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MBS review: why Trump and the west took a pass on the Khashoggi killing
Lloyd Green
Sun 8 Mar 2020 01.00 EST
In 2015, the veteran New York Times columnist Tom Friedman wrote a “Letter from Saudi Arabia” in which he extolled a younger generation of Saudi royals and gushed that Mohammed bin Salman, five years later crown prince of the desert kingdom, brimmed with fresh ideas.
Come 2017, Friedman announced: “Only a fool would predict [the] success [of Saudi reform] – but only a fool would not root for it.”
In between the two columns, Prince Mohammed had embarked on an iron-fisted anti-corruption drive or purge, reportedly engineered the temporary detention and resignation of Saad Hariri, Lebanon’s prime minister, and openly backed a bloody civil war in Yemen against Iran and its proxies.
Then, on 2 October 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and journalist resident in the US and writing for the Washington Post, was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, reportedly at the direction of the prince.
More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/08/mbs-review-mohammed-bin-salman-saudi-crown-prince-trump-jamal-khashoggi-ben-hubbard