Wetwork

There are other things happening - #MeToo in India, Ethiopia's reform cabinet, Pakistan going to the IMF, the Kavanaugh confirmation in America, Bolsonaro on the brink of becoming president of Brazil - but I decided to try to say something about the apparent hit job, in which media figure Jamal Khashoggi vanished after entering the Saudi embassy in Turkey. Unnamed Turkish sources have told the world that a Saudi hit squad traveled to Turkey in advance, tortured and killed Khashoggi inside the embassy, and then smuggled his body parts out of the country in diplomatic bags.

Saudi Arabia is the hub around which many things turn. It is the home of Al Haramain, the two cities of Mecca and Medina, and therefore the destination of the hajj, the pilgrimage that every Muslim must perform at least once. It is the world's most important oil producer, and the anchor of the "petrodollar" system which replaced the gold standard under Nixon. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, in which the Muslim Brotherhood strove for power in the Arab republics, only to be beaten down again, Saudi Arabia seems to have the public allegiance of all the Sunni Arab countries, with the exception of Qatar, which hosts Al Jazeera. The crown prince's radical plans to modernize the country, have become the hope of various forces who want to see a strong and independent Sunni world, and/or one that is friendly to the west and Israel.

When Obama's America began reaching out to Iran, and especially after Russia intervened in Syria, the Saudis apparently decided that they had to take their security into their own hands. They launched the war in Yemen, which, I am inclined to believe, is about halting Iranian-supported subversion which, unchecked, would spread into Saudi Arabia itself, and especially to the Shia regions where much of the oil lies. Saudi Arabia also assembled its "Sunni NATO", directed foremost against Iran, but also against Sunni radicals like Al Qaeda and its spinoff, Islamic State. It had already been de-facto occupying Bahrain since the Arab spring; now it launched a feud with Qatar. The Saudi royals embraced Trump's anti-Iran agenda, with Trump's son-in-law Kushner becoming best friends with King Salman's son Mohammed.

Many reprehensible deeds are committed in this world, by the powerful, in the name of the state; and they usually get away with it. Some such deeds are committed in public - e.g. in war - but others are meant to be covert, or at least deniable. When the latter are exposed, it spells trouble, even if they are denied. Russia in recent years has had to deny, not just a role in passing hacked Democratic Party emails to Wikileaks, but other events in which lives were lost: the shoot-down of a Malaysian passenger plane overflying the Ukrainian civil war, and the attempt to poison a defector living in Britain.

Now we apparently have a barbaric act committed by a western ally, that was meant to be secret, but which has been publicly exposed - by elements in the intelligence service of Turkey, nominally also a western ally, but which has turned east in the aftermath of the collapse of the Syrian resistance, the failed Gulenist coup of 2016, and the threat of Kurdish separatism. In this exposure I also see the hand of the remaining Obama globalists, liberals still immensely powerful in America but seeking relevance in a Middle East divided between Trump and Putin.

The CIA long cultivated ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, to a degree that we may never know, but which probably reached its apogee under Obama. That suited Turkey, but not Saudi Arabia, opposed as it is to all ideological currents that might threaten the monarchy, whether they be atheist communists, revivers of the caliphate, or Islamist democrats. Khashoggi, cut off from the usual princely politics in the era of Mohammed bin Salman's one-man show, threw in his lot with some opposition axis that was brewing in Turkey and America, and paid the price. But his backers in Turkey, perhaps still smarting from the Brotherhood's latest defeat, made sure that he could still serve the cause in death.

And so now everyone who has something invested in the continued survival of Saudi Arabia as we know it - and that encompasses many countries - has to decide what to do about this unwelcome fact. In a sense, we have been here before: Iraq's Saddam Hussein was supposed to be the bulwark against revolutionary Iran, seizing control of the Gulf. It was only when, Iran having agreed to a ceasefire, he set about building a revolutionary Arab-nationalist power, that his crimes became a liability for the west.

Saddam's continued resistance eventually led to America openly occupying Iraq. Obama's dalliance with the Muslim Brotherhood, and acquiescence to Erdogan's agenda of a new Sunni Islamist bloc, was no doubt an attempt to construct a new regional order that would still be friendly to America. But with the Shia in control of Iraq, and the Islamic State beaten down by Russia and Iran, Saudi Arabia has been stripped of buffer states. It might be able to call upon Pakistan for a nuclear umbrella, but Pakistan's own orientation has become increasingly eastern. So the Saudis had to become militant about their own survival. Thus the radicalism of the crown prince. And Trump went all in on this latest Saudi transformation - he got along better with the leaders of the Sunni NATO, than he did with the leaders of the original NATO - just as all American presidents, at least since Nixon, have stuck with the Saudis through thick and thin; even after 9/11.

Two futures can be seen. In one, Saudi Arabia survives and develops, a lot like Islamic State but not engaged in jihad against the west, and becomes one hub of a Sunni economic region stretching from Africa to Indonesia. In another, the Yemeni rebels are merely the harbinger of a revolt that will reach Mecca itself; at which point the viability of America's attempts to develop a new energy economy, based on fracking and electric cars, will truly be put to the test. And the true future is probably some unimaginable third way that will partake of elements of both scenarios.