The Rehabbing of Mr. Bonesaw

What is the real value in an interview that provides us with nothing more than what we knew before we read it?

Karen Attiah is understandably disgusted by the cover story in the new issue of The Atlantic that provides the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, a platform to tell self-serving lies:

Most sickeningly, the Atlantic gave MBS a platform to not only continue his absurd denials of having anything to do with Jamal’s murder (even though it was carried out by figures in his close circle and the CIA concluded he gave the order to capture or kill), but also to present himself as the real victim. “The Khashoggi incident was the worst thing ever to happen to me,” the magazine reported that MBS has told people close to him. The murder “hurt me and it hurt Saudi Arabia, from a feelings perspective.”

The article does occasionally acknowledge some of the abuses that have taken place on the crown prince’s watch, but it is fair to say that they handled Mohammed bin Salman with kid gloves and let him off the hook for many of the crimes committed by his government since he rose to prominence and then became de facto ruler. The war on Yemen was Mohammed bin Salman’s idea more than any other top official in the kingdom, and he owns the devastating consequences of that war more than anyone else. As Attiah notes, the war and the Saudi government’s war crimes against Yemeni civilians receive the briefest of mentions.

The framing of the war as one “between Saudi Arabia and Iranian-backed Houthi rebels” oversimplifies the conflict and also fails to put the Saudi coalition intervention in context. Because it mentions Yemen only twice in passing, the article does not discuss the extent of the humanitarian crisis that the intervention has created. The crown prince’s television-viewing habits are explored more extensively than the kingdom’s signature foreign policy initiative over the last seven years. One would not know after reading this article that the war on Yemen has killed at least 377,000 people, most of whom were civilians perishing from hunger and disease. That would seem to be important information to include in a cover story profile of a foreign leader, but somehow it was not included.

Graeme Wood has defended the profile as necessary reporting:

All journalism is an attempt to bring readers things they do not know, and all interviews with heads of state involve getting them to say things they wish they had not said. To elicit these utterances, one must approach the subject sideways—and, most of all, keep him talking, and reveal more than he intends to say.

This is a plausible-sounding defense of interviewing a war criminal, so what things did we learn that we didn’t know before? We found out that the crown prince still insists that he is blameless for a crime that we have every reason to believe he ordered, but that is not news. We have known that for the last three and a half years. Maybe we are supposed to be impressed that they quoted him saying that Khashoggi was not even in the top thousand of his would-be targets? I’m not sure what this twisted evasion tells us that we didn’t know before. The main takeaway from the article is that the crown prince thinks he has done nothing wrong and that he is actually the real victim, and that isn’t new information, either. So what is the real value in an interview that provides us with nothing more than what we knew before we read it?

Wood takes pride in the fact that the Saudi government has soured on him and his article because of the handful of critical comments included in it, but all that this proves is that the crown prince and his underlings are incapable of tolerating even the slightest negative remarks. The final message from the article is unmistakable to anyone paying close attention: Mohammed bin Salman will be with us for a long time, so we may as well make our peace with him because the alternatives are bound to be worse. In case anyone thinks I am exaggerating, this is a quote from the closing section of the article:

But it is pointless to consider policy in a state of childlike fantasy, as if it were possible to conjure some new Saudi monarch by closing your eyes and wishing him into existence. Open your eyes, and MBS will still be there. If he is not, then the man ruling in his place will not be an Arab Dalai Lama. He will be, at best, a member of the unsustainable Saudi old guard, and at worst one of the big beards of jihadism, now richer than Croesus and ready to fight.

This is the same old rationalization for backing despotic clients that we have heard for decades. No one expects an “Arab Dalai Lama” to take his place, but that doesn’t mean that the U.S. should cater to and arm the war criminal currently in power. It may be beyond the power of the U.S. to change the way that the crown prince wields power inside the kingdom, but the U.S. absolutely has influence that it can use in pushing the Saudi government to change how it conducts itself outside of its borders. The U.S. does not have to continue indulging and arming a government when it is led by someone as dangerous and reckless as Mohammed bin Salman. The purpose of the article is to encourage U.S. policymakers to overlook the crown prince’s psychopathic tendencies and ignore his victims for the sake of keeping Saudi Arabia on “our” side, and for that it deserves all of the condemnation it has received and more.