saudi Arabia is "a great ally in our very important fight against Iran."
James Mattis, who was at the time secretary of defense, asserted during a November 28 hearing that there was no "smoking gun" in the Khashoggi murder. But Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) came out of a later briefing with the CIA claiming that a "smoking saw" implicated the crown prince himself.
Congress was not pleased.
Back in February 2018, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Mike Lee (R–Utah) had proposed Joint Resolution 54, which would use the War Powers Act to withdraw U.S. support from the Saudi intervention in Yemen. It didn't get a hearing. But after the Khashoggi affair, lawmakers revisited the resolution as a tool they could use to pressure MBS even without the Trump administration's help.
Saudi Arabia had intervened in Yemen in 2015 after rebels known as the Houthis overthrew the government in Sana'a. During the final Senate floor debate around Resolution 54, Rubio said that "this fight will continue, and the reason why is pretty straightforward: The Saudis view the Houthis as agents of Iran."
Kizer calls this view a "self-fulfilling prophecy."
"It's not that [the Houthis] are an Iranian proxy; it's that they're so isolated that they're looking for outside support where they can get it," she says. Iran denies Saudi allegations that it supplies the Houthis, but U.N. investigators found in December that Houthi forces are using Iranian-made weapons shipped to Yemen after the war began.
Resolution 54 notes that America—also eager to counter Iran—has been providing "aerial targeting assistance, intelligence sharing, and mid-flight aerial refueling" to Saudi forces in Yemen. A few weeks before a scheduled vote on the measure, the Saudi military requested a freeze on U.S. aerial refueling. An unnamed Senate staffer told NBC News that it was "a means to pre-empt a potentially damaging debate" in the Senate.
American support for the Saudi-waged war doesn't sit well with some in Congress. In a February 2018 press release, Sen. Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) accused Saudi Arabia of "deliberately using disease and starvation and the withdrawal of humanitarian support as a tactic." He told the Senate in November that the blockade of Houthi-held areas has led to the deaths by starvation of 85,000 children.
As the largest cholera outbreak in recorded history unfolded in Yemen, Saudi bombers struck water treatment plants. On August 9, an airstrike using an American-made bomb killed 40 schoolkids on a field trip. "With U.S. personnel helping the Saudis pick targets, more civilians have been killed," Murphy said, "not less."
Kate Gould of the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the self-described "Quaker lobby," says that a variety of groups support Resolution 54: MoveOn, FreedomWorks, Win Without War, and even the disaster relief group Oxfam.
On November 30, the Senate reopened debate on the measure. For the first time in history, the upper chamber was voting on a War Powers resolution.
"This is the only thing that guarantees that this is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people," Lee said during the final vote.
It passed 56–41, with unanimous Democratic support, on December 13. Khashoggi's name came up 24 times that day.
Because the House had narrowly voted on December 12 to table discussion of Yemen, Joint Resolution 54 did not pass before the new Congress assumed office in January. But with the Democratic takeover of the lower chamber, Saudi skeptics may soon have the votes to win—despite a well-funded Saudi influence network on Capitol Hill.
The Saudi government spent $20.6 million on political activities in the United States in 2017 and 2018, making the kingdom the sixth-highest-spending foreign government in U.S. politics. We know this because the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires Americans to register their political work for foreign entities with the U.S. Department of Justice.
FARA filings made available by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) at OpenSecrets.org show the extent of Saudi activity. The only Middle Eastern state with more FARA-registered political spending was the United Arab Emirates, a federation of monarchies allied with Saudi Arabia. It spent about $30.5 million in the same period.
U.S. lobbying and P.R. firms, including the three mentioned earlier, signed 33 contracts with the Saudi government during those two years. Many of the activities they organized—such as a glitzy conference showing off Saudi technological prowess—were relatively innocuous. But registered Saudi agents also pushed for the Saudi war effort in Yemen, distributing 19 different press releases denouncing the Houthis, promoting the Saudi-led coalition, and praising Saudi "humanitarian" efforts in Yemen. Many of the press releases defended the Saudi-led siege of Hodeidah, a port city that processes 90 percent of Yemen's food and medicine imports.
At least two registered Saudi agents, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and BGR Government Affairs, have terminated their contracts with the Saudi government in response to Khashoggi's disappearance. Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher was paid a lump sum of $250,000 to help block the No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act, a House bill that would have allowed state-owned oil companies to be sued under U.S. antitrust laws. BGR Government Affairs was pulling in $80,000 per month (plus fees) for unspecified "strategic guidance," including "relevant outreach to U.S. government officials."
The CRP says that registered Saudi agents gave $1.6 million to 2018 midterm election candidates. A recent study by Kizer's organization found 12 occasions in 2017 when registered Saudi agents donated to and contacted the same members of Congress about Saudi-related policy on the same day.
Of course, FARA filings show only the money overtly spent on influence. The Daily Beast reported in December that Special Counsel Robert Mueller has, as part of his Russia probe, discovered secret lobbying operations involving "individuals from the Emirates, Israel, and Saudi Arabia." Former Trump adviser Michael Flynn has publicly admitted to violating FARA by secretly lobbying for the Turkish government.
The Trump family has its own connections to the House of Saud, which spends lavishly at Trump hotels. The New York Times reports that Saudi officials have cultivated a personal friendship between MBS and Jared Kushner, the president's adviser and son-in-law.
Trump also claims to have secured over $110 billion in arms deals with Saudi Arabia—promises from that country's government to buy military equipment from American firms. Actual sales so far add up to only $14.5 billion, which still makes Saudi Arabia the biggest importer of American weapons.
"War profiteers of all kinds, including various defense contractors, have aggressively lobbied for more weapons to Saudi Arabia," the Friends Committee's Gould claims. Domestically, the U.S. defense industry spent $26.2 million on the 2018 elections, according to the CRP data.
Saudi Arabia funds both its arms purchases and its lobbying network from the kingdom's massive oil revenues.
American companies first discovered oil in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s and 1940s. Because of the importance of that oil during World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt declared Saudi security a "vital interest" of the United States. President Jimmy Carter later echoed the idea in his "Carter Doctrine."
Thanks to the growing North American shale oil industry, Cato's Ashford says, Saudi oil production is no longer as important to world markets. But the Arabian-American Oil Company, a Saudi-U.S. consortium that was bought by the Saudi government and renamed Saudi Aramco in 1980, remains the world's most profitable company, according to Bloomberg News. And some U.S. politicians are still focused on keeping cheap Saudi crude flowing.
"Oil prices getting lower," Trump tweeted on November 12. "Thank you to Saudi Arabia, but let's go lower!"
The U.S. has also tried to use its relationship with Saudi Arabia to weaponize Islam against America's enemies—a policy with deadly unintended consequences for Middle Easterners and Americans alike.
The Saudi kingdom began as an 18th century alliance between the House of Saud and the Islamic revivalist Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, whose followers are sometimes known as the Wahhabis. Saudi rulers promoted ibn Abd al-Wahhab's puritanical teachings at home and abroad, especially after Saudi forces captured the holy city of Mecca in 1924.
For decades, Wahhabism served as a bulwark against secular ideologies such as Communism and pan-Arab nationalism, but starting in 1979, it also allowed the House of Saud to fight off rival Islamic movements. That year, the monarchy in Iran—another pro-U.S. petrostate—was overthrown and replaced by the theocratic Islamic Republic.
A few months later, a former Saudi soldier led an uprising in Mecca, claiming that his brother-in-law was a companion of the Messiah. The rebels were crushed, but only after killing hundreds of pilgrims and soldiers—and seriously rattling the legitimacy of the Saudi monarchy.
After an unpopular Communist government took over Afghanistan in 1978, American officials saw an opportunity for "sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire" while "inflam[ing] Muslim opinion against them in many countries," according to national security memos from 1979 republished by Louisiana State University. The U.S. and Saudi Arabia set out to kill two birds with one stone: bog down the Communists with a costly conflict and shore up Saudi religious legitimacy.
Thousands of mujahedin, or holy warriors, traveled from throughout the Muslim world to fight against the Soviet troops propping up the Afghan government. They were encouraged by Saudi clergy, facilitated by Pakistani intelligence, and funded by Uncle Sam, to the tune of $700 million per year.
After the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1988, a Saudi-born mujahid named Osama bin Laden founded Al Qaeda, the militant group that killed more than 3,000 people on U.S. soil in the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Fifteen of the 19 attackers were Saudi citizens.
When the U.S. government's 2003 investigation of the attacks found that Saudi "charities" were a major source of funding for Al Qaeda, Saudi authorities cracked down on the group's overt supporters. But previously classified diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks in 2010 suggest that U.S. officials continued to view Saudi Arabia as a major source of religious violence.
Martin R. Quinn, then consul general in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, complained in June 2009 that "many Saudis find the US position on religious freedom hostile to the very essence and nature of Saudi Arabia, founded and maintained under the rule of the country's strict, fundamentalist interpretation of the Quran."
In December of that year, then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote that Saudi Arabia "has responded to terrorist financing concerns raised by the United States.…Still, donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide."
Locals told the U.S. Consulate in Lahore, Pakistan, in January 2009 that preachers funded by the Saudis were indirectly causing an increase in "recruitment activities by extremist religious organizations." And when Judith Ann Chammas, now and then the U.S. chargé d'affaires in Bangladesh, visited "a growing 2,000 student Saudi-backed" religious school in 2005, she noted that its principal was promoting anti-Semitic and anti-Shi'a conspiracy theories.
The Saudi monarchy countered the pan-Islamic message of the Iranian Revolution—which was led by Shi'a clergy but sought to build an anti-U.S. alliance of Sunni and Shi'a Muslims—by emphasizing Sunni identity politics. But that approach has caused problems. According to a 2009 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Yemen, the Houthi movement's precursors were Shi'a political activists who felt "incredibly threatened" by the rise of Wahhabi preachers and their "discriminatory messages against Shiites." In other words, Saudi-backed sectarianism created the kingdom's own enemies in Yemen.
ISIS, the world's most infamous terrorist group, began as a particularly anti-Shi'a faction of Al Qaeda. In a 2014 email also published by WikiLeaks, Clinton claimed that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were "providing clandestine financial and logistic support to [ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups in the region."
Citing policy, State Department officials declined to "comment on purportedly leaked documents."
It's impossible to know how U.S. officials' opinions have changed since the leaks, but the Commission on International Religious Freedom, which is appointed by Congress, criticized the "dissemination of intolerant literature and extremist ideology," as well as restrictions on Shi'as and Christians, in its latest annual report on Saudi Arabia. And the Associated Press reported in August that Saudi forces in Yemen continue to collaborate with Al Qaeda.
Soon after becoming Saudi Arabia's de facto leader in mid-2017, MBS promised to promote a "moderate Islam that is open to all religions and open to the world."
But he seems unwilling or unable to confront the full extent of the problem. The congressional religious freedom report found that "some of the most egregious content promoting violence and intolerance, once thought to have been removed" from Saudi schoolbooks, is still there.
While MBS publicly rejects the label Wahhabism, he often defends the teachings to which it refers. In early 2018, he told the Saudi tabloid Okaz in Arabic that Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab's doctrines were "nothing but a pure teaching that returns to the word of God and the tradition of His prophet."
With much fanfare, authorities allowed Saudi women to drive for the first time ever in June 2018. But in the month leading up to that change, dozens of women's rights activists were arrested. Most of them remain imprisoned, and some have been brutally tortured, according to human rights groups.
United Nations experts warned in early 2018 that they were seeing a "worrying pattern of widespread and systematic arbitrary arrests and detention" of activists across the political spectrum in Saudi Arabia. The country imposed economic sanctions on Canada in August 2018 for criticizing these arrests in a routine report.
A month before his death, Khashoggi wrote that "Saudi Arabia wasn't always this repressive. Now it's unbearable."
Ashford notes that "personalistic dictatorships" tend to be the "most prone to aggression." Introducing fear into the equation only increases that impulse.
The Saudis pursued a "reactionary, counter-revolutionary foreign policy" in response to the Arab Spring of 2011, Ashford says. Meanwhile, former allies Turkey and Qatar have cultivated influence with anti-monarchical Islamic revolutionaries such as the Muslim Brotherhood, which Kizer says the Saudi monarchy views as an "existential threat."
In June 2017, MBS issued an ultimatum to Qatar—cut off support for the Muslim Brotherhood, including positive coverage on the state-funded channel Al Jazeera, or else—and blockaded that country's only land border. The Intercept reports that MBS had plans for a full-on invasion before then–Secretary of State Rex Tillerson intervened. Ashford calls this "another example of [MBS's] impetuous, reckless foreign policy decision making."
According to The Intercept and a separate New York Times report, the Emirates responded by lobbying for Tillerson's firing, which occurred in March of the following year.
That same month, the Saudi American Public Relations Affairs Committee (SAPRAC) hired the Podesta Group—a firm founded in 1988 by future Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta—to run an anti-Qatar website called TheQatarInsider.com. While SAPRAC denied in its FARA filing that it is "affiliated with any foreign government," it has contracts with the Saudi state-subsidized Muslim World League, and SAPRAC founder Salman al-Ansari frequently appears on Al Arabiya, a TV station owned by Saudi princes.
The Podesta Group went out of business in November 2017. SAPRAC has not responded to an email requesting comment.
Kidnapping is also becoming a tool of the MBS regime. When Lebanon's prime minister visited Saudi Arabia in November 2017, he was detained and forced to resign on Saudi television. In August 2018, the Saudi government attempted to trick Chinese authorities into arresting and extraditing a businessman with ties to the crown prince's rivals in the royal family, according to a Washington Post report.
Given this context, the only real surprise about Khashoggi's disappearance is how much backlash it has caused.
In March, Sen. Graham voted to table Resolution 54. After his November "smoking saw" comment, he voted to advance the same measure, though he abstained from the final vote.
Kizer cautions that "many Republicans are talking about the Saudi Arabia problem as a problem with MBS"—they want to depose the crown prince in order to "return to business as usual and continue pursuing war with Iran."
But the new Congress may be more skeptical of the kingdom. Only four freshman representatives—and no freshman senators—have taken money from Saudi-linked lobbyists: Jason Crow (D–Colo.), Jennifer Wexton (D–Va.), Joseph Neguse (D–Colo.), and Steven Horsford (D–Nev.). In total, they received $98,937 from these groups. (None of the four has responded to requests for comment.) Outgoing members of Congress—those who retired or lost—took at least $155,626 from registered Saudi agents in the last election cycle.
Asked about donations from the Saudi-linked law firm Brownstein Hyatt, Neguse told Colorado Public Radio that the money was from a Boulder-based employee who supported his campaign. "I'm far more concerned about taking action at the policy level in the Congress to ultimately hold Saudi Arabia accountable," he insisted.
Some new Congress members have made a point of publicly rejecting Saudi money. After a student from that country damaged his car, now–Rep. Tim Burchett (R–Tenn.) told Knox News that he would rather "drive around with a dent" than let the embassy pay for repairs.
In total, 10 out of 90 incoming representatives, plus incoming Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah), have publicly condemned Saudi Arabia for the Khashoggi killing or the war in Yemen. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D–Minn.) even called for a "boycott, divest, sanctions" movement against the kingdom. None of the newly elected members of Congress has publicly defended MBS.
In an interview with PBS, incoming Rep. Tom Malinowski (D–N.J.), a former State Department official, criticized "the notion that the crown prince is helping us to stabilize the Middle East, after he ordered the murder of [Khashoggi], after he launched a blockade against Qatar, after he launched a war in Yemen that President Trump, to his credit, is trying to end," apparently referring to U.S.-backed peace talks in Stockholm.
But the executive branch didn't necessarily have the biggest effect on those talks. Just a few hours before Resolution 54 passed the Senate, Saudi and Houthi negotiators suddenly agreed to "facilitate the freedom of movement of civilians and goods from and to the city of Hodeidah."
A few days before, Kizer had said in an interview with Reason that she was "optimistic" about the effect congressional debate was having on the negotiations. "For the first time, the United States Congress is sending the message that U.S. support is not unconditional, it's not indefinite," she said. Saudi rulers were realizing that "they need us more than we need them."
The post Bonesaw Diplomacy appeared first on Reason.com.
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The House of Representatives will vote today on whether to proceed with the latest Farm Bill. Tucked inside of it is a resolution that would suspend the War Powers Act with regard to Yemen and halt any House debate on American support for Saudi Arabia's aggression there.
The resolution attached to the farm bill says that the Congressional part of the War Powers Resolution "shall not apply during the remainder of the One Hundred Fifteenth Congress to a concurrent resolution introduced … with respect to Yemen."
That likely-to-be banned resolution, introduced in the House by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), would "recognize the undeclared nature of U.S. involvement in the Yemeni civil war and call for it to cease, absent explicit authorization," as FreedomWorks Federal Affairs Manager Sarah Anderson put it.
In the Senate, a resolution similar to the Massie-Khanna one (from Sens. Mike Lee and Bernie Sanders) is scheduled for a vote today.
"To avoid a debate on whether the US should be involved in a war in Yemen, today our leadership will trick members into suspending the provisions of the War Powers Act," tweeted Massie this morning. "Sad!" Last night, he called it "despicable" that House Speaker Paul Ryan "is shirking responsibility for debating our involvement in the Yemen war by hiding the war resolution in a procedural vote on the farm bill."
"Why not just vote against the farm bill?" someone asked Massie. He responded by explaining that today's House vote isn't to approve the farm bill itself but to approve a future vote on whether to approve it.
"We should vote against this procedural vote," Massie added. "If the procedural vote fails, the farm bill won't proceed to a vote."
If it does, and passes, it means Congress would temporarily give up their ability to have any say in how the executive branch decides to handle things in Yemen.
Does the Constitution not matter? Article I gives Congress alone the enumerated, undivided power to declare war. The executive branch can only wage war. U.S. involvement in Yemen is not declared, therefore the executive may not wage this war.
— Sarah Anderson (@smayranderson) December 12, 2018
This is the second time House Republicans have tried to sneak a vote perpetuating war in Yemen into unrelated bills, Anderson also pointed out. Last time, it was tucked into a measure about wolves.
Jason Pye, vice president of legislative affairs at FreedomWorks, commented:
Well, one of House Republican leadership's final acts will be to block a vote on the Yemen war powers resolution. House Republican leaders are determined to have the U.S. own our role this bloody conflict and humanitarian disaster in which we have no business being involved. pic.twitter.com/beboysfJqA
— Jason Pye (@pye) December 12, 2018
Republicans air grievances about their Google search results. As Robby Soave noted here last night, the whole hearing in which the House Judiciary Committee grilled Google head Sundar Pichai was seriously absurd, and kind of hilarious if it didn't foreshadow terrible new regulations and excuses for censorship.
Most of those questioning Pichai seemed under the impression that there are actual people at Google sitting around deciding what shows up in search results. This very busy cabal somehow manages to handle billions of searches globally per day while finding the time suppress good results about Republican leaders. Why else, they demand, would you get a picture of Trump when you search "idiot"? Why else would searching for these lawmakers' names not turn up positive news coverage?
The self-owns here are fun, and especially noteworthy since Google results depend at least in part on how popular a piece of content is (i.e., how many people visit the page) and how many times people search for particular terms together. What turns up is what's both topically relevant and what's popular. So yesterday's airing of grievances about GOP search results really just reveals widespread negative perceptions of these doofuses.
Beyond being ignorant about how search engines work, at least one of the lawmakers leading Pichai's questioning was not aware that Google doesn't make iPhones.
After @SteveKingIA raises inscrutable concerns about iPhones, Google CEO Sunday Pichai patiently informs him, "Congressman, iPhone is made by a different company." pic.twitter.com/TiNZ1t3VRo
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 11, 2018
The IRS has been "gutted" in the past few years, ProPublica reports. Good news, right?
Mostly. Libertarians can certainly get behind budget cuts at the agency and a slew of exiting employees (auditors employed at the IRS are down by a third since 2010). But one result of this, according to ProPublica, is that IRS auditors have started focusing more efforts on low-income taxpayers who fall behind.
The article contains a host of other interesting tidbits, but as Christian Britschgi wrote here yesterday, it doesn't quite explain why anyone should care that the IRS is taking in less tax money overall. "ProPublica fails to identify what, if any, effect a scaled back IRS actually has had on wider government operations," writes Britschgi. More:
One might complain that wealthy tax cheats are benefiting at the expense of the beneficiaries of government programs starved of funds. But the fact is that the absence of that $18 billion has not resulted in cuts to federal spending.
Indeed, in the years since the IRS has been "gutted," federal spending has gone nowhere but up. Fiscal year 2018 saw the federal government appropriate $4.1 trillion, a 3 percent hike from the previous year. That spending hike included an annual defense spending increase of $83 billion, and another $60 billion in increased non-defense discretionary spending.
• The British Parliament is holding a vote this evening to determine whether Prime Minister Teresa May is incompetent and should step down.
• Surprise, surprise, there's not a realistic way to keep the Russians off "our" social networks.
• A big new study shows that criminalizing prostitution makes it more risky. Sex workers are "three times more likely to experience violence" from customers where prostitution is illegal, The Guardian reports.
• "Whether it's 1848 or 1968, social upheaval in France rarely ends well."
• Let's end on some good news:
Federal court says Massachusetts public officials can no longer abuse state wiretap law to punish citizens for recording them https://t.co/2wyPDm0rDbhttps://t.co/ieLMumBl5z pic.twitter.com/NoOSfeCXFX
— bloodthirsty cadaver junkie (@TimCushing) December 12, 2018
The post Republican Leaders Sneak Support for Yemen War Into Farm Bill Vote: Reason Roundup appeared first on Reason.com.
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Finally a bit of bipartisanship with merit: Senators yesterday decided to at least debate ending U.S. sponsorship of Saudi Arabia's aggression in Yemen. With a 63–37 vote, the Senate moved to advance the resolution, which was sponsored by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), Mike Lee (R–Utah), and Chris Murphy (D–Conn.).
Specifically, the resolution "directs the President to remove U.S. Armed Forces from hostilities in or affectingYemen, except those engaged in operations directed at Al Qaeda, within 30 days unless: (1) the President requests and Congress authorizes a later date, or (2) a declaration of war or specific authorization for the use of the Armed Forces has been enacted."
Yesterday's "procedural vote sets up the beginning of a floor debate on the resolution next week," explains the AP.
I've been at this for 3 years, and I am blown away by this.
By a big bipartisan margin, 63-37, the Senate just voted, for the first time, to move forward with a debate on ending American involvement in the Yemen war.
Thanks to @SenMikeLee @SenSanders for their partnership.
— Chris Murphy (@ChrisMurphyCT) November 28, 2018
The vote stems from political anger over Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman's role in the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, President Donald Trump's response to Khashoggi's death, and Trump's derision of intelligence reports that the prince was involved, as well as ongoing Saudi aggression in Yemen and the humanitarian crisis it's created there. (Alas, the latter seems a lower-priority offense for most in Congress.)
What form the final measure could take is unclear. Republican Sen. Bob Corker, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, tells Roll Call he doesn't necessarily endorse the resolution as is but wants the "ability to have a debate as it relates to our relationship with Saudi Arabia." More from Roll Call:
If the Sanders-Lee resolution does not pass, Corker said he could see members of the Appropriations State-Foreign Operations Subcommittee adding language regarding Saudi Arabia and Khashoggi to the final fiscal 2019 foreign aid spending bill.
Another possibility is new legislation from Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., that would require the Director of National Intelligence within one month to issue an unclassified report into the individuals that participated in, ordered or "were otherwise complicit in" the death of Khashoggi.
The resolution does not explicitly halt U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia, as folks like Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) and Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) have proposed, and it does not end all U.S. millitary operations in Yemen. Still, it's something.
Of course, neither the White House nor Secretary of State Mike Pompeo were pleased.
So bombs count as investment, @SecPompeo ? Wow. https://t.co/T0ZWWzpcDa
— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) November 29, 2018
Scapegoating Section 230. Cato Institute analyst Julian Sanchez comments on incoming Sen. Josh Hawley's bad rhetoric around internet law:
That's… not how any of this works. It's not how the First Amendment works, and it's not how CDA 230 works. https://t.co/Tc9nv1u7fw
— Julian Sanchez (@normative) November 28, 2018
I wrote about this here yesterday. Unfortunately, self-interested calls to weaken Section 230 are an increasingly common (and bipartisan) affair.
Very good signs from Supreme Court on asset forfeiture case. The Court heard oral arguments Wednesday.
"The big questions before the Court are whether the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment is 'incorporated' against state governments and, if so, whether at least some state civil asset forfeitures violate the Clause," explains lawyer and Volokh Conspiracy blogger Ilya Somin, and "if the answers to these two questions are both "yes," the Court could also potentially address the issue of what qualifies as an 'excessive' fine."After oral arguments yesterday, it's "clear that the Court will almost certainly rule that the Excessive Fines Clause does indeed apply to the states," Somin concluded.
"Civil asset forfeiture is such a farce that it took Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer only about 100 words to twist Indiana's solicitor general into admitting that his state could have the power to seize cars over something as insubstantial as driving 5 miles per hour over the speed limit," notes Eric Boehm. "Here's how he set the trap":
"Operation Choke Point was real, and it exceeded legal limits."
Politics should be kept out of private contractual relationships. Full stop.
— Preston Byrne (@prestonjbyrne) November 28, 2018
• Ashley Judd continues in the great Hollywood tradition of swooping into serious issues with very strong and bad opinions:
Kate D'Adamo, a sex-worker rights advocate and partner with Reframe Health and Justice, called her out, tweeting, "Congrats, ?@AshleyJudd, on your hard work trying to make ?#MeToo a space where those most likely to face and harm are unwelcome and unsafe. ?#sexworkerlivesmatte?r."
Judd eventually responded to D'Adamo's thread, writing, "Hi, Thanks for your perspective. I disagree. I believe body invasion is indeed inherently harmful, and cash is the proof of coercion. Buying sexual access commodifies something that is beyond the realm of capitalism and entrepreneurship: girls and women's orfices [sic].
• In Pierce County, Washington, "Jessica Ortega repeatedly told deputies that her boyfriend threatened to kill her," reports Reason's Zuri Davis. "She died following their negligence." Now her family is accusing the Pierce County Sheriff's Office of being "grossly negligent in their efforts to serve and enforce a domestic violence protection order on a known, violent criminal."
• Los Angeles has finally passed a formal plan to legalize street food.
• The Reason 2018 Webathon is still ongoing—donate here!
The post In Rebuke to Saudis and Trump, Senate Votes to At Least Talk About Pulling U.S. Troops From Yemen: Reason Roundup appeared first on Reason.com.
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When you've lost Lindsey Graham… Yes, even one of the most hawkish, sycophantic members of Congress has condemned President Donald Trump's statement "on standing with Saudi Arabia"—a thoroughly depressing nine paragraphs that begin with "America First! and then, on a separate line, "The world is a very dangerous place!" From there, Trump went on to that say we can't know whether Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman knew about the state-orchestrated torture and killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi—"maybe he did and maybe he didn't!" are Trump's exact words.
"It is not in our national security interests to look the other way when it comes to the brutal murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi," tweeted Graham in response yesterday. "I firmly believe there will be strong bipartisan support for serious sanctions against Saudi Arabia, including appropriate members of the royal family, for this barbaric act which defied all civilized norms."
But based on Trump's statement, human rights norms come second to U.S. financial interests. "The Kingdom agreed to spend and invest $450 billion in the United States," the president proclaims. Some "$110 billion will be spent on the purchase of military equipment from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and many other great U.S. defense contractors."
Many are disputing his characterization of the scope of Saudi spending: "Saudi Arabia, in fact, has only followed through so far on $14.5 billion in arms and aircraft, the State Department acknowledged last month. Other deals are merely vague memorandums of understanding that cover the next decade, not this year," writes Robin Wright at the New Yorker.
But that's almost besides the point. What we should be angling for—and some in Congress are—is less American arms sales to Saudi Arabia, not more. These purchases are fueling Saudi airstrikes on civilians in Yemen as well as the starvation of children and all around destruction there.
This is, without a doubt, the most uninformed, imbecilic, toady, poorly-written, categorically untrue statement I have ever seen from a president of the United States. A complete disgrace. https://t.co/9eqoWFeroX
— Joe Cirincione (@Cirincione) November 20, 2018
All of this Trump brushes aside in his memo, because genocide is such a good deal for us!—and anyways, blame Iran. It's a sickeningly sociopathic statement from beginning to end, radically re-envisioning basic precepts of reality. And for once in recent memory, a Trump step too far for Republicans beyond the reliably decent Rep. Justin Amash.
Amash called out the president's statement yesterday and was joined by GOP colleagues Sen. Rand Paul and Sen. Bob Corker, among others. Both Amash and Paul are promising legislation to halt U.S. weapons sales to the Saudis, a measure which draws bipartisan support.
Trump is clearly very afraid of the prospect of the Senate delivering a serious rebuke to his policy by voting to end U.S. support for the Yemen war. But that is exactly what we will do when we vote on SJ Res 54 next week.
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) November 20, 2018
Meanwhile, Corker opined that he never thought he would "see the day a White House would moonlight as a public relations firm for the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia."
It's a fine characterization of the Trump administration's actions here, if inaccurate in pretending this is a first for White House occupants and staff, or members of Congress. The Obama, George W. Bush, and Clinton administrations have all had problematic ties to the Saudis and engaged in unethical behavior and transactions on their behalf. Maverick John McCain accepted a million dollar gift for his "human rights foundation" from the Saudis while simultaneously pushing to expand U.S. weapons sales there. And so on.
Obama turned a blind eye on the early stages of the atrocious Saudi war in Yemen and continued to sell arms to the Saudis and back the war. Now, his former National Security Adviser works for the Saudis.
— Dan King (@Kinger_Liberty) November 21, 2018
One thing not talked about is the Obama Administration encouraged Saudi Arabia "to be more aggressive" in Yemen as Hadi govt was failing. "At that time the Saudis were reluctant got more deeply involved," Gerald Feierstein, former amb to Yemen, told me. https://t.co/Sha52jMmO3 https://t.co/uliJyZFalq
— Sharon Weinberger (@weinbergersa) November 1, 2018
Trump explained himself to reporters later Tuesday with the ultimate in reality TV cliches: "It is what it is." This morning, he followed up with:
Oil prices getting lower. Great! Like a big Tax Cut for America and the World. Enjoy! $54, was just $82. Thank you to Saudi Arabia, but let's go lower!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 21, 2018
For a good and thorough rebuttal of the president's Saudi statement, see this thread from University of Ottawa international affairs professor Thomas Juneau.
Data from the General Social Survey shows relatively consistent value attached to free speech principles, with support for speech by most marginalized groups growing. Between the early 1970s and today, the number of people who supported the right of gay people to give a public speech in town rose from under 65 percent to nearly 90 percent in 2016. Support for atheist speakers, "militarists," and communist speakers only rose. Support for racist speakers rose slightly in the '90s but remains around the same today as it did in the '70s (a little over 60 percent).
In any event, "these questions mostly track fear or dislike of certain groups, not free speech as a principle," suggest Liz Wolfe and Daniel Bier. "The fact that 90 percent of Americans today support allowing homosexuals to speak probably reflects changing attitudes about sexuality, not rising devotion to freedom of speech."
Interesting. This DCT judge apparently thinks the way to decide constitutional challenges to the exercise of undelegated federal powers is to carefully apply doctrine instead of reasoning backwards from a predetermined pro-govt result. Silly rabbit. https://t.co/DcVHJRfDES
— Clark Neily (@ConLawWarrior) November 21, 2018
"Amazon delivers things to your house. Google helps you find things online. Apple sells actual objects. Facebook … helps you get into fights? Delivers your old classmates' political opinions to your brain?" https://t.co/kpj8KJDvmP
— Peter Suderman (@petersuderman) November 21, 2018
The post Trump's Atrocious Saudi Statement Spurs Republican Resistance: Reason Roundup appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) today had a blistering response to President Donald Trump's statement on the death of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi last month.
Khashoggi, who moved to the U.S. earlier this year, disappeared during a visit to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October. The Saudi government admits he was killed but claims it was not a government-sanctioned assassination. However, The Washington Post reported Friday that it was in fact Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who ordered Khashoggi's killing.
In a statement titled "America First," Trump called Khashoggi's killing "an unacceptable and horrible crime." But the president also pointed to the Saudi government's claims. "Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event—maybe he did and maybe he didn't!" Trump wrote, adding that "we may never know all of the facts surrounding" Khashoggi's death. The president also touted the Saudi government's plans to invest in the U.S., particularly via "the purchase of military equipment from" American defense contractors.
That wasn't enough for Amash, who blasted Trump's statement on Twittter as "repugnant":
This is an utterly absurd, irresponsible, and repugnant statement from @POTUS. No amount of money justifies the betrayal of our principles and values as Americans. https://t.co/wRjRN38DV4
— Justin Amash (@justinamash) November 20, 2018
For more than a month, Amash has been pushing to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for Khashoggi's murder. In October, the congressman announced he was co-sponsoring legislation that would block U.S. military assistance and arms sales to Saudi Arabia unless the kingdom was found to have had no involvement in Khashoggi's disappearance.
Even before Khashoggi vanished, Amash repeatedly called for the U.S. to halt arms sales to the Saudis, in part due to the Saudi government's involvement in the Yemeni Civil War. In fiscal year 2017, the U.S. sold $5.5 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia, according to the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.
Amash wasn't the only libertarian-leaning Republican to criticize Trump today. In a series of tweets, Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) also slammed the president's statement. "I'm pretty sure this statement is Saudi Arabia First, not America First. I'm also pretty sure John Bolton wrote it," Paul wrote, referring to Trump's national security adviser.
Trump, for his part, appears to be sticking to his guns. "It's a very complex situation. It's a shame, but it is what it is," he told reporters today. "It's America first."
The post Rep. Justin Amash Slams 'Repugnant' Trump Statement on Khashoggi Killing appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Over at The Daily Beast, Spencer Ackerman takes note of the cross-ideological alliance trying to put an end to the U.S. military's participation in Saudi Arabia's deadly activities in Yemen. The alliance itself is not new. Libertarian-leaning Republicans like Rep. Justin Amash (Mich.) and Sens. Mike Lee (Utah) and Rand Paul (Ky.) have long been critical of our involvement with and funding of military actions that have killed innocents, especially since we are not officially at war with any of the nations involved.
What's new, Ackerman notes, is that the Charles Koch Institute is briefing conservative lawmakers about a resolution introduced by Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.) that would direct the president to end all military action in Yemen that is not covered by the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). To keep U.S. forces involved in the conflict, the White House would need to seek an explicit declaration of war from Congress.
The resolution has 69 co-sponsors right now, only three of which are Republicans (Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky among them). The Koch Institute and libertarian-conservative FreedomWorks are going to be pushing Republicans to try to get a vote in November, after the midterms. Whether such a resolution would actually change anything is a question that deserves our skepticism. Every presidential administration since that of George W. Bush has used the AUMF to justify military activity against any terrorist organization overseas.
The subheadline of Ackerman's piece calls the Koch Institute's involvement "unexpected." Media companies should be past this by now, particularly since they've obsessed over the Kochs for nearly a decade. The Koch Institute's foreign policy page is very clear that while it supports a strong military, it's opposed to the sort of interventionist adventures associated that have defined our activities in the Middle East for years now. Here's a blog post from 2016 expressing concern about military actions in Yemen and the negative consequences of our alliance with Saudi Arabia.
In fairness, Ackerman's reporting does not treat it like an unexpected development. He notes that FreedomWorks has been lobbying for a year on a failed effort by Lee and Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Chris Murphy (D–Conn.) to force a vote on military action in Yemen.
But it's nevertheless frustrating that the headlines tend to treat the Koch brothers' very common libertarian attitudes toward a number of policies as surprising. We saw it happen years ago where people seemed to be surprised at David Koch's position in support of gay marriage recognition in 2012, even though he, like many libertarians, had felt that way for quite a while (before many Democratic leaders, in fact). Media outlets seem to frequently feign surprise that the Kochs favor criminal justice reforms, even though they've supported such efforts for years.
There's a tendency among some media outlets to approach the Koch's libertarian brand of conservatism as though the brothers' deviation from typical Republican stances are unusual for them. They're not. When media outlets write this way, it tells libertarian audiences that they know very little about the Kochs and what separates libertarians from conservatives. Disappointing libertarians may seem like small potatoes, but it also misinforms people who know little about what distinguishes libertarians from Republicans. I would argue that this is actually bad: It allows Republicans to pass as lovers of liberty even when they're not, and—perhaps in rarer instances—it allows libertarians to join ranks with Republicans when they shouldn't. Treat them as distinct, and you make it harder for both groups to say one thing and then do another without consequence.
Disclosure: David Koch sits on the Board of Trustees for the Reason Foundation, which publishes this site.
The post Let's Not Treat Koch's Libertarian Opposition to U.S. Military Action in Yemen as 'Unexpected' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Saudi Arabia reversed days of denials on Friday evening and admitted that journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi was killed by Saudi agents inside the country's Istanbul consulate.
But the new official story is "not even close to credible," says Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), who today reiterated his call for a reevaluation of the U.S.–Saudi relationship, including putting an end to military cooperation with and arms sales to Saudi Arabia.
The so-called "explanation" from the Saudis is not even close to credible. What they did was unacceptable and I call on my colleagues in Congress to join me in denouncing their behavior and changing how we treat them.
— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) October 20, 2018
Indeed, the new Saudi explanation of how Khashoggi was killed strains credulity.
Saudi Arabia's foreign ministry now says the journalist was killed after being placed in a choke-hold during a fist fight that broke out inside the consulate on October 2. Khashoggi, who was living in Turkey, visited the Saudi consulate to obtain some paperwork necessary to marry a Turkish woman. Once there, he was confronted by a team of 15 men, most of whom were part of the Saudi security services, who had flown to Istanbul from Saudi Arabia earlier that day, according to The Washington Post. Saudi Arabia says it has detained 18 individuals involved in the incident and is continuing to investigate.
Earlier in the week, The New York Times reported that Khashoggi was beheaded and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate, citing audio recordings provided by an unnamed senior Turkish official.
For the official story to hold up, you'd have to believe that a 59-year-old journalist tried to Jean-Claude Van Damme his way out of a confrontation with more than a dozen highly trained operatives. And you'd have to come up with an explanation for what happened to Khashoggi's body.
Paul is hardly the only one to question the legitimacy of this story. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) has tweeted that it would be "an understatement" to say he's skeptical of the latest Saudi explanation for Khashoggi's death, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) says the story of a "fist fight gone bad is bizarre." (Consider how rare it is for Graham and Rubio to land on the same side as Paul on a foreign policy issue.) Rep. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, tells the Post that "if Khashoggi was fighting inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, he was fighting for his life with people sent to capture or kill him."
President Donald Trump, on the other hand, seems accepting of the shifting explanations. On Friday he called the newest version of the Saudi's story "a good first step," and the White House says it will continue seeking further investigation.
Khashoggi's death has generated so much international attention because it represents a brazen attack on a critic of the Saudi government who was living outside Saudi Arabia and who had close ties to American media outlets. (Khashoggi was a contributor to The Washington Post and other publications.) But the difference between this latest atrocity and Saudi Arabia's long history of brutally repressing criticism and violating human rights is one of degree, not kind.
The kingdom's ongoing proxy war with Iran has caused horrific bloodshed in Yemen, including the killing of 40 children in August when a school bus was struck by an American-made missile. The conflict has also caused a widespread famine that threatens to kill millions more.
In an op-ed for Fox News published earlier this week, Paul says Khashoggi's killing should be "a turning point in our relationship, where we as Americans stop and ask ourselves what we have been propping up."
Saudi Arabia is the largest buyer of American weaponry in the world, and it inked a $110 billion weapons deal with the Trump administration in 2017. Trump has pointed to that large purchase agreement as a reason to hold off on punishing Saudi Arabia for killing Khashoggi.
Paul says that is a poor reason to continue supporting "outright evil," and that Saudi Arabia's need for American firepower gives America leverage over the kingdom. The fact that Saudi officials have been pressured into changing their story to admit fault in Khashoggi's killing seems to prove the senator's point, as least in some small way.
"The Saudis need our help and weapons," Paul writes in his Fox article. "And we should make sure that this need causes a change in their behavior."
The post Questionable Saudi Explanation of Khashoggi's Death Bolsters Rand Paul's Case for Ending Arms Sales appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>
Free minds need a free press. In Freedom House's most recent global liberty index, "only one country in the Arab world"—Tunisia—was classified as free and only three were deemed partly free. "As a result, Arabs living in these countries are either uninformed or misinformed," lamented Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist whose disappearance and probable murder has set about international melee.
People in these countries "are unable to adequately address, much less publicly discuss, matters that affect the region and their day-to-day lives," Khashoggi continues. "A state-run narrative dominates the public psyche, and while many do not believe it, a large majority of the population falls victim to this false narrative. Sadly, this situation is unlikely to change."
Khashoggi's words ring especially haunting considering the circumstances. The Washington Post published Khashoggi's final column—headline: "What the Arab world needs most is free expression"—after giving up hope that he would return alive. In a note preceding the column, Post Global Opinions Editor Karen Attiah explains that Khashoggi had filed the column not long before he disappeared in Istanbul. "The Post held off publishing it because we hoped Jamal would come back to us so that he and I could edit it together," writes Attiah. "Now I have to accept: That is not going to happen."
That Khashoggi's disappearance has captured U.S. media attention for days is itself something of an anomaly. Those intimately familiar with censorship in some regimes note that not only does Saudi Arabia mistreat media as a matter of course, but Turkey—now emerging as a vindicator of Khashoggi's death—is also absolutely awful when it comes to censoring and jailing journalists, among other thuggish things. Many have suggested that for Turkish leaders, it's Saudi aggression on their soil that stings, not the suppression of someone for speaking their mind.
The potentially brutal nature of Khashoggi's killing may explain some of the heightened attention here. But Khashoggi's publication by prestigious western outlets like The Washington Post is probably a better indicator of why we're taking note.
Of course, some corners of U.S. culture are aggressively downplaying the significance of the alleged Khashoggi killing—a killing which was incredibly painful and brutal, according to Turkish authorities who've obtained audio recordings from the Saudi consulate. The audio allegedly captures Khashoggi screaming as he's being dismembered alive.
"You've got one journalist — who knows?" opined Christian Broadcasting Network cryptkeeper Pat Robertson. "Was it an interrogation? Was he assassinated? Were there rogue elements? Who did it?…You've got $100 billion worth of arms sales…we cannot alienate our biggest player in the Middle East."
Robertson's words echo those of President Trump, who has also been quick to cast doubt on any official Saudi malfeasance here and suggested that they're too good of allies (allie$?) to risk enraging. (Trump would much rather sanction our southern neighbors for failing to block brown people from coming here.)
At least a few in Congress are rejecting this Republican front, though. For instance, Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) announced yesterday that he's cosponsoring legislation to block U.S. arms sales to the Saudis.
I've joined as an original cosponsor of @RepMcGovern's bill to prohibit military assistance and arms sales to Saudi Arabia unless @SecPompeo certifies that the Saudi government was not responsible for #JamalKhashoggi's disappearance, imprisonment, or death. pic.twitter.com/jM5uSBDRUS
— Justin Amash (@justinamash) October 17, 2018
"Amazon has hired more than 150 Ph.D. economists in the past five years, making them the largest employer of tech economists. In fact, Amazon now has several times more full time economists than the largest academic economics department." https://t.co/eXT40GJv1C
— Walter Olson (@walterolson) October 17, 2018
Which hot new lip gloss goes with this? Whichever the state decides will be the only lip gloss! https://t.co/lmRONKYnRf
— Shoshana Weissmann, Regulatory Reform Muse (@senatorshoshana) October 18, 2018
The post Last Column From Khashoggi Warns About State-Spread Fake News. Americans Should Take Note: Reason Roundup appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) wants to hold Saudi Arabia responsible for the disappearance and possible death of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist critical of his country's government. On Twitter today, Amash said he's cosponsoring legislation that would block U.S. military assistance and arms sales to Saudi Arabia unless the kingdom is found to have had no involvement in Khashoggi's disappearance.
I've joined as an original cosponsor of @RepMcGovern's bill to prohibit military assistance and arms sales to Saudi Arabia unless @SecPompeo certifies that the Saudi government was not responsible for #JamalKhashoggi's disappearance, imprisonment, or death. pic.twitter.com/jM5uSBDRUS
— Justin Amash (@justinamash) October 17, 2018
Khashoggi hadn't lived in Saudi Arabia since he moved to the U.S. earlier this year. He visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul earlier this month to get a document for his upcoming wedding, but never came out and has been missing ever since. As Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown explained this morning, "a mounting body of evidence" links the Saudi government to his disappearance.
The legislation cosponsored by Amash would prohibit the Defense Department from providing the Saudi government with "any United States assistance, including security assistance, intelligence, training, equipment, or services relating to maintenance, testing, or technical data." It would also stop U.S. companies from selling any "defense article, defense service, or design and construction service" to the Saudi government. Security assistance and arms sales can only resume, the bill says, if the secretary of state "determines and certifies" that the Saudi government did not carry out or order the kidnapping and/or death of Khashoggi.
The bill was introduced yesterday by Rep. Jim McGovern, the ranking Democrat on the House Rules Committee. It's cosponsored by six other Democrats and two Republicans: Amash and Rep. Thomas Massie (R–Ky.).
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said yesterday he met with Saudi King Salman and his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Both men, according to Pompeo, have denied involvement in Khashoggi's disappearance. Pompeo said he can sense a "serious commitment" from top Saudi leaders "to determine all the facts and ensure accountability."
President Donald Trump has expressed similar sentiments, suggesting to the Associated Press that criticism of the Saudi government is another example of "guilty until proven innocent."
But criticism of Saudi Arabia is nothing new for Amash. As the Michigan representative pointed out earlier today, he's repeatedly called for the U.S. to halt arms sales to the Saudis, in part due to the Saudi government's involvement in the Yemeni Civil War. In fiscal year 2017, the U.S. sold $5.5 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia, according to the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.
Amash is not the only libertarian-leaning Republican to call for Saudi Arabia to be held accountable. Reason's Brian Doherty reported last week that Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) said he would try again to block U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Paul, like Amash, has been calling for U.S. government action regarding this the issue for some time.
In a Fox News op-ed published yesterday, Paul said "it's time to rethink America's relationship with the Saudi Kingdom." The Kentucky Republican cited the "killing" of Khashoggi, as well as Saudi Arabia's involvement in Yemen, its terrorist ties, and its dismal record of human rights abuses.
Indeed, Saudi Arabia's history of repression probably doesn't get enough attention. While bin Salman has tried to highlight some of his country's recent reforms—like allowing women to drive and work outside the home—the government has also overseen a renewed crackdown on free speech and dissent. The Saudi government put at least 100 people to death last year, according to Amnesty International.
I noted last week that the situation is particularly bad for reporters like Khashoggi, as Saudi Arabia is ranked 169th out of 180 in the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders' latest World Press Freedom Index.
So what should the U.S. do? Defense Priorities fellow Daniel DePetris was absolutely correct when he argued yesterday, in a piece for Reason, that the U.S. shouldn't let Saudi threats dictate our foreign policy.
But does that mean Amash and Paul are right in calling for the U.S. to cut off all arms sales to Saudi Arabia? Not necessarily. On the one hand, selling weapons to foreign governments with checkered pasts presents an ethical dilemma. At the same time, private companies are private companies. The Reason editors discussed this issue in detail on Monday's podcast.
The post Rep. Justin Amash Cosponsors Bill to Halt Saudi Arms Sales Over Missing Journalist appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>More than ten days after Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi disappeared after entering the Saudi consultate in Istanbul, Riyadh is reportedly preparing to admit some culpability for the journalist's death. On orders from President Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Saudi Arabia to meet with King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman about the case directly. The State Department described the talks as "direct and candid;" given the egrecious nature of the crime—ambushing a journalist and permanent U.S. resident in a diplomatic facility, torturing him, murdering him, and disposing of him with a bone-saw—one can only hope the Pompeo read the Saudi royal family the riot act.
At the same time the Saudis are feigning cooperation with an investigation into Khashoggi's disappearance, Riyadh is warning of retaliation in the event Washington issues sanctions on the Kingdom. Turki Aldakhil, the general manager of Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya, bluntly warned that higher oil prices could soon be coming down the pike: "If the price of oil reaching $80 angered President Trump, no one should rule out the price jumping to $100, or $200, or even double that figure."
As the Middle East's top oil exporter and the second largest oil producer in the world, a decision by Saudi Arabia to cut production would inevitably raise the price of crude substantially. Over a span of months, Americans would be paying more for gas at the pump. Yet Riyadh would be vastly overstating its leverage if it believed a medium-sized regional state like Saudi Arabia could for a moment dictate policy to the United States, the world's largest economy and military power.
Over the long-term, inflating oil prices would be a disaster to Saudi Arabia's economy and a public relations nightmare for the media-conscience Kingdom. Riyadh cannot guarantee one of its competitors would not increase its own exports and steal market share underneath its feet. For a country like Saudi Arabia—which is almost totally dependent on oil sales to finance the extensive welfare benefits it provides for its population—losing market share is an unsustainable situation. With less revenue coming in, the Saudi government would either have to tax a population used to receiving free education and healthcare, dip into its foreign exchange reserves (getting lighter since 2015), or begin freezing a bloated public sector that has served as a job program for young Saudis entering the workforce. Neither option is positive in terms of Saudi Arabia's domestic tranquillity.
It is a safe assumption that Saudi Arabia's stock in the West would also plummet, both in diplomatic circles and in the business world, as potential investors start looking for opportunities elsewhere.
Riyadh would like the Trump administration to think that the U.S. needs Saudi Arabia more than Saudi Arabia needs the U.S. The reality could not be any different.
There was a time earlier in the century when the U.S. was as an addicted consumer of Saudi oil. To Riyadh's disappointment, that is no longer the case. As America's own oil production has gone up, its imports of Saudi oil have gone down. According to U.S. government statistics, U.S. imports of Saudi crude in 2017 decreased by 14 percent from the previous year, reaching the lowest rate since 1988. Riyadh accounts for only 9 percent of America's total crude imports, a shell of a figure compared to Canada's 40 percent. Because U.S. purchases are already decreasing, a hypothetical Saudi slowdown in production—or even an outright cutoff—would have far less of an impact. While the Saudis like to brandish oil as a weapon in its arsenal, the weapon is losing much of its luster.
Since Saudi officials rely so much on oil proceeds to pad their budget, they may choose to retaliate in another way: downgrading its diplomatic and intelligence relationship with Washington. Such a downgrade would cause concern in Washington as U.S. policymakers, particularly those responsible for counterterrorism, calculate the impact of weaker collaboration.
This course of action, however, would also be far from cost-free for the Saudi state. Indeed, if Riyadh were brash enough to cut off diplomatic relations or intelligence partnerships, Saudi Arabia's already buckling credibility on Capitol Hill would plateau to an extent the Kingdom would be unprepared to manage. The Saudis, even under a gambler like the 33-year old bin Salman, would be unlikely to spark the ire of Congress and jeopardize their access to U.S. military hardware, training, and technology, particularly when Riyadh is currently fighting in the fourth year of a war in Yemen that, charitably put, is a stalemate. And while the Saudis could lessen their dependence on American equipment by switching to Russian and Chinese suppliers, such a transition would not happen overnight. It would require the kind of time Riyadh is unwilling to spend in the current threat environment.
The killing of a journalist is an unconscionable act, especially when the assailant is a supposed U.S. friend. U.S.-Saudi ties, however, were never founded upon friendship, shared values, a mutual sense of ethics, or a common history. They were founded upon pragmatism and realpolitik. If the pragmatism is wearing off, or the other party is acting counter to U.S. interests, Washington should reassess the assumptions underlying the partnership.
Notwithstanding the dubious and changing explanations from the Saudi royal family about what happened to Jamal Khashoggi, this is a seminal moment for President Trump as a world leader. The message from the U.S. government across the board must meet the occassion: while the administration desires constructive relations with the Kingdom, its interests will always be surpassed by those of the American people. Just the same: U.S. policy in the Middle East from now on will independent from any one country, flexible, and untethered from the region's power struggles.
The post The Saudis Need Us, Not the Other Way Around appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"There's not enough money in the world for us to buy back our credibility on human rights," chastises Rubio. Authorities have admitted that maybe U.S.-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed while paying a visit to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and have promised to put out a statement soon with more information about the death of a man routinely critical of his country's leadership and policies. To President Trump, this seems neither a cause for alarm nor a rethinking of America's close ties to Saudi leaders.
In interviews Monday, the president not only struck a nonchalant tone about the situation but helped prop up a preemptive defense, suggesting (despite all evidence pointing to the contrary) that Khashoggi's death had naught to do with Prince Mohammed bin Salman and other official leaders and had happened at the hands of "rogue" Saudi cops.
The response has drawn criticism even from generally Trump-friendly corners. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has said that if Trump won't do something about about the situation, Congress will. "There's not enough money in the world for us to buy back our credibility on human rights," Rubio told CBS.
What's so galling and chilling about the Trump WH and Saudi response to the Khashoggi murder is that it's all the normal Trump toolkit of lying and gaslighting and hand waving in an attempt to get away with literal murder.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) October 15, 2018
Trump seemed more at ease yesterday discussing Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren's family history. The president has prolifically mocked Warren for laying claim to Native American ancestry, and even offered to pay $1 million to a charity of her choosing if she would take a DNA test to prove her heritage. She did, and the results suggest that she does have some Native American ancestry.
Asked whether he would make good on the charity donation promise, Trump initialy dismissed the idea that he had ever promised any such thing, despite there being ample video of him making such a claim as recently as July.
Trump on offering $1 million for Elizabeth Warren's DNA test: "I didn't say that." This is him saying that: pic.twitter.com/G2vRiQU0PA
— Tommy Christopher (@tommyxtopher) October 15, 2018
Later in the day, Trump changed his tune, insisting that he would indeed hold up his end of the deal—but only if he could swab Warren's cheeks himself. "I'll only do it if I can test her personally," Trump told ABC News. He added that "it will not be something I enjoy doing" (because everyone knows that instituting creepy conditions like this is less creepy if you're also defensive about possibly enjoying it!).
On Twitter Tuesday morning, Trump continued to lay into Warren, whom he likes to call "Pocahontas (the bad version)" lest there's any confusion that he's talking about the long-dead Native American woman that inspired a Disney movie.
Pocahontas (the bad version), sometimes referred to as Elizabeth Warren, is getting slammed. She took a bogus DNA test and it showed that she may be 1/1024, far less than the average American. Now Cherokee Nation denies her, "DNA test is useless." Even they don't want her. Phony!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2018
Warren didn't do herself any favors with this stunt either, however. For instance, a statement from the Cherokee Nation said her claims dishonor "legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven," and accused Warren of "undermining tribal interests."
FREE MARKETS
TV drug ads about to get even worse? Television commercials for pharmaceuticals are already a comical mix of smiling, healthy people oblivious to the steady drone of voiceover narration about possible side effects and complications. Now, the required mumbo-jumbo in this ads may get even longer. On Monday, federal regulators announced a proposal to mandate that drug companies disclose during television ads whether the featured medication could cost more than $35 per month.
"Patients deserve to know … if the drug company has pushed their prices to abusive levels," said Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Alex Azar. "And they deserve to know this every time they see a drug advertised to them on TV."
Nevermind that no other category of products are required to list prices at the point of advertisement, nor that there are myriad other ways consumers can find the cost of a medication and nobody pays much attention to the verbal "fine print" in these ads anyway—the Trump HHS is proving itself just as willing as Democratic predecessors to dabble in health care and pharmaceutical regulation that had only a symbolic effect for consumers while racheting up bureacratic hoops for businesses.
QUICK HITS
Man this anti-Democrat ad that keeps playing on CNN is really something pic.twitter.com/GDrrQ0QDpi
— Elizabeth Nolan Brown (@ENBrown) October 16, 2018
SF police say the closure of #Backpage has pushed sex trafficking, pimping back out onto the streets. Reported crimes have tripled over the previous year. By @ted_d_andersen https://t.co/e2ixBjS8kR
— Megan Cassidy (@meganrcassidy) October 15, 2018
ICYMI: My investigation of Little Rock's drug enforcement unit, published yesterday. They're serving almost all drug warrants with illegal no-knock raids, some with explosives. There's also evidence that cops and informants have lied in affidavits. https://t.co/VzeCRx7wN8
— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) October 15, 2018
The post Trump Seems More Skeptical of Elizabeth Warren's Ancestry Test Than of Saudi Innocence in Death of Jamal Khashoggi: Reason Roundup appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When Lesley Stahl asked President Donald Trump how he would punish Saudi Arabia if the oil-rich dictatorship was found to have murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, the president quickly turned the conversation toward the importance of arms sales to American jobs. Was that the right answer?
No it wasn't, argue editors Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, Nick Gillespie, and Matt Welch on the Monday editor-roundtable version of the Reason Podcast. But maybe, they add, that's an argument for re-examining whether government should have any role in limiting commerce between U.S. companies and far-flung baddies. The discussion then ranges from the ethics of dictatorship junkets to seasonal Saudi-bashing syndrome to Trump's ongoing presidency-demystification project, before moving on to the politics of anti–political correctness and the trauma-absorbing qualities of Mr. Rogers.
Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast at iTunes. Listen at SoundCloud below:
Audio production by Ian Keyser.
'18—Ghosts II' by Nine Inch Nails is licensed under CC BY NC SA 3.0
Relevant links from the show:
"Did Saudi Arabia Murder This Expat Journalist for Criticizing the Government?," by Joe Setyon
"Jamal Khashoggi Disappearance Doesn't Seem to Faze White House," by Elizabeth Nolan Brown
"With the Saudis, Trump Shows Timidity," by Steve Chapman
"Rand Paul Says He'll Try to Block Saudi Arms Sales Over Khashoggi Disappearance," by Brian Doherty
"The President Shouldn't Act as an Arms Dealer to the Saudis," by Veronique de Rugy
"American-Backed Saudi Coalition Kills 40 Children in Airstrike, Injures Dozens More," by Nikhil Sridhar
"Trump's 60 Minutes Interview Further Demystifies the Presidency," by Nick Gillespie
"Study: 80% of Americans Believe Political Correctness Is a Problem," by Robby Soave
"Don't Take Too Much Comfort From Surveys Showing Widespread Opposition to 'Political Correctness'," by Ilya Somin
Don't miss a single Reason Podcast! (Archive here.)
The post Should We Sell Weapons to Saudi Arabia?: Podcast appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>If a foreign journalist living in America and writing about the Iranian government's noxious policies were murdered by agents of Tehran, the president of the United States would take it as evidence of the need for tough action. Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, however, was a Saudi writing about the Saudi government, which is a U.S. ally.
After Khashoggi disappeared while visiting Riyadh's consulate in Istanbul, Donald Trump was a portrait in timidity. "We want to find out what happened," he bleated more than a week later. "He went in, and it doesn't look like he came out." What happened is pretty clear. Since Khashoggi entered the building October 2, he has not been seen or heard from.
The evidence is that his disappearance was no random event. "The crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered an operation to lure Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi back to Saudi Arabia from his home in Virginia and then detain him, according to U.S. intelligence intercepts of Saudi officials discussing the plan," reported The Washington Post. The Turks have told U.S. officials they have audio and video recordings of Khashoggi being tortured and killed inside the consulate.
Trump responded with the limp evasions he reserves for tyrants who have seduced him. "We don't like it, and we don't like it even a little bit," he ventured. If it turns out that the Riyadh regime murdered Khashoggi, he said, "it would be a very sad thing." But he also proclaimed that our relationship with the Saudi government is "excellent."
No doubt. Trump is not about to let a trifle like the premeditated murder of a journalist who had applied for permanent residence in the United States get in the way of his own priorities. The president intimated that those in favor of cutting off weapons sales to Saudi Arabia—a group that includes members of Congress from both parties—fail to grasp the value of those shipments.
"We have a country that's doing probably better economically than it's ever done before," he asserted with his usual inattention to factual accuracy. "Part of that is what we're doing with our defense systems and everybody's wanting them, and frankly, I think that that would be a very, very tough pill to swallow for our country."
Leave aside for the moment Trump's heartfelt conviction that we should indulge assassins as long as they are loyal customers. He also managed to showcase his bottomless store of ignorance and deceit.
The supposed arms deal he reached with the Saudis last year amounted to $110 billion. But as Brookings Institution analyst Bruce Riedel points out, the announced agreement "was fake news then and it's still fake news today. The Saudis have not concluded a single major arms deal with Washington on Trump's watch." The transaction was aspirational, not actual.
Even if the vapor of Trump's claims were to solidify, his deal would stretch over 10 years, making it worth an average of $11 billion annually. That is a huge amount for a military contractor's bottom line but a tiny amount for a $20 trillion economy such as ours.
It's less, in fact, than the amount Trump plans to pay out to American farmers who have suffered from his trade war with China. It's far less than the cost of his threatened tariffs to our economy —a "tough pill" he has been eager to force down our throats.
We might also want to count a notable cost that is easy to ignore because it falls on innocent people far away. A U.N. report in August concluded that the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen has killed thousands of civilians, citing airstrikes that "have hit residential areas, markets, funerals, weddings, detention facilities, civilian boats and even medical facilities." Such attacks, the panel found, "may amount to war crimes."
Much of the weaponry used by the Saudis comes from the United States. Trump could blame Barack Obama for many of those shipments. Instead, Trump lifted one of the few curbs imposed on the Saudis, letting them buy "smart bomb" components that Obama had blocked.
What have we learned about Trump from his handling of the apparent hit job on Khashoggi? That he is amoral, mendacious, weak, and deaf to matters of humanity. Those are qualities we have seen in him many times before. But sometimes, he exhibits them in a way that retains the power to shock.
The post With the Saudis, Trump Shows Timidity appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Stopping arms sales to Saudis would be a "very tough pill to swallow for our country" says Trump. Evidence suggests that Mohammed bin Salman, a recent darling of the D.C. foreign policy crowd and the young crown prince of Saudi Arabia, ordered the capture of Jamal Khashoggi, a self-exiled Saudi writer and regular Washington Post contributor, who went missing in Turkey. Cameras outside the Saudi consulate in Instanbul show Khashoggi arriving there on October 2, but do not show him leaving.
Before he went missing, U.S. intelligence agents "intercepted communications of Saudi officials discussing a plan to capture him," the Post reported yesterday. Since Khashoggi's disappearance, "Turkey's government says it has seen no evidence supporting the Saudi claim that Khashoggi ever left the consulate alive."
The U.S. and many other countries generally ignore what the Saudi government does to Saudi Arabians while they're in Saudi Arabia. But the Saudi government possibly abducting and harming a dissident writer living in Istanbul is a different thing altogether. This move could rile Turkish authorities, sour Saudi ties with allies outside the Middle East, and shift relations with some neighbors.
"Confirmation of any state-sponsored violence against Khashoggi would make it even harder for Saudi leadership to portray Iran as the ultimate villain of the region," writes Maysam Behravesh at Reuters. It would also "increase international pressure on the Trump administration, which has thrown its weight behind the young prince to execute his so-called reforms and helped set the stage for his ascension to the throne," as well as "backed the controversial Saudi-led intervention in Yemen with advanced weapons and political cover in international institutions." As Behravesh notes,
An airstrike by the Saudi-led coalition on a school bus in north Yemen left 40 children and 11 adults dead on August 9 and wounded 79 others, 56 of them children. CNN later reported that the weapon used in the deadly attack was a 500-pound laser-guided bomb made by Lockheed Martin and supplied by the United States.
Khashoggi had been critical of Prince Mohammed and Saudi-led actions in Yemen. "He lamented that Saudi Arabia's repression was becoming unbearable to the point of his decision to leave the country and live in exile in Washington," his editor at the Post, Karen Attiah, wrote yesterday.
Like way too many in U.S. politics, "Trump's foreign policy toward Saudi Arabia is compromised by deep financial conflicts of interest," points out Post contributor Brian Klaas.
In 1991, when Trump was $900 million in debt, he was bailed out by a member of the Saudi royal family, who purchased his 281-foot yacht, Trump Princess. Trump's other princess, Ivanka, is married to Jared Kushner, who has deep ties to the crown prince. In 2015, when asked about his relationship with the Saudis, Trump said: "I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me. They spend $40 million, $50 million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much."
Asked yesterday about cutting of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, President Trump told Fox News' Shannon Bream that "what we are doing with our defense systems" meant "everybody is wanting them and, frankly, I think that would be a very, very tough pill to swallow for our country." Asked about Khaskoggi's disappearance on Monday, he had told White House reporters:
I am concerned about that. I don't like hearing about it and hopefully that will sort itself out. Right now, nobody knows anything about it.
Greetings from D.C.
#TNOIIECBAFTATPPAAFPDATW pic.twitter.com/hiubKWTqFh
— Katherine Mangu-Ward (@kmanguward) October 11, 2018
Kavanaugh and Gorsuch differ during Wednesday immigration arguments.
Justice Kavanaugh sounds sympathetic to the Trump administration's argument that it has broad powers when it comes to immigrant detention.
Justice Gorsuch, not so much.https://t.co/aMNjBxUVPn
— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) October 10, 2018
Read more on the immigrant detention case and gun-crime cases argued before SCOTUS in Tuesday's Roundup.
Dear lord. pic.twitter.com/18NmavCFya
— John Waggoner (@JohnWaggoner) October 9, 2018
The post Jamal Khashoggi Disappearance Doesn't Seem to Faze White House: Reason Roundup appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) told a radio station today that he intends to try, once again, to block U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia. While the particular news hook this week is the Saudi government's possible complicity in the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Paul has long been opposed to the U.S. role in helping support, among other things, the corrupt and repressive regime's highly destructive war in Yemen.
Sen. Bob Menendez (D–N.J.) has also, Bloomberg reports, "notified the Trump administration he would use an informal procedure to block sales to Saudi Arabia because of his concern about the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen."
Paul told the Louisville station WHAS that he knows his position on this currently differs from the Trump administration's, "but who knows, the president may come around on this if there is any evidence they killed this journalist."
The Saudis insist that Khashoggi left their consulate in Turkey, where he is presumed by many to have been killed after entering to get a legal document related to his planned wedding.
Back in June 2017, Paul was a main sponsor of a symbolic Senate resolution opposing that year's $510 million weapons deal with Saudi Arabia. (The bill failed by a vote of 47–53.) The Senate has the power, via the 1976 Arms Export Control Act, to force a vote on presidential arms sales decisions within a 10-day period.
The Bloomberg story today notes that Sens. Bob Corker (R–Tenn.) and Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) have also made noises that suggest they might be willing to rethink aspects of our support for Saudi Arabia over the Khashoggi matter.
The Saudi-led war on Yemen, with active cooperation from the U.S., has killed over 5,000 civilians, may be starving many millions more, has helped prop up Al Qaeda, and has generally damaged the nation in ways that could make it a cauldron of chaos for decades to come. Regardless of Khashoggi's fate, Paul is correct to do everything he can to stop the U.S. from enabling the mayhem there.
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]]>Nearly a week after the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi disappeared, suspicions are rising that the regime in Riyadh has silenced him.
Khashoggi hadn't lived in Saudi Arabia since he moved to the United States last year. According to The Washington Post, where Khashoggi was a contributor, he visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last week to get a document for his upcoming wedding. He never came out.
Turkish officials have suggested Khashoggi was murdered. "I personally think the possibility of him being killed is stronger than other possibilities, although I do not want to accept it. Because if he was alive, Saudis would provide evidence that he is alive," Yasin Aktay, an adviser to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, tells CNN.
The Turkish government is looking into Khashoggi's disappearance. CNN reports that 15 Saudi nationals visited the consulate the same day as Khashoggi and have since left the country. That team was sent "specifically for the murder," a person with knowledge of the Turkish investigation tells the Post.
Saudi Arabia, naturally, has denied any involvement. But if Khashoggi is dead, the Saudi government certainly had a motive to kill him. "Saudi Arabia wasn't always this repressive. Now it's unbearable," read the headline for one of his articles. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman "is acting like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin," Khashoggi wrote in another one. This past February, he claimed bin Salman exercises complete control over the nation's media.
Khashoggi was right about Saudi repression. Though Riyadh has accepted some reforms recently—women there are finally allowed to drive and to work outside the home—the government has also overseen a renewed crackdown on free speech, and particularly on dissent against the government. In fact, as The Intercept reported Saturday, some of the same women who fought for the right to drive are now being taken into custody and/or exiled. Moreover, the Saudi government put at least 100 people to death last year, according to Amnesty International.
Things are particularly bad for reporters. Saudi Arabia is ranked 169th out of 180 in the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders' latest World Press Freedom Index. Independent media outlets are not permitted, and those who "report the reality" are often detained without a trial and sometimes flogged, the group says.
Khashoggi was one journalist who chose to "report the reality." It may have cost him his life.
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]]>A Shiite woman and four other activists will be executed if a Saudi prosecutor gets his way.
Israa al-Ghomgham and her husband were taken into custody in December 2015 for protesting anti-Shiite discrimination in Saudia Arabia's Qatif province. Earlier this month, at a hearing before the country's special terrorism tribunal, a prosecutor recommended that the couple and several like-minded activists be executed. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), six activists were charged in total, though only five face the death penalty.
Their alleged crimes were completely nonviolent, according to HRW:
The Public Prosecution, which reports directly to the king, accused the detained activists of several charges that do not resemble recognizable crimes, including "participating in protests in the Qatif region," "incitement to protest," "chanting slogans hostile to the regime," "attempting to inflame public opinion," "filming protests and publishing on social media," and "providing moral support to rioters." It called for their execution based on the Islamic law principle of ta'zir, in which the judge has discretion over the definition of what constitutes a crime and over the sentence.
A judge will hear their case on October 28, then determine whether or not to move forward with the death penalty. Depending on the judge's decision, al-Ghomgham could become the first female activist to be executed in the country.
Saudi Arabia has recently implemented some limited liberal reforms. Most notably, women are now allowed to drive and to work outside the home. But as Reuters notes, there has also been a renewed crackdown on free speech, and particularly on dissent against the government.
The situation is particularly bad for Shiite Muslims, who are vastly outnumbered by Sunnis in Saudi Arabia. Shiite activists say the government doesn't allow them to practice their version of Islam freely. Some of them have been executed for speaking out.
"Any execution is appalling, but seeking the death penalty for activists like Israa al-Ghomgham, who are not even accused of violent behavior, is monstrous," says Sarah Leah Whitson, HRW's Middle East director. "Every day, the Saudi monarchy's unrestrained despotism makes it harder for its public relations teams to spin the fairy tale of 'reform' to allies and international business."
The Saudi government put at least 100 people to death last year, according to Amnesty International. The European Saudi Organization for Human Rights tells Middle East Eye that 58 more are currently on death row.
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]]>A Saudi airstrike in northern Yemen yesterday claimed the lives of 51 civilians, at least 40 of whom were children. An additional 79 people, including 56 children, were reportedly wounded. Given the dismal conditions of the area, it's likely more will die from the lack of adequate medical care.
The American-backed Saudi coalition says the attack was a retaliation for a previous attack by Houthi rebels that killed one Yemeni person. The coalition claims that the missile was intercepted and the fragments ended up hitting a bustling market square and a bus carrying kids. Colonel Turki al-Malki, a spokesperson for the coalition, insists that the airstrike "conformed to international and humanitarian laws." But Al Jazeera reports that the market was nowhere near any sort of Houthi rebel installation.
So far, the Pentagon has offered mixed messages about America's role in the disaster. One spokesperson told Vox that the Pentagon isn't sure whether American weapons were used in the strike or if the U.S. helped refuel the Saudi jets; another flatly denied any American involvement. Washington has yet to condemn the airstrike.
Regardless, this incident isn't an anomaly. Just a little over a month ago, the United Nations found that the Saudi coalition was responsible for a majority of the conflict's children casualties, and also that they were guilty of recruiting child soldiers. More than 5,000 civilians have been killed in this war so far, and U.S. support for the Saudis is adding gasoline to an already out-of-control fire. As Lee Keath of the Associated Press told CBS, American weapons, intelligence, and logistical help "has been vital for the coalition."
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]]>Saudi Arabia and Canada are officially in disagreement over the topic of human rights. As the criticisms between the two countries mounts, a recent crucifixion is overshadowing Saudi Arabia's accusations that between the two, Canada has the worse record on human rights.
Saudi King Salman recently endorsed a court's decision to crucify a Myanmar man accused of theft and murder. The man, Elias Abulkalaam Jamaleddeen, was charged with breaking into a woman's home and stabbing her to death. He was additionally accused of stealing weapons, trying to stab another man, and attempting to rape a woman.
Crucifixions in Saudi Arabia, as explained by the Associated Press, involve beheading an individual and placing their body on display. Though the practice of crucifixion is admittedly rare, Saudi Arabia imposes the death penalty at a higher rate than most other countries. Amnesty International reported in 2015 that China and Iran were the only two countries that used capital punishment more than Saudi Arabia. Just this past year, the country was criticized for killing 48 people over the span of four months. About half of those executed by the Saudi government were convicted of nonviolent drug charges.
Just before this latest execution was carried out, Saudi Arabia accused Canada of having a poor human rights record. The accusation was part of a larger fight that began when Canada called for the release of Saudi women's rights activists on Twitter. One of the activists named, Samar Badawi, and her brother, Raif Badawi, were arrested in 2012 after Raif blogged criticism of Islam. He was sentenced to 1,000 lashes and 10 years in prison. Earlier in the year, his wife and children became citizens of Canada, which has since joined other western countries in calling for the Badawi siblings' freedom.
Saudi Arabia responded by ordering Canada's ambassador to leave the country while recalling its own ambassador from Canada. The country has also called on its citizens currently present in Canada to return home, has suspended various operations in Canada, and has placed sanctions on the country.
Saudi Arabia also accused Canada of hypocrisy by bringing up the arrest of Ernst Zündel. Though he was born in Germany, Zündel operated a Nazi publishing house in Canada for several years. He was arrested and held in solitary confinement in a Toronto jail before Canada deported him back to Germany in 2005. In 2007, Zündel was sentenced to five years in prison for Holocaust denial and inciting racial hatred under German law.
The disagreement only escalated when a verified, pro-Saudi government Twitter account shared a digitally altered picture of an Air Canada plane flying towards the Toronto skyline with the caption "sticking one's nose where it doesn't belong." The picture seemed to evoke the 9/11 terrorist attacks that targeted New York City and Washington, D.C. The picture was deleted and the Saudi Ministry of Media announced an investigation.
(Note: Saudi Arabia has repeatedly denied its involvement in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A U.S. district court judge ruled in March that the families of the victims had a right to sue Saudi Arabia for damages under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act.)
Saudi Arabia is currently a member of the United Nations' Human Rights Council.
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]]>A woman was arrested in Saudi Arabia after rushing onto the stage and hugging singer Majid al-Mohandis during a concert. Mohandis is a man and women in Saudi Arabia are not supposed to mix with men who are not related to them.
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]]>TV broadcaster Shireen al-Rifaie has fled Saudi Arabia after the nation's broadcasting authority began investigating her for wearing indecent clothing. A clip of her reporting on women drivers in the nation shows that her abaya is open, clearly exposing the blouse and trousers underneath.
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