The richest dead man

Muhammad Bin Salman is all over the place

Mohammad Bin Salman or MBS in March pledged to invest $400 billion in the US in 10 years. Back then, Khashoggi was an irritant for the 33-year-old Prince because Khashoggi was criticising him in his Washington Post Op-Ed columns. Today, MBS is all over the place. Khashoggi refuses to die down. The damage control strategy has only exacerbated the situation. KSA is eager to do whatever it takes to escape this quagmire. Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Imran Khan, seized the day at the “Davos in Desert” conference and has secured a Saudi pledge of $6 billion for his cash-starved nation.

Over 10,000 Yemenis have been killed by Saudi bombing. But Trump says that the military equipment sales to KSA created 40,000 American jobs. The silence over 10,000 Yemeni lives earned 40,000 American jobs. Trump called MBS a “great purchaser” of American armaments and investments. The silence over Khashoggi’s death would have to cost much more. All in, MBS might end up spending more than the combined net worth of the five richest men on earth, just to make Khashoggi go away. Financially, diplomatically, and politically Khashoggi in death is worth more than anyone in recent memory.

Turkey has been looking for a deal with the Saudis. There is no love lost between the Saudis and the Turks but the Turks won’t mind a piece of the pie. In the movie Godfather, a Nevada Senator tells Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) how much he despised Corleone and his Italian roots but that he would still do business with him so as to squeeze money out of him. The Turks intend to squeeze the Saudis and if they cannot then they will spill the beans. Erdogan has already started telling the “naked truth” that he has been threatening about. His systematic and episodic leaks are reversing Saudi propaganda aimed at damage control.

MBS is straight out of Syriana, a movie loosely based on the book See No Evil by Robert Baer. In the story, there is a Pro-American second born Saudi prince who is groomed to hold the throne despite the fact that he is not the next in line. His older brother is pro-China and therefore, not acceptable to American oil companies. He is ridiculed in the Western media as a terrorist and a Godless communist and is eventually murdered so as to pave the way for his younger brother to become the unchallenged Emir. MBS has been, for lack of a better word, installed by the defacto Emirati leader Muhammad bin Zayed with not so different initials, MBZ.

MBS’s 57-year-old cousin Muhammad bin Nayef was removed to make way for MBS. The grooming of MBS has some key advices by MBZ; that if MBS wants to be Washington’s blue-eyed boy, he must “end the rule of Wahhabism” in KSA as well as open a “strong channel of communication” with Israel. Furthermore, the UAE has a ‘Brotherhood’ (Ikhwan) problem. MBZ groomed MBS because of his opposition to ballot loving Islamists such as the Ikhwan. MBS scored an A on all those counts. The Saudi bounty is what’s keeping Trump from criticising KSA. Trump is a businessman. He knows that the customer is always right as he was quick to expel Russian diplomats and spies from America and shut down the Russian consulate in Seattle after allegations of Russian role in the attempted assassination of the Skripals in Salisbury, England.

As kids, we would take offence when our classmates joked about us resembling the cartoons in our textbooks. May be MBS as a kid was bullied that way. He hates personalities, which have been labelled as villains by the Western media. He compared the Iranian supreme leader to Adolf Hitler. Khashoggi had equated MBS with Putin.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 25^th, 2018.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.