Joe Biden lets the Saudis get away with murder — for now

The history of the Middle East dates back to ancient times so it requires taking the long view. But there is every reason to expect that the spirit of the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi will live on far longer than those who have tried to smother it — including Saudi Arabia’s chief killer, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Ten years ago last month, much of the Arab world exploded in jubilation over the forced resignation of Egypt’s despised leader Hosni Mubarak. It was the climax of the Arab Spring, which saw the region in revolt against dictatorial regimes — often supported by the U.S. and other western countries — that imposed poverty and corruption on their people for decades.

When Mubarak was ousted, U.S. president Barack Obama praised the courage of the pro-democracy protesters: “In Egypt, it was the moral force of non-violence that bent the arc of history towards justice once more.”

That, of course, was premature. The Arab Spring collapsed, dictatorships throughout the region — including in Egypt — grabbed back power and the “arc of history” in the Middle East bent once more against the interests of justice.

In the short term, that is what happened this past week in the case of Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist and reformer who was killed and dismembered in 2018 in the Saudi embassy in Turkey by a Saudi Arabian hit squad operating at the direction of the country’s Crown Prince.

Although it was widely known how the killing actually happened — after all, there were gruesome audio tapes of the horrific event — the U.S. government under Donald Trump concealed the evidence and pretended that it was a “rogue killing” done without bin Salman’s knowledge.

Joe Biden, while a presidential candidate, vowed he would make the evidence public if he was elected and promised he would make Saudi Arabia “pay the price” for the killing.

This week, he made public a U.S. intelligence report that implicated the man known as MBS, but he held back from imposing any major sanctions against the country, or against the crown prince himself.

While acknowledging that Saudi Arabia is guilty of enormous human-rights violations, the American position is that its relationship with a country that is a giant in oil production, a major U.S. arms customer and a counterbalance to Iran in the Middle East is too important to jeopardize.

If “America is back,” as Biden now claims, this looks very familiar. To many advocates of human rights in the Middle East, this sounds uncomfortably like a version of the loathed Trump policies.

But that’s the immediate response. In the long term, the aftershocks we heard from this week’s developments may turn out to be an earthquake in the modern Middle East history.

Khashoggi’s legacy seems to be growing in the region because, in so many ways, his life symbolized the hunger for free expression that has been long denied. Wadah Khanfar, a former director-general of the Al Jazeera network, was one of Khashoggi’s closest friends. In a passionate essay he wrote in 2019, he suggested that the man’s memory may spark a second Arab Spring: “The spirit of Jamal is now haunting the Arab dictators and shaping this second phase of an Arab uprising.”

Khanfar’s piece is very powerful, and effectively argued.

I know Khanfar well, since he was the one who hired me at Al Jazeera and was my boss. There is no one I have met who is more deeply committed to the development of free and independent journalism in the Middle East.

Khanfar was also a key speaker in an excellent hard-hitting new documentary about Khashoggi, “The Dissident,” directed by Oscar winner Bryan Fogel. Apparently intimidated by the threat of controversy, major streaming companies have avoided it, but it is available on demand in Canada.

Another insightful documentary worth watching about the events leading up to Khashoggi’s killing is “Kingdom of Silence,” directed by Rick Rowley. Also available now in Canada, it is a gripping story not only of Khashoggi’s personal evolution, but also of the fraught U.S./Saudi relationship.

One day, someday, we may find out why Biden decided that his first significant foreign policy move would be to betray a fervent promise he made while campaigning.

In 2019, Biden called Khashoggi’s death “flat-out murder” and vowed to punish senior Saudi leaders in a way that the Trump administration never did: “There’s very little social redeeming value in the present government in Saudi Arabia. They have to be held accountable.”

But that is exactly what the Biden government has chosen not to do, which begs the question: “Why?”

Years from now, his memoirs will try to explain why. But in the meantime, we may already have some sense of what Biden will write.

Barack Obama, in his newly released memoirs, “A Promised Land,” provides genuine insight into the confused and tortured American policy toward Saudi Arabia.

In a tone that sounded a lot like regret, the former president wrote that “only rarely did the United States scold allies like Egypt or Saudi Arabia publicly for their human rights violations … The stakes felt too high to risk rupturing our relationships.” However, when “every so often, the story of a woman’s rights activist being arrested in Riyadh would reach my desk … I’d feel haunted.”

Obama also mentions the high-minded promises he made to the Muslim world in his famous Cairo speech in June 2009, shortly after being elected. In an address that electrified the Arab world, the new Black U.S. president offered a message of peace and partnership based on mutual respect.

I remember that speech. I watched it in amazement with my Al Jazeera colleagues in our newsroom in Doha, Qatar.

I could sense that Obama’s optimism was infectious even among some of America’s most implacable critics in the Arab world. Immediately after the speech, the U.S. government reinforced it by sending some of its most senior officials to try to convince Al Jazeera that this initiative was genuine.

But sadly, it turned out to be a profound disappointment. There was very little followup in terms of policy and programs — and if anything, there was embarrassment in the Middle East that this American initiative had been taken so seriously at the outset.

So, looking ahead beyond this week’s dramatic fallout from the Khashoggi murder, perhaps the best advice — in the same way that Obama’s Cairo speech was a squandered opportunity — is also to dismiss this latest U.S. attempt to salvage its relationship with Saudi dictators.

Instead, I agree with Wadah Khanfar’s analysis that it will ultimately be the spirit of Jamal Khashoggi — rather than the twisted logic of U.S. policy-makers — that may live on in a way that triggers the inevitability of a second Arab Spring.