American Media Should Tell The Truth About The Saudi Barbarian Regime

And How Obama Perpetuated Bush’s Neoconservative World Order

On September 11th, 2001 I was 11 years old. Since then, I have spent years of my adult life learning about the culture of the Arab world. I majored in Middle Eastern History and studied Arabic five days a week for three years at Georgetown University. I lived in Jordan for five months and traveled extensively throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

After over a decade working in the media, I believe it is time that our free press speaks up about the foreign policy mistakes of our past, as well as the moral paradox that is our alliance with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. 

Over the last four decades, the Saudi brand of radical Wahhabism was exported to power vacuums around the world, resulting in the death of thousands of innocent American civilians- some of them family members of my peers. 

September 11, 2001

The Principal took my middle school into the gymnasium and told us that two planes crashed into the Twin Towers. A handful of the kids in the room, whose parents worked in the building, began crying as their adolescent wails echoed off the hardwood floors. Administrators ferried them into back offices for consolation and phone calls. The rest of us put our heads down, some of us sobbing at the sound of our classmates’ innocence disappearing into the back hallways of the school. 

One of the fifth graders locked himself in a closet for hours. During that time his Dad either burned alive or perished in the ensuing collapse. 

I was relieved to hear that my Mom, who worked in New York City, drove back home after hearing the news on the radio. That same night, my parents sat down my brothers and I to tell us that our Mother had lung cancer. She was going in to prepare for the surgery the next day. Our parents had no choice but to break the news on one of the most earth-shattering days in modern history. After having one lobe of her lungs removed, my Mom survived the surgery, healing over time with a large scar down her back. In that scar I see my friends’ family members who will never heal because they are dead.

The same day that my Mom had surgery, September 13, 2001, George Bush sat down with a member of the Saudi Royal family and the notorious international playboy, Prince Bandar, who served as the Saudi Ambassador to the United States from 1983-2005. Lounging on the Truman Portico overlooking the South Lawn of The White House, they smoked Cohiba cigars while discussing the evacuation of over 140 members of the Saudi royal family as well as members of the billionaire Bin Laden’s clan.¹

While it might have been useful to the investigation of the hijacking to interview some of these individuals, Bush instead chose to smooth things over because the neoconservatives  thought that maintaining a relationship with Saudi Arabia was essential to maintaining the strength of the petrodollar.

Growing up, I read about one foreign policy mistake after another in the Arab world. Like many kids who were old enough to remember 9/11, my initial interest in the region came from a desire to fight the radical muslim terrorists who attacked my country. But as I progressed into adulthood, I came to realize that this reductive understanding of what happened on that day would do nothing to alleviate its causes. That is because our country’s leaders hold a double standard when it comes to which autocratic governments they choose to support, and which ones they choose to destroy.

September, 2004

I remember my Dad remarking on the news one night as he was making dinner. “See that, Richie? CNN, MSNBC, Fox, every single one of them are supporting the Iraq war.” He was right, and even the New York Times bought the phony WMD narrative hook, line, and sinker. Media pundits endorsed the war because they were afraid of making the politically incorrect statement that might imply that they didn’t “support the troops.” The difference between supporting the young men and women who were sent to the desert to be maimed or killed and supporting the policy decisions that put them in harm’s way was catastrophically overlooked by the Fourth Estate.

In 2004, my freshman high school AP World History teacher asked the class, “Who here is for the war in Iraq?” Fearing the same social pressure to which our media succumbed, the entire class put their hands up. My teacher laughed, “OK, folks. In the next month I will teach you the history of the Fertile Crescent (the ancient area now occupied mostly by Iraq), and show you why you’re all wrong.” He posed a simple question at the end of class that I will never forget. “Can any of you tell me why bringing democracy to a 60 percent Shia-Muslim country that borders our biggest adversary in the region- Iran- is a good idea?”

It appeared that my high school history teacher was more insightful than the corporate news establishment and its spineless discourse, which contributed to our foreign policy decisions. Turns out he was right, and America’s invasion of Iraq achieved nothing to ensure that something similar to 9/11 never happens again.

August, 2008

After high school, I moved to Washington, DC. My mission was to study Arabic and Middle Eastern history at Georgetown. Thinking that Obama would be an agent for “Hope and Change,” I volunteered to canvas for the Obama Presidential campaign in Virginia. But the more I studied the Middle East and the Arabic language, the more I understood Obama’s failure to diverge from Bush’s neoconservativism in the region.

December 2010

I returned from a semester in Amman, Jordan only a month before the Arab Spring. I watched as Barack Obama’s State Department, helmed by Hillary Clinton, lied about the reasons for the civil unrest in Libya. After threatening to sell his oil with an independent currency instead of the American petrodollar, Muammar Ghaddafi’s regime collapsed under the pressure of a NATO-sponsored no-fly zone. At the time, Libya touted one of the highest per capita incomes in Africa. That all ended when rebels discovered Ghaddafi in a storm drain, rammed bayonets up his ass and then dragged his body behind a dusty old Toyota pickup truck. In 2011, Hillary Clinton laughed with CBS News about Ghaddaffi’s grizzly death. “We came, we saw, he died!”

In 2017, a CNN hidden camera investigation revealed open-air slave markets in the capital of Tripoli.

August, 2012

Obama gave a speech drawing a “red line,” in the Syrian sand, stating that there would be consequences , namely the use of chemical weapons, if Assad crossed it. Bashar Al-Assad reportedly crossed that line multiple times with virtually no consequences. This is yet another sad reminder of the emptiness of Obama’s original foreign policy promises.

I watched in anger as Obama’s administration gave Saudi Arabia the same steadfast support of the previous presidency. I learned that the Obama campaign maintained their perilous relationship with Saudi Arabia in order to preserve their precious Iran deal, and to maintain the power balance that keeps the special interests of the multinational oil conglomerates happy. Furthermore, and much to the enjoyment of Lockheed Martin stockholders, his administration completely ignored the initial campaign promise to “end the war” in Iraq, penned by Obama himself in a  New York Times Op-Ed in the summer of 2008.

September 11, 2022

From the ashes of our foreign policy blunders, Radical Islamic terrorism is flourishing in 2022. Less than one week after Biden gave the Crowned Prince of Saudi Arabia a fist bump, Vladimir Putin was on the phone with Muhammad Bin Salman negotiating a deal to sell him Russian oil. 

The Saudi regime is a theocracy with a claim to the Prophet Muhammad’s bloodline. Their kingdom was consolidated around Islam’s most sacred religious cities, Mecca and Medina, from the remains of the collapsed Ottoman Empire after World War I. Despite being one of the least free countries of the last century, the Saudis have enjoyed a friendly alliance with the West since the discovery of oil in the early 1900’s.

Numbering in the tens of thousands, the Saudi Royals are one of the richest families in the world. They maintain power over their young and impoverished population through one of the most repressive governments in existence today.

The family’s history of draconian torture tactics would make Putin blush.  Meanwhile, our media ceaselessly bemoans war crimes in Ukraine while ignoring the Saudi-funded religious genocide of Shi’a Muslims in Yemen.

The Saudi family’s lavish spending and sexual exploits are shameless. Yet, our media celebrates gay pride to the point of absurdity and is silent when homosexuals are publicly beheaded in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. 

Our press is conveniently mute about the state’s wrongdoing as long as the same commercial interests that influence our government continue to advertise on their programs.

And even as the new right warns of the growing threat of Iran and its proxies, thousands of other Americans touched by the 9/11 tragedy would agree that Saudi-funded Wahhabism is a far bigger danger to US citizens than radical Shi’a Islam emboldened by Iran. How did Americans benefit from Obama’s Iran deal? They didn’t. Both Obama’s and Bush’s presidencies failed to yield positive results in the Middle East. These are the facts of history.

Though the CIA and big money oil companies might not like the prospect of short term instability, America would benefit from turning inward and focusing on domestic petroleum and gas production rather than salvaging lost causes in the Middle East.

Trumpism and its America-first agenda currently represents the only new path to an American-centric, rather than a globally dominated, United States foreign policy (but only if its leader can put his country ahead of making lucrative Trump Golf course deals with the new Saudi-funded professional golf league). 

With China and India’s economies on the rise, we now live in a multi-polar world. Putin is selling his oil to China on the ruble instead of the US dollar. The strength and hegemony of the petrodollar is waning. Our politicians should begin to accept these realities.

The time is ripe for actual “Hope and Change” in the Middle East because Crowned Prince Muhammad Bin Salman is a young leader who could be pressured into moving his country more rapidly towards modernity. Our press must lead the way by ceasing the hypocrisy; denouncing Putin as a cruel strongman on the one hand yet remaining silent on the Saudi government’s daily acts of barbarism on the other. 

Until the media speaks up about our unwavering support of the Saudi Barbarians’ despotic regime, American foriegn policy will continue its history of dishonesty and destruction.

1. House Of Bush House Of Saud By Craig Unger (2004)