Originally published at: Jamal Khashoggi's Saudi kill team received paramilitary training from a U.S. security firm | Boing Boing
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In a better world the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia would be a pariah state on par with North Korea. Between the switch to green technologies and the tendency of this family of short-sighted feudal greedpigs to invest in money-losing scams like Uber, I hold out some slim hope they may finally lose their toxic influence abroad.
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It’s a cash transaction. Like a gun dealer who sells weapons to customers and once they leave leave the shop could care less about what they do with the guns.
Partnership my a**.
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It seems that the answer to all of the United States’ external problems come back to “because we did a really, really stupid thing 10-40 years ago”.
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I’d be good to see the feudal Saudi royal family reduced to penury and irrelevance, but let’s not fool ourselves - they own huge chunks of London and have been busy investing in companies like Lucid Motors.
Not to mention, so long as they can play the West off against Iran, they’ll still be the US and UK’s favourite despots.
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Privatized school of the americas ehh?
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I think like the aristocracy of old they have reached a point where their wealth and influence are self-perpetuating. Even if we stopped buying their oil tomorrow they still have such unimaginable amounts of money that they can go on as if nothing had happened and they will still be untouchable by such things as international law.
There are people who supported the right side in a war literally a millennium ago and their families have been living in style based on that ever since, after all.
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The winning side I assume you mean? Or is there some aspect to the emirate v caliphate I don’t get? Most of what I know about it comes from The Crusade Through Arab Eyes and it’s tangential to that and Amin Maalouf isn’t a historian.
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I was talking about my example of (European) aristocrats whose ancient ancestors supported the right side (and yes, I mean the winning side by that) in a regional conflict between two warlords and whose country houses and Paris homes are a direct consequence of that.
What I’m saying is that wealth can achieve such heights that it becomes completely divorced from its original source and becomes self-perpetuating even long after that source is gone. And political influence comes with that as well.
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They’ll never be poor but the family is remarkably short-sighted, both in terms of how it invests its dirty money (e.g scams like Uber) and how it maintains its power (mainly by allowing itself to be shaken down for decades by very unpredictable and violent religious fundies at home and by relying on the goodwill of multinational energy corporations and declining empires abroad).
When the oil revenues decline to a point that the family can’t bribe its way out of trouble as they have in the past there will likely be an Islamic revolution in the KSA. That won’t be good for anyone, but the downfall and comeuppance of the House of Saud will be a silver lining.
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