Interesting to observe and read the column inches outpouring over the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Turkish, Saudi Arabian embassy but it is what’s not being reported in the mainstream media that is even more interesting and as is more often the case, when it comes to the complex, concave and convex hall of mirrors and geopolitical Rubik’s Cube of the Middle East with all its moving parts, things are never quite what they seem.
Khashoggi wasn’t just a simple Washington Post contributor and media martyr journeyman as portrayed, but a major player in the seething underbelly of the beast of Saudi politics having joined up with the Muslim Brotherhood forty years ago. It is believed that he was at or near the top of the brotherhood in Saudi Arabia and as we saw in Egypt with Mohammad Morsi in 2012, in such a capacity he would have been regarded as a nascent threat to the Saudi leadership.
For good measure he was apparently a friend or at least an acquaintance of Osama Bin Laden.
When you cross the Muslim Brotherhood mafia mobsters with the Saudi mafia mobsters you get the worst of both worlds — A Hotel California situation, where “you can check out but you can never leave ” as Khashoggi apparently found out, much to his detriment.
With that background and with Saudi Arabia as a bulwark and ally against Iran, it would be absolute folly, an act of national economic self harm and totally futile for the United States to sacrifice it’s arms deal with the Saudis for the simple reason that it will not only make a bad, geopolitical situation worse, but they’ll simply procure their hardware from, and become a client state of, China or Russia.