Trump resists the move to isolate the Saudis

Carolyn Glick:

Trump Stares Down the ‘Post-Nationalist’ Mob on Khashoggi

...
It is important to see the Khasoggi murder in the context of the meeting with evangelicals and the transformation of Saudi Arabia’s position on the propagation of reactionary, jihad-supporting-and-abetting Islam worldwide.

Under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s leadership, Saudi Arabia has fundamentally shifted how it deals with the outside world, how it relates to jihadist Islam, and how it views itself and its position in the world. Indeed, regarding the latter, MBS has cultivated nationalism rather than Islamic imperialism, and world leadership as the central identity of Saudi youth.

Khashoggi’s murder has to be seen in this context. The murder was brutal. Its brutality serves as a vivid reminder that Saudi Arabia is a brutal kingdom. It does not aspire to become a liberal democracy. But it does share key interests with liberal democracies, led by the U.S. And to advance those common interests, the Saudis are acting forthrightly to counter and defeat the jihadist ideology that the Saudis themselves once propagated.

In stark contrast, Turkey, under Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which has used the apparently state-ordered murder of Khashoggi to harm U.S.-Saudi ties and undermine MBS’s rule, is moving in the opposite direction. Turkey has jailed more journalists than any other country on earth. Turkish prisons are filled with tens of thousands of former officials and military officers, often subjected to horrific torture. Their sole “crime” has been insufficient loyalty to the regime. Whereas Saudi Arabia is confronting Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and its Sunni terror spinoffs like Hamas, Turkey is embracing all of them.

As for Iran, its human rights record is certainly no better than Saudi Arabia’s. Two weeks after Khashoggi – who mourned Osama Bin Laden’s murder and was an intermediary between the terror kingpin and the Saudi royal family for many years – Iranian authorities arrested Pouyan Khoshhal as he attempted to leave Iran. Khoshhal, a journalist, was charged with insulting a Shiite holy figure by writing that he had “passed away” rather than refer to his death as “martyrdom.” Khoshhal faces the death penalty for his phrasing.

The former Obama administration officials who are insisting that the U.S. end its support for MBS and cancel its arms sales to Saudi Arabia in response to Khashoggi’s murder stood back and did nothing as the Iranian regime executed hundreds of opponents and jailed thousands of democracy activists in the 2009 Green Revolution. Rather than confront the mullahs, Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, Susan Rice, Wendy Sherman, John Brennan, and others supported Obama as he sent planeloads of cash to the world’s largest state sponsor of terror and concluded the nuclear deal that gave Iran an open path to a nuclear arsenal.
...

If those who want to isolate Saudi Arabia are doing any strategic thinking it has to be because they prefer the tyrannies of the Iranians which are much worse.   Otherwise, it makes no sense at all.  Iran is the enemy that wants to destroy Ameria and the rest of the west and impose an Islamic theocracy on the world.