The announcement that President Biden would be traveling to Israel1 and then to Saudi Arabia in July and perhaps meeting with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), has triggered shock and outrage among progressives, human rights advocates, journalists, and others.
In 2018, under MBS’s direction, Saudi Arabia carried out the ghoulish murder and dismemberment of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a leading critic of the ruling royal family. Khashoggi lived in the U.S. and wrote for the Washington Post. His murder generated righteous global outrage among journalists and a wide range of justice-loving people. (For more on the Khashoggi killing, see “Some Basic Points of Orientation on the Murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the Heightened Dangers Internationally,” revcom.us, October 29, 2018.)
While campaigning for president the year after Khashoggi’s murder, Biden postured that he was going to get tough on MBS and Saudi Arabia by “mak[ing] them, in fact, the pariah that they are” and declared there is “very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia.” After he was elected Biden imposed some minor sanctions on Saudi Arabia and authorized the release of a report by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence blaming MBS for Khashoggi’s murder.
But now Biden is heading to Saudi Arabia, where he’s likely to meet or interact with MBS.
A New York Times article noted, “Human rights activists, media figures and even some of Mr. Biden’s fellow Democrats denounced the idea of a president shaking hands with a Saudi leader said to have ordered the killing and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi.”
What MBS ordered done to Jamal Khashoggi was an outrage and a crime. But those who are shocked that a U.S. president would shake hands with a Saudi leader with blood on his hands must confront some basic questions about the biggest, most vicious and murderous gang of criminals in the world—the U.S. imperialists.
Face Reality: Who Has Backed, Armed, and Overall Dominated Saudi Arabia Since Its Founding?
First, who do you think was crucial in Saudi Arabia’s founding 90 years ago?2 Who has been crucial to Saudi Arabia’s functioning, security, and influence in the decades since, and in an overall sense has been calling the shots—under both Democrats and Republicans? It’s the U.S.
Second, who do you think has more blood on their hands—MBS and Saudi Arabia? Or the USA and its rulers?
Yes, Biden’s visit, as one Saudi dissident said, is “the equivalent of a presidential pardon for murder, and MBS would perceive it as the Biden-issued license to kill more Khashoggis.”3 But this is not the first instance of a U.S. green light for Saudi crimes, and hardly the worst.
Talk about a license for mass murder—people have to face what the U.S. has done and is doing in Yemen: how, starting under Obama in 2015, the U.S. has backed the Saudi war in Yemen, including training Saudi pilots and guiding their warplanes in their bombing campaigns. The U.S.-backed air war has directly killed some 15,000 civilians in Yemen. Overall, the Saudi war has contributed to the deaths of over 400,000 people, driven millions—including children—to the edge of starvation, and created one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. All these are massive war crimes and crimes against humanity—carried out by Saudi Arabia and their American backers! (See sidebar.)
This Is About Imperialist Empire and Global Domination—Not Just Cheap Gas
Biden isn’t heading to Saudi Arabia (and Israel!) just or even mainly (or at all) to try to “lower gas prices.” He’s heading to Saudi Arabia because he’s the head of a global imperialist power fighting to maintain its dominance. As Bob Avakian drives home:
Imperialism means huge monopolies and financial institutions controlling the economies and the political systems—and the lives of people—not just in one country but all over the world. Imperialism means parasitic exploiters who oppress hundreds of millions of people and condemn them to untold misery; parasitic financiers who can cause millions to starve just by pressing a computer key and thereby shifting vast amounts of wealth from one place to another. Imperialism means war—war to put down the resistance and rebellion of the oppressed, and war between rival imperialist states—it means the leaders of these states can condemn humanity to unbelievable devastation, perhaps even total annihilation, with the push of a button. (from BAsics 1:6)
That global system of exploitation and oppression demands “allies,” really client regimes, like Saudi Arabia. Regimes that are violent tyrannies that ruthlessly suppress the masses of “their” people, especially women as is the case in Saudi Arabia. Just this past March, Saudi Arabia executed 81 people in one day—including, according to Amnesty International, some convicted of charges like “disrupting the social fabric and national cohesion” and “participating in and inciting sit-ins and protests”!4
The U.S. rulers may sometimes try and distance themselves from the savagery such regimes carry out. But in reality, these regimes aren’t “problems” or “embarrassments” for the U.S., they’re key pillars of America’s imperialist empire.
Saudi-led airstrike destroyed Yemeni building, killing at least seven, including women and children. Photo: AP
In the case of Saudi Arabia, its vast petroleum reserves have provided cheap energy and even more crucial strategic leverage for the U.S. rulers (and, of course, this has helped fuel the global climate emergency). The Saudi kingdom has been a stabilizing force in global capitalist-imperialist financial markets. Its location has been key to U.S. military moves and political domination of the Middle East. Saudi Arabia has been a willing partner of the U.S. in war after war—in Afghanistan in the 1980s, in Iraq in the 1990s and 2000s, in Syria in 2015, and more.
During the upcoming visit, Biden will reportedly be discussing key challenges to U.S. domination of the Middle East, including the Islamic Republic of Iran, and strengthening ties between Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel.
All of this is in the service of pushing the interests of an imperialist power. And as Bob Avakian has written about this imperialist power:
The U.S. by far holds the record for invasions, coups and other violent interference in other countries. It has continued, right down to today, to be responsible for atrocities—for example, in Yemen—which are far worse than what Russia has done in Ukraine.5
Where is the urgently needed outrage, condemnation, and determined opposition against that?
Shocked by Biden’s Trip to Saudi Arabia?
You Haven’t Been Paying Attention to His Lies About YEMEN!
Biden’s campaign promise to treat Saudi Arabia like a “pariah” wasn’t his only lie. In his first foreign policy speech as president, Biden promised the U.S. would step up its diplomatic efforts to end Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, and that the U.S. was “ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.”
The U.S. has been backing the Saudis since they launched this war of aggression in 2015. And the U.S. has continued that support even after the war created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis—killing some 400,000 people either directly in combat or due to famine and disease caused by the war. Seventy percent of these deaths reportedly are children under the age of five, and U.S. planes, training bombs, and naval forces have contributed directly to the slaughter.
So if Biden actually was ending all U.S. military support for the Saudis, that would be a big change.
But he wasn’t. Even the pro-Democratic Party think tank Brookings Institute wrote, “Biden’s assertion that the U.S. would end support for offensive operations is a lie.”
And, as revcom.us has analyzed, “Biden said nothing about, much less call for an immediate end to the U.S.-backed Saudi blockade that is literally starving and killing massive numbers of people in Yemen by keeping out essential food, fuel, and medicine or making these necessities prohibitively expensive. And, while this is kept almost completely secret, the U.S. Navy itself, not just the Saudis, is playing a role in imposing that blockade.”
Now, two new reports, “Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen have been called war crimes. Many relied on U.S. support” in the Washington Post (June 4) and “U.S. Fails to Assess Civilian Deaths in Yemen War, Internal Report Says” in the New York Times (June 7 and 15), have provided further evidence that shows Biden was lying, as well as the extent of America’s vast and criminal facilitation of Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war on Yemen.
The New York Times reported, “President Biden said in 2021 that the United States would end its support, but his administration has continued selling it weapons.”
According to the Washington Post’s investigation:
The Biden administration in 2021 announced an end to U.S. military support for “offensive operations” carried out by the Saudi-led coalition against Yemen’s Houthi rebels and suspended some munition sales. But maintenance contracts fulfilled by both the U.S. military and U.S. companies to coalition squadrons carrying out offensive missions have continued.
And:
As global attention focused on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, the Saudi-led coalition carried out more than 150 airstrikes on civilian targets in Yemen, including homes, hospitals and communication towers, according to the Yemen Data Project.
The Times reports, “The Pentagon managed $54.6 billion of military aid to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates from 2015 to 2021….”
Other findings from the Post and Times investigations include:
- The “United States supported the majority of air force squadrons involved in the Saudi coalition’s years-old air campaign... revealing that a substantial portion of the air raids were carried out by jets developed, maintained and sold by U.S. companies, and by pilots who were trained by the U.S. military…. [and] the majority of the fighter jet squadrons in the campaign.”
- Hundreds of thousands have died from the fighting or its indirect consequences, such as hunger, the United Nations says. The devastating air campaign alone—carried out by a Saudi-led coalition—has killed nearly 15,000 civilians, according to conservative estimates by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), which monitors war zones around the world.
- “While Russia’s bombings of a maternity hospital and other civilian targets in Ukraine have drawn widespread public indignation as war crimes, thousands of similar strikes have taken place against Yemeni civilians. The indiscriminate bombings have become a hallmark of the Yemen war….”
- “The State Department and the Defense Department were recently found to have failed to assess civilian casualties caused by the Saudi-led coalition in the war and the use of U.S. weapons in the killings, according to an internal government report.”