Once upon a time, there was a brutal and reckless dictator of an oil-rich Arab country who, despite his well-documented excesses, was stroked and supported by the United States and other Western governments. His crimes were terrible, went the rationale, but he was modernizing his country and he was holding the line against Islamist jihadism and Iran. Anyway, there was probably no alternative.
And yet, 30 years later, those mandarins and the politicians they report to are blindly repeating the mistake. They are saying they abhor the blatant crimes of Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, including the killing of Washington Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi and the torture and imprisonment of women seeking greater rights. They see his bombing campaign in Yemen as a war-crime-ridden disaster.
The determination with which politicians and policymakers cling to this blinkered view can be seen in the lonely quest of Agnes Callamard, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. At her own initiative, Callamard conducted a five-month investigation into Khashoggi's killing and dismemberment inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last October.
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