Saudi crown prince pushes for liberalization of his society

Everyone with an curiosity in the Middle East will welcome this research by Karen Elliott House of a man who is sure to play a important function in the area’s future. 

Between the second Karen Elliott House completed the textual content of her e book The Man Who Would Be King and its forthcoming publication on July 8, occasions of historic proportions have taken place.

In the month before the e book’s look, the long-established order of the Middle East was stood on its head. It was US President Donald Trump’s declared intention, during his second presidential marketing campaign and shortly after assuming workplace, to withdraw the United States from international entanglements. However, on June 22, he dispatched a fleet of stealth bombers into Iran and destroyed its three main nuclear services.

What occurred has modified the geopolitical facet of the Middle East. It does not, however, detract at all from House’s in-depth, insightful, and fascinating account of the life, achievements, and future plans of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince and digital chief, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).

A glance at the crown prince of Saudi Arabia

In 2019, House reminds her readers, Iran bombed Saudi oil fields; and Trump, in his first time period as president, though intently aligned with the kingdom, did nothing in retaliation.

Saudi leaders took that, she writes, “as evidence that Washington is no longer a reliable protector of the kingdom…The US ignoring a direct attack by Iran on the kingdom was… shocking.” Which explains why House writes, elsewhere in the quantity: “The kingdom’s traditional protector, the United States, is steadily losing interest and influence in the region.”

That view certainly wants modifying in gentle of current occasions.

In compiling this work, House has drawn on a long time of personal involvement with Saudi Arabia and its main personalities – and MBS in explicit.

That she likes him and admires his achievement in turning his nation from a strict, repressive, Islamic theocracy into a trendy, secular-oriented (though still Islam-rooted) nation is evident. That, however, has not deterred her from presenting her readers with other, less enticing, features of his persona.

She particulars, for instance, how he ruthlessly eradicated the inner opposition to his rise to energy, including what has become identified as the Ritz-Carlton lockup when he rounded up members of the royal household and stored them under armed guard – albeit in a luxurious resort – until they agreed to relinquish their problem to his authority. What he threatened them with has never been revealed.

“MBS achieved at least two goals with the Ritz lockup,” writes House.

“He disgraced and disposed of the late King Abdullah’s sons as potential challengers to his power. One paid the government a reported $1 billion of alleged ill-gotten money and was forced to resign his powerful post as head of the national guard, giving MBS control of all the kingdom’s armed forces. Another of King Abdullah’s sons remains in prison to this day. But the Ritz-Carlton lockup was much more than a family affair. It was a terrifying signal to elite Saudis that the way of doing business in the kingdom was changing.”

House gives a vivid distinction of life in the kingdom at present in contrast with how it was when MBS was growing up.

Yet against his in depth liberalization of Saudi society in normal, and in explicit that of ladies within that society, the horrific homicide of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi still casts a shadow.

House was acquainted with Khashoggi, whom she had interviewed many instances. He had began by supporting the younger MBS on his rise to energy but later turned more and more essential about the prince’s elimination of all opposition, when – as House places it: “No longer were powerful uncles alive to curb MBS, as they had with previous kings’ empowered sons.”

Khashoggi left Saudi Arabia for the US, where his articles in The Washington Post grew ever more essential of MBS and, House writes, “led to his shocking death in October 2018 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Khashoggi’s body was sawn into pieces and hauled out in suitcases. That brutal murder was sensational news worldwide. Overnight, MBS, the Saudi savior, was now widely viewed as a savage. Suddenly, MBS stood for ‘Mr. Bone Saw’ to his critics.”

HOUSE IS satisfied, and presents a very convincing case, that MBS never ordered Khashoggi’s assassination, that his homicide was in truth an abduction attempt that went incorrect. All the (circumstantial) evidence factors to an operation aimed at seizing Khashoggi and flying him back to Saudi Arabia. What MBS really deliberate to do with him, once he had been returned, is anyone’s guess.

Born in 1947, Karen Elliott House is an American journalist and former managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. Her journalism awards embrace a Pulitzer Prize for worldwide reporting in regard to protection of the Middle East.

Her e book On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines – and Future was printed in 2012.

The meticulous analysis that went into The Man Who Would Be King is apparent from the 21 pages of detailed notes that she appends to it. Every main assertion the creator makes is offered with its source and can be checked by the assiduous reader. In addition, 13 pages of references help her readers access each side of her investigation into MBS’s life, profession, and plans.

For many in Israel who are in Saudi Arabia and its dynamic younger chief, the most intriguing facet of current years has been the hypothesis about whether the kingdom could be the next Arab state to normalize relations with the Jewish state and be part of the Abraham Accords. House, of course, offers in element with the historical past of Saudi-Israel relations, and she asserts that MBS’s imaginative and prescient is “for his kingdom’s economic and security future tied to cooperation with Israel.”

In view of that, it is rather odd that the time period “Abraham Accords” never seems in the e book and is therefore absent from the index.

House describes how MBS’s imaginative and prescient of Saudi-Israeli cooperation was blown off beam by Hamas’s bloodbath in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and even more so by the death and destruction within Gaza following Israel’s efforts to defeat Hamas.

She writes: “Saudi officials say the Crown Prince would be putting his life at risk were he to recognize Israel when his own young population and that of other Arab states is deeply incensed by images on social media of Israeli devastation and death in Gaza.”

The ceasefire in the 12-day Israel-Iran struggle is another current occasion that could put a completely different gloss on earlier attitudes and opinions.

The kingdom of Saudi Arabia is less than 100 years outdated. It was only in 1932 that Abdul Aziz ibn Saud emerged from many years of political and army battle against the Ottoman Empire and other native chieftains and was ready to identify the space he had conquered “Saudi Arabia” and proclaim himself its monarch.

It was likely with an eye to the eventual centenary celebrations of the monarchy and the kingdom that in April 2016, MBS launched Saudi Vision 2030, an formidable plan to revitalize the nation state.

If it succeeds, by 2032 Saudi Arabia will have been reworked from digital whole dependence on oil revenues into a trendy, liberalized, thriving society, its prosperity underpinned by flourishing industrial, financial, financial, and business sectors.

House, telling us of MBS’s long fascination with futuristic video video games, sees his Vision 2030 as “full of his grandiose, videogame futurisms. At the top of a long list,” she writes, “is Neom, a $500 billion development nearly the size of Belgium… It will feature an AI-driven linear city, “the Line,” a high-rise mirrored construction operating 110 miles long and standing 1,600 ft high – taller than the Empire State Building. The metropolis will have no vehicles and no carbon emissions, [ and be] powered totally by renewable vitality. Residents will journey by high-speed trains and flying taxis.”

However, there have been setbacks along the method, and some of the more formidable schemes in Vision 2030, including Neom, have had to be cut back.

House reserves judgment: “Whether the kingdom successfully transitions from Vision 2030’s big push to a sustained long push by truly diversifying sources of public revenue across oil, mining, sales tax, tourism, and financial income on both domestic and foreign assets remains to be seen.”

The Man Who Would Be King is a extremely readable evaluation by an professional – who is also a top-flight journalist – of one of the most colourful and characterful personalities on at present’s political scene. She presents him “warts and all,” as Oliver Cromwell is reputed to have remarked – and her account is all the more entertaining because of it.

MBS is still a younger man – he celebrates his fortieth birthday on August 31. His story is far from over. Everyone with an curiosity in the Middle East will welcome this research by Karen Elliott House of a man who is sure to play a important function in the area’s future. 

The author is the Middle East correspondent for Eurasia Review. His newest e book is Trump and the Holy Land: 2016-2020. Follow him at www.a-mid-east-journal.blogspot.com.

• THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING: MOHAMMED BIN SALMAN AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF SAUDI ARABIA