Saudi Arabia had its first palace political upheaval about a decade after the death of its founder King Ibn Saud. That was when a group of influential princes staged a palace coup against their brother (or half-brother) King Saud Bin Abdulaziz. Crown Prince Faisal al Saud was a major drive behind the coup, which forced Saud to abdicate in favor of Faisal. After that there were no serious palace upheavals, not that we know about anyway. There was an incident in the late 1950’s when a group of rebellious princes (The Free Princes) sided with Nasser of Egypt and flew to Cairo in exile. One of them was Prince Talal Bin Abdulaziz, brother of the king and father of Prince Al Waleed. Another unrelated incident was when king Faisal was assassinated by one of his nephews in 1975.
Palace intrigue resumed openly and in full force after King Salman took over in 2015. There was a protracted turmoil as the king positioned his son MBS to gain absolute power over the country. That turmoil did not end when Mohammed took over absolute power, he felt insecure with too many important princes in prominent positions. So he went about cutting them down to size with purges.
The last ‘known’ major purge was in the fall of 2017, when a large number of businessmen, officials, and princes (including the once high-flying Prince Al Waleed) were incarcerated in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton for weeks and months. Many were shaken down for a share of their wealth, which they gladly gave up in exchange for restricted freedom and only within the kingdom. There have been other smaller purges since then, but nothing involving the most prominent princes who were so close to ascending the Saudi throne. These princes were politically emasculated, apparently.
Then, yesterday’s shock. Some of the most senior princes, in fact the highest princes in the kingdom were arrested yesterday. No charges announced yet, almost certainly none will be. Senior prince Ahamd Bin Abdulaziz is an elderly son of Ibn Saud, the founder of the kingdom. He was often mentioned as a possible heir during the past decade. But the main catch of this new purge is Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef (MBN), the former crown prince who was deposed after King Salman picked his own son (MBS). The third mentioned captive is a brother of MBN, a former deputy minister. Of course in such a system, a prince is never alone: he has many aides, sycophants, minions, and allies. So we can assume that many others have been arrested as well with these three prominent princes. Some of these other important detainees will also be princes. So, the circle, the radius of the purge, widens by nature, and covers more people over time, both royals and hapless non-royals. Meanwhile, the circle of princes and potentates left untouched by the purges shrinks.
Saudi Arabia was not historically known as an unstable country that experienced domestic political shock. Not in the royal palaces anyway. Not that any outsiders would notice. It may return to its past normal form after one person consolidates his secure power to such an extent that there will be no need to fear new upheavals. Maybe no more purges, but I doubt it. This is not his grandfather’s world anymore, nor is it his grandfather’s kingdom anymore.
Cheers
M H Ghuloum
Category Archives: Bin Salman
With Friends Like These: America Loses Respect as the Princes Threaten Trump, New Khashoggi Spin……..
“They present catastrophic scenarios that would hit the US economy much harder than Saudi Arabia’s economic climate…… It would lead to Saudi Arabia’s failure to commit to producing 7.5 million barrels. If the price of oil reaching $80 angered President Trump, no one should rule out the price jumping to $100, or $200, or even double that figure. An oil barrel may be priced in a different currency, Chinese yuan…….. And perhaps trusted exchange of information between Riyadh and America and Western countries will be a thing of the past after it had contributed to the protection of millions of Westerners, as testified by senior Western officials themselves. Imposing any type of sanctions on Saudi Arabia by the West will cause the kingdom to resort to other options, US President Donald Trump had said a few days ago, and that Russia and China are ready to fulfill Riyadh’s military needs among others. No one can deny that repercussions of these sanctions will include a Russian military base in Tabuk, northwest of Saudi Arabia………”
An official Saudi mouthpiece threatening the United States of America. A first, only under Donald Trump, whose focus is the money only. The absolute princes and potentates have read him, and Jared Kushner, correctly: dangle the money in his face, and you have the upper hand.
Selective rumors and facts about Khashoggi, post-Afghanistan:
During the 1980s, Khashoggi was on Ronald Reagan’s side, and both were allied to Bin Laden and the Islamist Mujahideen (later Taliban) against the Soviets and the leftist secular Afghan government. This explains a lot of noise this week by right-wing American media about Khashoggi and his ties with Islamist Jihadis. Most of it distorted selective information, although he had at some point a soft spot for some Islamist political movements. Yet he remained a faithful follower of the aggressive Saudi royal policy until the past year. In the 1980s the whole Western world was allied to the Islamist Jihadis in Afghanistan.
Sunday Breaking:
Trump: I talked to King Salman, knows nothing about Khashoggi.
– could’ve been a rogue group, not Saudi gov’t.
– sending Pompeo to Saudi, he can always find an Iran connection.
– Bibi can help with his UN charts.
– I’m not a baby, I’m not a baby.
Monday Morning Khashoggi Spin:
Trump has sent Secretary Mike Pompeo to Saudi Arabia “to investigate” the Khashoggi murder. While Pompeo was in flight, Trump told the media that maybe a rogue group of killers did it.
Top Saudi opposition exile @mujtahidd (whose reports are often reliable) writes what many already suspect including me: Trump sent Pompeo to Riyadh not to investigate. He sent him to finesse the new emerging story about a rogue group that led to the Khashoggi death. That new spin is very likely Fake News agreed by the Trump Administration (Pompeo & Bolton) and the Saudis. One downside of lying publicly too often is that it makes it almost impossible for others to believe you).
Under Trump & MAGA, America is now so respected that even the Saudi minions are threatening it publicly. They expect Trump to publicly support them on the Khashoggi affair: just like their bribed aid recipients in humorless Jordan, Bahrain, Egypt, the town of Ramallah, etc.
He is inclined to do it!
About America being respected: under Obama or Bush or any previous president, the princes would never dare publicly threaten the USA (directly or through their media). Now, thanks to the greed of Trump, they know they can get away with it…. and they will…
They are threatening Trump, assuming he will blink. And he will, given the money dangling in front of him…..
Did they tell me that Saddam Hussein was dead?
Did I tell you “long live the new Saddam”?
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum
The Questionable Wisdom of Friedman: From Beirut to MBS, and Beyond Saddam………
“I never thought I’d live long enough to write this sentence: The most significant reform process underway anywhere in the Middle East today is in Saudi Arabia. Yes, you read that right. Though I came here at the start of Saudi winter, I found the country going through its own Arab Spring, Saudi style. Unlike the other Arab Springs — all of which emerged bottom up and failed miserably, except in Tunisia — this one is led from the top down by the country’s 32-year-old crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman……. only a fool would not root for it.To better understand it I flew to Riyadh to interview the crown prince, known as “M.B.S.,”………..”
The prominent gullible American fool said: “only a fool would not root for it”
“‘Our Hands Can Reach You’: Khashoggi Case Shakes Saudi Dissidents Abroad…… A Saudi women’s rights activist was driving in the United Arab Emirates when she was pulled over by security officers, thrown on a plane to Saudi Arabia and jailed…….. In Canada, when a Saudi student refused to stop making YouTube videos criticizing the kingdom’s rulers, two of his brothers back home were imprisoned…….. So when a prominent Saudi critic, Jamal Khashoggi, disappeared after entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last week, it hardly surprised Saudi dissidents living abroad — until Turkish officials said they believed he had been killed……”
Well, I know the same fool who has been rooting for various Middle East despots and movements, always to be proven wrong at the end. His problem is that he always listens to ‘insiders’, be they in Cairo or Riyadh or Abu Dhabi. That is, when he is not gleaning wisdom from his Arab airport taxi drivers (invariably named Abed, Abduh, Abbadi, Abdul, Abu Lama’a etc…..)
As I have often opined: the West often seems blind to one fact about the Middle East region, Saddam Hussein is always with us. One Saddam is dead, now long live the new Saddam……fully supported and armed by the West, just as the old one .
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum
Trump’s Perpetual War: With Pompeo and Bolton, New Persian Gulf War Cabinet is in Place…..
Perpetual American wars of choice around the world are apparently here to stay. To expand soon.
Donald Trump almost has his most intimidating Cabinet of War in place. Or so he thinks. Or maybe so he wants others, the North Koreans and the Iranians and the Arab absolute kings, princes, and klepotocratic potentates, to think.
Remember: his first National Security adviser Mike Flynn, whose first official statement was that he has “putting Iran on notice“. Mike Flynn himself was “put on notice” and fired within a month, replaced by H R McMaster, a more steady man. Now McMaster has been fired, replaced by a Fox News windbag. John Bolton is a dangerous windbag. So dangerous that a Republican Senate committee refused to vote him as ambassador to the UN under George W Bush. He was appointed during recess for one year.
Between the nomination of Mike Pompeo for Secretary of State and John Bolton, one Iranian pundit tweeted “WE Are All Going to Die!” Two partisan allies and son-in-law Kushner (a potential stooge of Persian Gulf repressive princes and potentates) steering a naive blustering president towards another American war of choice in the Middle East.
Perpetual war is here to stay. A new Muslim war of aggression against Iran: America breaking an international agreement and looking for an excuse to attack another Muslim country. A Saudi-American sectarian war in the Persian Gulf that America can’t win in the long term. America can’t afford it either, which might explain the visit of the Saudi Crown Prince and the welcome he got for spreading his oil money. Trump and son-in-law probably think this prince of darkness can make a new war affordable.
US Middle East policy to be determined by John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and New York slumlord arriviste Jared Kushner (rumors are strong that the Saudis and some Emiratis may have made financial promises to Kushner and family).
Imagine this: Bolton is also widely seen as an anti-Muslim bigot who reportedly allegedly cooperated with Quasi-Nazi Robert Spencer and a famous New York female anti-Muslim blogger (someone called her activities ‘the downside of a generous divorce settlement’). Now he will be in charge of US foreign policy. On the fringe no more.
Of course Donald Trump may think he is smarter than Pompeo and Bolton, smarter that all the naysaying pundits, even smarter than me! He may think he is now credibly blackmailing both Iran and North Korea. Maybe even China! That these two added warmongers, Pompeo and Bolton, will make those countries quake with fear, cry uncle.
There are others, top American generals who have actually fought wars and are truly patriotic, who are opposed. General Votel of the Central Command, and almost certainly Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, and other leading generals. They want to keep the Iran Nuclear Deal, since the Iranians and the rest of the world are abiding by it. With the exception of the plotters: absolute Saudi princes and a couple of other kleptocratic oligarchies in the Persian Gulf region who are trying to buy themselves a new sectarian war to be waged by American boys and girls as mercenaries.
Then there is the valid theory that a foreign adventure or war is often a useful refuge for scoundrel-leaders during periods of potential domestic political trouble. Human and other costs be damned……
Should be interesting weeks coming……
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum
The First Frustration of Prince Bin Salman: Horrors of a Complex War in Yemen…….
Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, known affectionately and otherwise as MBS, has had a rocky period. But that is to be expected for a young man who finds himself suddenly at the helm of a country, purely by the coincidence of birth.
In fairness, Saudi Arabia and her allies (as well as little Qatar) were well on their way to losing the Northern Tier of the Arab World (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon) when his father Salman became king and started prepping his son to take over. By then it was almost certainly too late to roll back Iranian influence in those three countries.
But King Salman and his son and designated heir thought their first new foreign project, closer to home, would be easy. Piece of cake, as they say. Besides, Yemen is a sort of vulnerable underbelly of the Arabian Peninsula: it could be disastrous if controlled by a hostile power, like Iran. Unfortunately it was a piece of bitter hard Yemeni cake that they tried to swallow in the wrong way. By that time Yemen was engulfed in a complex of multiple domestic and regional wars that included AQAP, ISIS, Southern Secessionists, among others. A war of many fronts.
The Saudis should have known from their own recent experience that the Yemeni cake has always been too bitter and hard for outsiders if mishandled. Late in 2014 the largely autonomous northern Houthi group allied itself to influential former President Ali Abdallah Saleh and swept the corrupt Hadi-Islah regime out of Sanaa and the rest of North Yemen. Soon after that the new Saudi regime took power in Riyadh, with Prince MBS as its Defense Minister and Deputy Crown Prince. The 30-year old prince had the Yemen portfolio. Unfortunately he has proven that he is no Alexander.
The original goal of Saudi intervention was to put Saleh’s hapless but also corrupt successor General Hadi back in power, along with the Muslim Brotherhood oligarchs of the Islah and Al Ahmar clan. Hadi’s legal term had actually expired before then. So they blockaded Yemen, and started a ferocious campaign of air bombardment that has killed thousands of people and ruined the infrastructure of that poorest of Arab states. The Saudi war is also a war waged by the USA (under both Obama and Trump) as well as Britain against Yemen. Western powers not only supplied the weapons and the ammunition, including cluster bombs, they also help with targeting and midair refueling of Saudi/UAE bombers. Several impoverished African countries, including Sudan, were also bribed and recruited in order to provide mercenary fighters.
The futile genocidal war on Yemen has lasted three years so far, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel for the Saudis and their allies. It has been a drain on the Saudi economy, to the tune of many billions of dollars. The lightly armed Houthis have even taken the war back into southern Saudi Arabia, with attacks and occasional incursions into enemy territory. Only a political solution can end the Yemen war, which is actually a complex network of multiple civil and proxy wars.
(I had predicted early on that the deposed Hadi will never return to rule from Sanaa. He is now basically a captive of his hotel suite in Saudi Arabia).
Stay tuned. To be followed…..
THE WAR IN YEMEN: EXACTLY WHOSE SIDE IS ALLAH ON?…..
MIRACLE OF THE IRGC: SHIPPING WEAPONS TO YEMEN THROUGH WESTERN MEDIA………
YEMEN: A GENOCIDAL WAR OF CLASHING FOREIGN MERCENARIES…….
Cheers
Mohammed Haider Ghuloum