Saudi Arabia Going After Dissenters Abroad: On the Egregiousness of Concentrated Power

After having been selected by his father as the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia “authorized a secret campaign to silence dissenters—which included the surveillance, kidnapping, detention and torture  of Saudi citizen—over a year before the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, according to American officials” with access to the classified reports.[1] The killers of Khashoggi had been involved in at least 12 other such operations starting in 2017. The sheer egregiousness of the operation under the crown prince says something about not only dictatorship, but also the nature of power itself.

According to the American officials, “(s)ome of the operations involved forcibly repatriating Saudis from other Arab countries and detaining and abusing prisoners in palaces belonging the crown prince and his father, King Salman.”[2] Although Saudi law forbids torture as it is considered an abuse of power, and confessions made under duress are inadmissible in Saudi courts, dictators can easily ignore the force of law as if it were just a moral imperative. Furthermore, Saudi officials acknowledged after Khashoggi’s murder “that Saudi intelligence service had a standing order to bring dissidents home.”[3] Hence the torture and murders involved international relations, a fact that points to not only the extent of the crown prince’s use of power to go after dissent, but also the sheer brazenness and even the underlying mentality.

Extending the reach to include Saudis in other countries points to the egregious extent to which the crown prince went to stifle dissent. “Saudi Arabia has a history of going after dissidents and other Saudi citizens abroad, but the crackdown escalated sharply after Prince Mohammed was elevated to crown prince in 2017, a period when he was moving quickly to consolidate power. Since then, Saudi security forces have detained dozens of clerics, intellectuals and activists who were perceived to pose a threat, as well as people who had posted critical or sarcastic comments about the government on Twitter.”[4] That writing a critical or even sarcastic comment on a blog or on Twitter could justify being kidnapped in another country and killed there or brought back to Saudi Arabia points back to a dictator’s attitude toward power—that a person cannot have too much of it, and thus that any external (or even internal!) constraint is to be regarded as not only pliable, but easily pushed aside altogether.

When a Saudi group linked to the crown prince killed and dismembered with a bone saw inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey’s government was using surveillance video and audio recordings to uncover the crime.” According to Bruce Riedel a former CIA analyst, “the team’s sloppiness showed that it was used to operating freely inside the kingdom and not under the watchful eye of an adversary’s intelligence service.”[5] The brazenness may suggest that as condensed in a dictator, power warps the mind’s perspective. 
By analogy, gravity warps time and space. As the mass of power increases, perhaps past a threshold point, the normal perception and judgment of having gone too far may be skewed by the power itself. Perhaps similar to additions, the high from the intense pleasure from having a lot of power occasions the warping of perception and judgement regarding one’s own power and the illusion that complete control over other people, hence with zero dissent politically, is achievable. Other operative mental defense-mechanisms doubtlessly include denial. If so, then checks on substantial power being held by political officials (as well as religious, educational, and business officials) are grounded in what having a lot of power does to the human mind. Put another way, a limit exists as to how much power is compatible with human biology.

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[1] Mark Mazzetti, “Saudi Prince Ran Brutal Campaign to Stifle Dissent,” The New York Times, March 18, 2019.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

The Saudi Crackdown: A Cause for Market Confidence

The Saudi government sought to confiscate cash and other assets worth as much as $800 billion in ostensibly cracking down on corruption in late 2017. More than 60 princes, officials, and business practitioners were initially detained. Both the figure and the number of arrests reflect merely “the initial stages” of asset seizures and arrests, according to a Saudi spokesman.[1] It was not long before 500 had been detained.[2] I submit that both the swiftness and scope left international investors and foreign businesses in Saudi Arabia unnecessarily rattled. Doubtless uncertainty as to the real reason for the crackdown unnerved the business elite. Corruption was endemic in the Saudi political economy, so the sudden need to crack down on it understandably left people to wonder as to the real reason, which, as it turns out, was nothing for business to fear.

The first point to make regards the spuriousness of the prime facie anti-corruption motive. At the time, Saudi laws “included little or no regulation of the sprawling royal family and its closest clients.”[3] For example, a major Saudi investment firm founded by one of King Salmon’s sons and then chaired by another owned “a significant stake in a conglomerate” that did “extensive government business.”[4] Indeed, princes “were known for borrowing money and simply never paying it back, which nearly led to the collapse of the National Commercial Bank.”[5] Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, curiously one of the detainees, told the American ambassador in 1996 that a handful of senior princes controlled billions of dollars in off-budget programs.”[6] Bringing about accountability in princely self-aggrandizement at the expense of the government can only be an oxymoron when said government belongs to the royal family. To apply democratic accountability would only be to demonstrate a foreigner’s base ignorance of the Saudi political economy.

The New York Times observed at the time that “if corruption is defined as private profit at the public expense, the practice is so pervasive that any measures short of revolutionary change may appear to be selective prosecution.”[7] Such change was clearly not in the cards. Doubtless the Crown Prince, who headed the anti-corruption force, shielded his allies and supporters and took advantage of the opportunity to take some detractors out of play, but his motive likely went beyond merely consolidating power, given the precariousness of the economy’s oil-dependency in the twenty-first century amid global calls for lower use of fossil fuels. Indeed, being dependent on any industry is not sound economic practice for any government or ruling family.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said that going after corruption at the highest level would be necessary to moving the Saudi economy off its dependence on oil, but the pervasiveness of “unlawful gain”—as if the law touched the royal family—undermines the claim. Were the Crown Prince determined to rid the political economy of corruption, an entirely new system would be needed; such a prospect would indeed legitimately raise caution-flags among investors and businesses, but they needn’t have worried as corruption itself was still safe in Saudi Arabia given the continuance of the royal family as the economic and political sovereign.

The riddle as to the actual motive is solved once it is realized that the assets seized would go to the state, and thus be available for investment to diversify the economy. The prolonged period of low oil prices had “forced the government to borrow money on the international bond market and to draw extensively from foreign reserves, which dropped from $730 billion at their peak in 2014 to $487.6 billion in August” 2017.[8] Eurasia Group, a political risk advisory firm, claimed that the crown prince needed “cash to fund the government’s investment plans.”[9] Like other countries in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia was facing time pressure to diversity economically while oil-money could still make it possible. The low oil prices simply meant that more than on-going oil revenue would be needed. So rather than being spooked by the uncertainty unleashed in the dramatic crackdown, investors and business practitioners having an interest in the Saudi economy should have felt more secure, for a diversified economy enhances stability for the long term.

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[1]Margherita Stancati, “Saudis Target Up to $800 Billion in Assets,” The Wall Street Journal, November 8, 2017.

[2] Nicholas Kulish and David Kirkpatrick, “Arrests Reveal Blending of Kin and Kingdom,” The New York Times, November 8, 2017.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8]Margherita Stancati, “Saudis Target Up to $800 Billion in Assets,” The Wall Street Journal, November 8, 2017.

[9] Ibid.

Americans Can Sue Saudi Arabia over 9/11 and the Saudis Accept Lower Oil Production by OPEC: The Unraveling of a Deal?

On Wednesday, September 28, 2016, the U.S. Congress voted overwhelmingly—97-1 in the Senate and 348-77 in the House of Representatives—to override President Obama’s veto of a bill that allows the families of the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center bombings.[1] As a result, American courts can seize Saudi assets to pay for any judgment obtained by the families. Saudi officials in turn warned that their government might need to sell off hundreds of billions of dollars in holdings in the United States to avoid such an outcome. In another place in the world, Saudi officials were dropping their resistance to OPEC—an oil cartel—cutting production. Even though positive correlation does not in itself indicate causation, the timing may point to the impact of political calculations by Obama. That is to say, the timing may suggest a political deal gone bad.

Generally speaking, low gas prices and the related fall in the prices of foodstuffs favor the reelection of the party in power. Such economics play well with the American electorate voting for U.S. President. So President Obama, being in favor of Hillary Clinton, another Democrat-centrist, may have told Saudi officials that he would make sure a law allowing U.S. citizens to sue the Saudi Government over 9/11 would not be enacted, and in return the Saudis would continue to pressure OPEC to keep oil supply at the high level. Keeping such a deal from falling apart may have been why the White House proffered “fierce objections” to Congress overriding the president’s veto. To be sure, the override could pose a danger in that the Saudis could sue the U.S. Government on matters related to the U.S. military presence in the kingdom, but would Obama have been so “fierce” just for that possibility when a more pressing concern was likely keeping the White House in Democratic hands to insure his legacy (e.g., Obamacare).

Sure enough, OPEC’s 14 oil-producing nations, including Saudi Arabia, agreed on Wednesday, September 28, 2016, “to modestly cut their collective oil output later this year in an effort to bolster sagging prices.”[2] Although the cuts probably would not take place until after the U.S. presidential election in early November, the “decision sent global oil prices soaring by more than 5 percent.”[3] The question for Obama might have been: How long will it take for the increase to be reflected “at the pump” and in grocery stores? Perhaps he might have considered opening up more of the U.S.’s strategic reserves, though he might have felt that the override itself was close enough to the election that any price-implications by election day would not diminish Clinton’s chances.

A major difference separates the motive of not wanting to open the U.S. Government up to being sued in Saudi Arabia on the one hand and not wanting Clinton to lose the upcoming election; whereas the former is acting in the interest of these United States, the latter desire is partisan and personal. Making a deal with a foreign government for the latter motive would essentially put the United States second, as well as having the sordid taste of trying to manipulate the American People—the popular sovereign to which the government and its elected and appointed officials are agents rather than principals.

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1. Jennifer Steinhauer, Mark Mazzetti, and Julie H. Davis, ,“Congress Allows Saudis to Be Sued Over 9/11 Attacks,“ The New York Times, September 29, 2016.

2. Clifford Krauss and Stanley Reed, “Oil Prices Rise 5% on OPEC’s Tentative Deal to Cut Production,” The New York Times, September 29, 2016.

3. Ibid.