What Jamal Khashoggi and Edward Snowden Have in Common
So it is safe to say that Saudi Arabia is feeling the heat from Washington, and that has taken Riyadh by surprise. What’s interesting is the degree to which the media firestorm also has taken the kingdom’s critics by surprise. There is little love for the Saudi government on either the left or the right in the United States. The outcry over Khashoggi’s disappearance, however, seems to have rankled longtime critics of the U.S.-Saudi alliance:
We should all be angry about what appears to be a blatant act of murder by Saudi Arabia, but notice that the senseless killing of one well-connected dissident journalist has triggered way more elite outrage than the prolonged and brutal bombing of thousands of anonymous Yemenis.
— Stephen Walt (@stephenWalt)
Congressional attitudes toward Saudi Arabia have soured slowly over the past year, but Khashoggi’s disappearance has accelerated matters.
Why has Khashoggi’s suspected death rattled the relationship so much more than previous policy miscues? Let me suggest that the same dynamic that affected U.S. soft power in the wake of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations is now affecting the Saudis' ability to influence U.S. elite public opinion.
Immediately after the Snowden revelations, Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore argued in Foreign Affairs that what made Snowden so damaging was twofold. First, as they wrote, Snowden’s disclosures “undermine Washington’s ability to act hypocritically and get away with it. Their danger lies not in the new information that they reveal but in the documented confirmation they provide of what the United States is actually doing and why.” Second, the damage put U.S. allies in an impossible situation. What made Snowden so damaging was that long-standing allies such as Brazil and Germany curtailed cooperation because the evidence of U.S. surveillance could no longer be denied.
The foreign policy community in the United States could forgive a lot from the Saudis, because the other alternatives for allies in the Persian Gulf region seemed worse.
This meant that U.S. elites were willing to look the other way even as the Saudis screwed up.
The Saudis have a lot of chits invested inside the Beltway. Saudi leverage over other U.S. actors might increase. Akbar Shahid Ahmed noted in the HuffPost, “By directing billions of dollars of Saudi money into the U.S. for decades, Riyadh’s ruling family has won the support of small but powerful circles of influential Americans and courted wider public acceptance through corporate ties and philanthropy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/outlook/2018/10/15/what-jamal-khashoggi-edward-snowden-have-common/
It appears these WaPo journalists like to write stories for a special audience, and then interweave confusing and sometimes unconnected information in the midst of the intended discussion. But, with some maths, we can add and subtract their cryptophonetic Pimsleurian. ;)