Should we punish the Saudis or not over the killing of Khashoggi? Is this really the only choice being offered? That is what the mainstream media and Washington politicos and pundits would have us believe. As usual they are wrong. In this special Liberty Report we lay out how a real "America First" foreign policy would react to Saudi actions.
Should we punish the Saudis or not over the killing of Khashoggi? Is this really the only choice being offered? That is what the mainstream media and Washington politicos and pundits would have us believe. As usual they are wrong. In this special Liberty Report we lay out how a real "America First" foreign policy would react to Saudi actions.
Should we punish the Saudis or not over the killing of Khashoggi? Is this really the only choice being offered? That is what the mainstream media and Washington politicos and pundits would have us believe. As usual they are wrong. In this special Liberty Report we lay out how a real "America First" foreign policy would react to Saudi actions.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning into this special Liberty Report.
Yesterday, the President issued a very interesting press release dealing with the killing of Khashoggi.
And it raises as many questions as it answers.
But the whole issue that I see coming out of this press release, and there were multiple points that the president made, and that is that why are we so much involved there?
And how are we going to blame somebody?
And how are we going to punish the Saudis?
It seems like the only thing going on in Washington right now is what is the proper punishment, you know, for the Saudis for committing murder against one of these people that were considered a dissident.
And the question should be, why are we involved in this?
Murder's bad.
It's a horrible thing.
But now it is being discussed here by the members of Congress and other people.
And now the president, and there's a bit of disagreement.
The most significant disagreement, Daniel, that I find is the report of the CIA saying, oh, well, you know, the administration of Saudi Arabia knew about it and are responsible for it.
And yet the big issue now is why is the president still dealing with them?
That is a reasonably good question.
But of course, I think our answer, Daniel, is probably going to be a little bit different than the arguments that are going on in Washington right now.
Yeah, absolutely.
As usual, everyone is taking their appointed positions and staking their appointed points.
But the CIA issue probably is the first one to deal with because it's fascinating.
But I think the one important thing to remember is that the reports that the CIA had found that the Saudi, that the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was responsible for the murder of Khashoggi, that came by as a leak, a CIA leak to the media.
And I think whenever you think about leaks, Dr. Paul, you have to wonder what is the motivation, what would motivate someone close to the CIA investigation to leak it to the media?
You know, and we can speculate, and we speculate a little bit before the show, but might it be something about someone with a beef against the president?
We know that there are certainly elements of the CIA that do not like President Trump.
Could that be part of it?
Could it be something else?
It's hard to know, but I think the leak aspect is key.
Yeah, I think what we're talking about here is the procedures and what's going on and what the position should be.
But the theme of that press release was so glaringly anti-Iran.
It was blistering.
Not that we are surprised that that happens.
It happens all the time and the president's never liked them.
But to have this list of particulars on why Iran is much better than anybody ever dreamed, and it's their fault too.
So it's almost, yes, we like Saudi Arabia.
They may have been involved.
Even I think the press release says it's possible, but they are such good friends.
And then the justifications that Trump uses, very, very annoying.
It's all commercialism.
It has nothing to do with the rule of law or national security.
He says it's for security, national security, and safety of America.
But, you know, that's a stretch to think that we're doing this for the national security when he does the listing.
It's about oil.
It's about military sales.
It's about Israel.
It's about economic benefits and on and on and why Iran is so bad.
And when they list that, well, they're all over the place.
They're around the world.
I thought I might even be talking about our foreign policy.
But Iran is in, you know, they're constantly at war with Saudi Arabia.
Hezbollah in Lebanon.
He killed, killed, and killed, who killed many of his own people.
And the Iranians have killed many Americans as well.
And the other one that's back again, and we've heard it so often, is Israel or Iran is a chief sponsor of terrorism.
So it's almost just used to just further bash and set the stage for this constantly looking for a way to go to war against Iran.
I consider the statement a very dangerous statement.
How can you ever talk to the Iranians?
But I don't think they want to.
I mean, we were talking to them, but the treaty and the agreement, the nuclear agreement that we had with them, that was a good way to talk to them, but that's been blown out the door.
And, you know, so this is a lot of regression as far as I'm concerned from the last couple years because I thought we were making a little bit of progress.
Well, the statement itself from the president is absolutely delusional, as you say, Dr. Paul.
I mean, from the very beginning, this is the statement about the Saudi government's involvement in killing a Saudi journalist, yet the first country mentioned is Iran.
So that lets you know what's going on here.
But you're right, it's absolutely delusional.
It's all Iran's fault that the Saudis decided to kill a journalist.
And everything else is, I mean, even if I wonder if anyone proofread the piece or whether they think we're that stupid, because he talks about propping up dictator Bashar Assad in Syria, who has killed millions of his own citizens.
Well, that's objectively not true.
There have been about a half a million people killed in the entirety of the war, including predominantly military fighters on both sides.
And in fact, as we know, Dr. Paul, we've done this on many shows.
When Assad retakes a place like Aleppo, the killing miraculously stops.
When Al-Qaeda is kicked out of places, the killing stops.
So if what he's saying is true, then why is Aleppo not completely devoid of people?
In fact, they're rebuilding it.
So the whole statement on Iran is just an absolute lie.
Yeah, and you know, the debate seems to be with the politicians in Washington is how are we going to punish them?
Some would punish them in a different way, but I don't hear too many say, well, you know what?
This indicates that they're bad partners.
This means that we ought to immediately stop selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, that we immediately should remove our military assistance to the Saudis in the war against Yemen.
But that is not the case.
And the last thing we're going to hear from any at Washington, except a few of our friends in Washington, is this is a consequence.
It's a predictable consequence of the overall foreign policy of interventionism, where we're supposed to know every answer on every problem and dealing with every murder that ever has occurred.
And that's really the fallacy.
And then we end up with these debates, people walking this tight wire.
Well, I got to be tough, but I can't be too tough because if we do that, we might not sell enough weapons and Israel might not like it.
So they back and forth instead of saying, how about a clean break once in a while?
That probably would solve a lot of our problems.
Yeah, and you know, there's plenty of hypocrisy in Washington about the president's statement.
As you point out, they just want to punish Saudi Arabia.
But if you look at some of these representatives like Ted Liu and the other ones, they are just as anti-Iran as he is.
They're just taking this position because they want to hurt him.
They're on record voting for sanctions against Iran.
But, you know, I think there's a senator from Kentucky who struck a couple of good notes.
And I think, you know, Senator Paul has been pretty careful about not getting, you know, for the sake of being on Trump's bad side, being on the bad side.
So I think it gives him a little bit more credibility when he is critical.
And he has gotten a little bit of play for his criticism of Trump's statement.
And I think he made a couple of good points.
In fact, this quote stood out to me from Senator Paul yesterday after the issuance of the statement.
He said, the problem is that the president's instincts on these things are often good, but he's surrounded by people from the foreign policy swamp.
And Bolton is the king of the swamp.
So it does make you, I think you hit that one right.
Yeah.
You know, one other point that Trump made in there I found interesting, but, you know, very inconsistent with trying to solve the problem.
But he made a point which, you know, has some merit to it.
He says, why are you people getting so excited?
He said that the Chinese, they're pretty tough on their dissonance, and they aren't civil libertarians, and we don't get too excited about that, which is true.
But politically, this one required it because it was so public.
But once again, the fact that the Chinese do it and they get away with it doesn't mean that, oh, that justifies it then.
So China does it, so why doesn't Saudi Arabia do it?
It's no big deal.
I think that was certainly not a very good explanation of our foreign policy.
Yeah, and let's not forget that it was President Obama who used drones against American citizens on at least three occasions.
And also we remember a little thing called Abu Ghraib and other things.
So and Guantanamo, so our record is certainly not clean on that either.
The other absurd thing that Trump said in this statement is that, oh, the Saudis would love to leave Yemen if they just could, but if the Iranians would just leave, the Saudis would be out of there tomorrow.
What a joke.
First of all, the Iranians aren't there.
And second of all, the Saudis had committed unprovoked aggression and they continue to commit aggression against civilians there.
And he also added to that was the Saudis will feed them and send them food.
But right now, their whole deliberate policy is blockades and keeping the food out and millions, I don't know, millions, but there's a lot, hundreds of thousands of people.
They consider this one of the worst starvation episodes in the history of war.
I mean, it is a lot of purposely starving people to death.
So it is a real mess.
I think, Daniel, generally speaking, there's a setback, if anything else, because why I see this as a setback is there's still a lot of people who say that the policies are changing and the deep state is being attacked and they're not in charge anymore.
And when you look at CIA reports and not knowing who can send what and Trump doing things with, and you mentioned the name already, Bolton, John Bolton there, and Pompeo and these people, they're really an hassle, even among the head of the CIA.
These are people that, you know, they're part of the deep state.
They're part of the problem that we had hoped would disappear.
But it doesn't look like that's going to happen.
No, and in fact, you know, I just happened upon a name yesterday that I remember from when you were on the Hill.
And this is, we talk about this sometimes too, Dr. Paul, is the second tier people, not necessarily the Pompeos and the Boltons, but the second tier appointees really are the ones that make things happen.
And I was actually shocked to see one of the assistant secretaries of state, and I'm going to write about it, so I won't mention the name now, but she's someone you would remember or remember as a senior staffer on the Foreign Affairs Committee, who was one of the hardest neocons you can imagine.
So these are the people that have wormed their way into these positions, and they're the ones that are driving the policy.
Second Tier Power Players00:01:52
Okay, yes, I think that's absolutely the case.
Want to close this out, but Daniel, if you wanted to add something right now to conclude your assessment of this press release, go ahead and do that.
Sure, and I'd actually close by just quoting from my good friend George Samuelli, who was a very, very astute observer, works for a think tank in London.
But he tweeted out yesterday: it's interesting that none of the people fulminating about Trump's weak response to Saudi Arabia suggest the obvious strategy: a change of U.S. foreign policy to make nice with Iran.
It's what statesmen would do.
It'll bring about a change in Riyadh a lot faster than threats of sanctions would.
I think that's probably a pretty interesting idea.
Yeah, that's for sure.
Well, I want to go ahead and close by just mentioning that the term used in this release and is used frequently by the administration.
That is America first.
We care about America.
We're going to protect America.
It's American everything.
And that's the way it's been with both parties.
Always national security.
You already pointed out that Obama was pretty atrocious too with the civil liberties of Americans.
And if anything, who is first are the crony capitalists.
The crony capitalists are first.
And the other policy is, and that is connected to anti-Iranian policies.
And that is, we have to have a lot of allies and sell a lot of weapons.
And we have to take care of all the economic interests here.
We have to protect the price of oil and the military sales.
And we have to stay in the coalition against Iran.
And that is not, to me, America first.
That's crony capitalism first.
I would like to think America first meant protecting the liberties of all American citizens.