A boy walks on rubble of a house destroyed by recent airstrikes carried out by the Saudi-led coalition in Sanaa, Yemen, on Dec. 29, 2017. Picture by Mohammed Mohammed/Xinhua News Agency/PA Images. All rights reserved. While
Thomas Friedman was taking Mohammad bin Salman’s claims about
fighting corruption
at face value,
many
were seeing extortion, and an abuse of power. Consider what follows, all of which also mysteriously escaped Friedman’s
journalistic acumen:
In
the summer of 2015, while vacationing in Southern France, MBS
purchased,
on a whim, one of the biggest and most expensive yachts in the world
from Russian billionaire Yuri
Shefler
(who incidentally made his fortune selling
vodka), after spotting it once in the bay. The deal was finalized
right there without further waiting, for a staggering $500 million
(twice
the cost of the most expensive house in the United States,
itself already the ultimate billionaires’ dreamland.) While
indulging himself with such lavish luxury purchases, His Highness was
pushing for and implementing economic reforms
of the IMF type, meaning, drastic austerity measures, budget cuts,
salary cuts, freezes of government contracts and so on and so forth,
following the drop in oil prices which has since resulted in the KSA
losing a stunning one
third
of its currency reserves in less than three years since 2014.
This
itself would be enough to prove that MBS, supposedly a paragon of
morality, moderation and integrity, a “wise king”, is one of
those morally and politically corrupt rulers and “wealthiest 1%”
(0.0001% in his case) for whom austerity, “necessary sacrifices”,
and belt-tightening measures apply to others but never to oneself.
But
there is worse.
In less than 2 years, our wise ruler bought for himself two luxury yachts for over $600 million
The
Serene
was actually the second
yacht MBS bought (at least the second that we know of). Less known is
the fact that in 2014, namely not even a year before that July 2015
half billion “impulse purchase” of the
Serene,
MBS had already bought a yacht, the Pegasus
(now Pegasus
VII)
for $120 million, at a time when he was special advisor to the royal
court and state
minister.
So,
in less than 2 years, our
wise ruler bought for himself two luxury yachts for over $600
million, while making his Saudi subjects tighten their belts. It is
also to be noted that the KSA currency reserves were
already at that time being depleted faster than the speed of light,
yet that did not seem to matter either for MBS. It would be
interesting to know what else he
bought and how much of the Kingdom’s shrinking oil money he has
spent on himself during his
shopping binge.
Furthermore,
let us remember that by the time he bought this second
yacht, MBS was the head of the Royal Court as well as Saudi Arabia’s
Defense Minister (he was appointed to that crucial position by his
father on January
23, 2015).
He
had also
already
started his bombing campaign in Yemen (“Operation Decisive Storm”
was launched in March
2015),
to devastating consequences for
the civilian population,
who quickly ran out of food and medicine and started dying en masse
from a lethal mix of hunger and disease, provided they were not
killed by the Houthi rebels or MBS’s own indiscriminate air
strikes.
So,
what we have here is a Defense Minister who shortly after initiating
a murderous bombing campaign in one of the poorest countries on
earth, quietly goes on vacation in Southern France, indulges himself
for weeks there, and on a whim buys a second yacht to the tune of
half a billion, while imposing austerity on his own Saudi people and
killing thousands of civilians in Yemen.
Which
Defense Minister just leaves the country for weeks on end (MBS even
extended his French Riviera stay by 10 days just so he could finalize
the contract) to vacation in France (or anywhere else) shortly after
launching a major military intervention in a neighboring country?
That incredibly casual, reckless, and criminally irresponsible
behavior is highly reminiscent of Bush spending weeks on his Texas
ranch after being warned by his own intelligence agencies that an Al
Qaeda commando had managed to infiltrate the U.S. and was preparing a
major attack on American soil (this was 9-11); or Trump, another
buddy and ally of our Crown Prince, spending half his time as
president
of the United States on golf courses. MBS, evidently belongs to that
category of heads of states.
And
there’s even more that keeps coming if one digs a little.
As
revealed by France’s top daily Le Monde and the Paradise
Papers
/ International
Consortium of Investigative Journalists
(this remarkable ongoing investigation on a global scale involving a
network of nearly 400 journalists and financial experts who have
coordinated their efforts to track down how the rich and famous hide
their money and other assets to escape tax evasion through legal and
illegal means), MBS and Yuri Shefler hired the British Appleby law
firm (the
same one
at the center of the Paradise Papers scandal itself) to organize for
them a complex and opaque financial montage of fake off-shore
companies in the Isle of Man (one of the world’s Top 10 tax
havens)
whose sole purpose was to allow His Majesty to escape paying the 84
million euros in taxes he should have paid to France, where he saw
and purchased the boat (Le Monde, which is part of the Paradise
Papers consortium, was able to get a leaked copy of the actual yacht
contract signed by the two men.) Though the English-language press
does not seem to have kept up with this, MBS’s deal with the
Russian owner of the yacht is actually one of the thousands that has
been exposed by the Paradise Papers investigation.
Meanwhile,
MBS
does not seem particularly keen on helping the world, and his fellow
Muslims, deal with that mammoth refugee crisis: “As Amnesty
International
recently pointed out, the ‘six Gulf countries — Qatar, United
Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain — have
offered zero
resettlement places to Syrian refugees.’
This claim was echoed by Kenneth Roth, executive director of
Human Rights Watch.” What a shame for a regime who brags about
being the “guardian of Mecca”.
A clear and present danger
On
foreign policy, MBS is the worst thing that could have happened to
the Middle East at this particular, already volatile moment. In a
mere few months, he has proven to be the main threat to stability and
peace in the region, and with Assad and groups like ISIS, a major
agent of destabilization and violence. As if the Middle East needed
more of that.
Like with all powerful men, when he fails, it’s others who pay the price
There
are at least four reasons why MBS is both a danger for the region and
the Saudi people. First,
he has
acted as the most hubristic Saudi supremacist in the kingdom’s
history. Second,
there is his
paranoia about, and against, Iran, KSA’s regional rival. Third,
his
character, which has a lot of common with Trump’s: behind his
misleadingly mild manners there
is
a toxic mix of recklessness, extremism, amateurishness, lack of
experience, absence of good and wise advisors around him, substandard
education (a B.A. in law when the standard at the Saudi royal court
is often a Ph.D. in one of the world’s top elite institutions),
greed (for power, money, luxury etc.), indifference to the suffering
he is causing around him, and brutality—including against members
of his own family if he thinks they could one day become rivals. His
good connection to some of the Saudi youth and his populist appeal to
them will not be enough to redeem that. And
fourth, largely
due to that character, unfit for a head of state especially that of a
major world power, his quasi systematic failures in pretty much all
his enterprises. The
problem
is that like with
all
powerful men, when he fails, it’s others who pay the price.
When
it comes to failure, our Prince
of Mayhem
fails a
lot,
as we have seen these past several months. Here is a non-exhaustive
list:
His
blockade
of Qatar
and attempt to bully that nation, even to bring it to its knees (for
reasons evidently different from those he stated, the usual “fight
against terrorism” invoked by all of the region’s despots) failed
miserably, and actually backfired by pushing
Qatar in the arms of Iran, Turkey
and other regional powers. MBS’s poorly-conceived anti-Qatari
“policy” actually resulted in the creation of a strong tactical
Iran-Qatar-Turkey axis likely to undermine his own supremacist
regional ambitions.
His
laughable yet dangerous Lebanese /Hariri operation (also initially
meant to counter Iran and Hezbollah’s influence in Lebanon) failed
equally miserably. Prime Minister Hariri has now rescinded the
resignation that MBS forced upon him, and even received a true hero’s
welcome when he returned. Again,
the bullying backfired.
The
Hariri adventure shows the reckless and dangerous nature of MBS: had
he succeeded, Lebanon may have been profoundly destabilized with
risks
of civil wars and additional violence
on its soil. The crown prince also revealed that he would not
hesitate to trigger yet another war on Lebanese soil by using Israel
as his attack dog against Hezbollah and Iran. Israel, was wiser and
more cautious than to play into the Saudi bullying.
In
Iraq, he has also failed to counter the ever-growing influence of
Iran at all levels of government and society.
For
many analysts, MBS has fallen into the Yemen trap set up for him by
the much smarter and subtle Iranian regime, thus shooting himself,
and his country with him, in the foot, as researcher Elizabeth
Kendall explains here.
But
it is Yemen that remains his worst, bloodiest adventure and most
atrocious failure so far.
Launched
in March 2015, operation “decisive storm”, now mockingly referred
to as Operation indecisive
storm,
has turned out to be a quagmire in which the KSA and its coalition
have been stranded for almost three years now. And again, it is the
civilian population who is paying the very heavy price of MBS’
adventurist, violent and criminal policies. He, on the other hand, as
mentioned earlier, went on vacation in Southern France buying luxury
yachts shortly after pushing the KSA in this new and
amateurishly-conceived military operation.
The
most concrete consequence of MBS’s actions in Yemen has been to
throw fuel on the fire of what was essentially a domestic
civil war
(not an Iranian foreign operation as he is led to believe), and to
push
7 million Yemenis
to the brink of death by starvation and disease.
His
cruel and indiscriminate bombing campaign has turned Yemen’s
civilian infrastructures including apartment buildings, schools and
hospitals into dust while killing civilians by the thousands, leading
even his E.U. allies to call for an arms
embargo against Saudi Arabia.
There is no doubt left at this point that this prince has been
committing war
crimes
on a large scale, helped in that by western powers like France and
the U.S. who keep selling him billions worth of weaponry, in full
knowledge of how he uses them. Which incidentally makes heads of
states like Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump themselves war
criminals
and major sponsors of Saudi (and
Egyptian)
state terrorism, if words still have meaning.
The
cruelty and extremism of MBS became even more apparent when on
November 4, he implemented a complete
blockade of Yemen
well after that population had reached a critical stage and was
already being decimated by famine coupled with the world’s worst
epidemics of cholera (here,
here,
here,
here,
and here).
Yet, unfazed, uncaring, solely motivated by his blind hatred of Iran,
he did not hesitate for a second to make it even worse. Saudi Arabia
has since partially lifted that murderous blockade but it is not
nearly enough,
and that decision was mostly due to the considerable international
pressure
and global outrage—even
Trump
asked the KSA to end its blockade!
Let
us remember here that MBS’ blockade of a population that already
was in critical condition and dying from a mix of military
operations, famine, and disease, even included humanitarian aid, food
and medicine.
What
kind of leader does
this to a
defenseless civilian population
before giving himself a little luxury vacation on the Riviera,
wasting billions of his kingdom’s money on luxury goods bought from
offshore fiscal paradises?
The
young Saudis, who naively believe his propaganda or put
their hopes
in that sordid, despotic character with already so much blood on his
hands and a long record of abject failures, may want to reconsider.
Let’s
also notice how, in that particular context of a mass famine largely,
though not solely, of MBS’s own making, it was particularly
disgusting for Friedman to gleefully evoke all the rich meals of
lamb, “several dishes of them!”, he was served by his autocrat in
his " ornate adobe-walled palace in Ouja". This
little boy here
was not served Saudi lamb for dinner, though.
Failure, abject strategies, and bad luck
He has already started to sabotage his own economic plan
When
it comes to murderous policies, MBS has been second only to Assad.
Even el-Sisi looks like a cautious, wise and reasoned strategist by
comparison, and it is no small feat! Despite his attempt at creating
a cult of personality around him through individuals like Friedman,
MBS
should be renamed Prince
Shoot Himself in the Foot
or The
Reverse Midas Touch.
He will probably manage to wreck by himself his one good, smart,
much-needed and timely project: his grandiose Vision
2030 economic plan
aimed at diversifying the Saudi economy for a post-oil future, which
he essentially cut-and-pasted from Abu Dhabi’s own…Vision
2030 whose name he did not even bother to change.
And
as a matter of fact, he has already started to sabotage
his own economic plan:
apparently, no one in his “young” entourage explained to him that
it is bad for business to scare potential investors away by
arresting, kidnapping, robbing then ransoming hundreds of them
including the most globally known
ones like billionaire and
international
businessman Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. This may fare well among some
Saudi youth, providing them with a populist outlet, but in the world
of business investors and high finance that the KSA now increasingly
depend on for its future, such a behavior is unacceptable
especially at a time when the kingdom is badly in need of hundreds of
billions of foreign investment while there’s growing skepticism
around Vision 2030 (here,
here,
here).
In
that context, the spectacle of MBS locking businessmen and forcing
them through blackmail, threat and actual violence to spit their
assets is yet another mark, this time a domestic one, of his
recklessness (his brutality, too) as a head of state. Whatever
billions he may have obtained that way have probably been offset by
the many more he must have already lost right there.
One
also observes that, to make things worse, MBS is also a very unlucky
man. For example, just when he thought that former Yemen president
Saleh reaching out to him would finally help the KSA extract itself
from that nightmare of his own making, the
man gets killed almost instantly!
On Saturday December 2, Saleh makes his overture to Saudi Arabia and
everyone thinks this could be the breakthrough that may help end the
war. On Monday December 4, the man is dead, the hope for an exit from
that quagmire is no
more,
and Saudi Arabia has to reengage
itself even further
in Yemen through stepped-up bombings.
Similarly,
MBS strikes an alliance with Israel (hoping to instrumentalise that
country too through a war-by-proxy against Iran), but a mere few
weeks later, his other ally Trump recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s
capital, provoking outrage throughout the Middle East and beyond and
putting our prince in an even more delicate and frankly impossible
situation regarding this unholy alliance with Israel, whose regime is
hated throughout the whole Arab world including the KSA.
It
recently came out that while
hypocritically opposing the decision, MBS
gave Trump the green light
and behind the scenes has been helping
Israel and some
American
zionists grab Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Multiple sources including Israeli, Arabic, European and American
ones reported that despite his criticism of Trump (for PR to his Arab
public), MBS was allegedly from the start in bed with
the Israelis and with characters like Trump's son in law Jared
Kushner to help them get Jerusalem and more including the West Bank.
MBS is probably hoping to put Israel further on his side in his war
against Iran. He allegedly also tried to convince Palestinian
President Mahmoud
Abbas
offering him money in exchange for his acceptance of the pro-Israel
deal. In particular, the New
York Times, reporting
its own version of the meeting on December 3,
confirmed through multiple insider sources that MBS offered Abbas
“vastly increased financial support for the Palestinians, and even
dangled the possibility of a direct payment to Mr. Abbas, which they
said he refused.” All this is perfectly congruent with the rest of
MBS foreign policy. It is therefore not just with Israel that MBS is
fully in bed for cynical anti-Iranian reasons and goals, but
with
the most right-wing Israeli government and Trump’s White House.
Such
a deadly mix of incompetence, inexperience, brutality, adventurist
recklessness, and indifference to the suffering caused by one’s
ill-conceived policies would already represent a major threat to any
country with such a head of state. But coupled as it is with regional
supremacism and great power and outreach, it can only mean disaster
for the whole region, the KSA included. And it is therefore no
surprise that in a few short months since he rose to prominence, Bin
Salman has already hurt the region badly (Yemen, support to Egypt’s
brutal
regime, etc.) or tried to do so (Qatar, Iran, Lebanon). Although he
has not killed as many people as Assad, MENA’s worst mass murderer,
MBS’ capacity and potential for nuisance is a lot greater than the
Syrian president’s.
Contrary
to MBS, Assad has no imperialist ambitions
and is merely content with staying in power and controlling his
little western corner of “useful” Syria. But our prince wants to
drag, push and suck the whole region, and the west, U.S. included, in
an all-out war without end against Iran, or a series of hot and cold
wars, no matter the cost. He has shown he was even willing to use
Israel as his attack dog and have it start a war in Lebanon against
Hezbollah and Iran. Let’s just imagine the result had he succeeded.
Friedman
describes bin Salman as the right person at the right time. Instead,
he is the wrong—the worst, actually—person at the wrong time at
the wrong place. His belly filled with those “many dishes of lamb”
served to him by a despot while 7 million poor people were dying of
hunger next door starved by his own princely guest, Friedman, happy
like a child and proud of himself at how “important” he felt, had
probably stopped thinking at that time. But this remark should have
given him cause for concern, as that is the kind of bellicose
rhetoric we heard before, for example during Bush’s 2003 invasion
of Iraq:
“Iran’s
‘supreme leader is the new Hitler of the Middle East,’ said
M.B.S. ‘But we learned from Europe that appeasement doesn’t work.
We don’t want the new Hitler in Iran to repeat what happened in
Europe in the Middle East.’”
When
a world leader starts comparing his public enemy number one to
Hitler, calling him “the New Hitler”, the “Hitler of the Middle
East” and that sort of thing, you know it is not good news for the
future.
Besides
his important and timely attempt to modernize the Saudi economy, Bin
Salman has two essential goals, which help understand each and every
one of his domestic and regional policies including his aggression
against Qatar, his alliance-building activity with the UAE and Egypt,
his war in Yemen, his efforts to secure western support by talking a
little “liberal Islam”, and more: the first goal is to prevent a
resumption of the ‘Arab Spring’. Those autocrats have all felt
the heat in 2011, they feel a bit better now, but they also know that
the ashes of that historic revolution are still burning under the
snow and ice of the ‘Arab winter’. The second goal is, as
mentioned earlier, regional Saudi supremacism and, if he could, the
destruction of the KSA’s arch enemy and rival, Iran.
There
is nothing this crown prince and future king will not do or push
others (Israel, Trump, etc.) to do to accomplish those two
goals. If this dangerous character has his ways, it will mean the end
of hope for Arab democracy, and wars without end throughout the whole
region.
That
is why Mohammad bin Salman is now MENA’s main threat to peace,
stability, and hope for democratization in the Arab world.