Oct. 12, 2018 - Steve Pieczenik
04:59
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hi, Dr. | |
| Bachchanik. | |
| Today I want to talk about two big egos, Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia and President Erdogan of Turkey. | |
| I would like to thank the New York Times of today for suggesting that scenario and going into some detail. | |
| From my point of view, I just want to talk a little bit about my background that would allow me to do this type of analysis and afford the CIA and other intelligence organizations the skills in order to do profiles of two personalities like these two egos. | |
| Number one, the field that I specialized in, politics, personality, political psychology, was created by a gentleman by the name of Harold Laswell. | |
| He wrote a book called Politics and Psychopathology, 1929, which really was about the input of politics in people who practice politics. | |
| Psychology and the reverse. | |
| The input of psychology and people who were politicians. | |
| I believe he spent some time at St. | |
| Elizabeth's observing people. | |
| He was not incarcerated there. | |
| But be it as it may, the OSS took it over and then the CIA had a major profile section which was led by One of my colleagues who also trained at Harvard, and it was quite good. | |
| At this point, I really don't know where the profile sections are among the 16 different intelligence units, but I would hope there is one. | |
| In any case, let's look at the two personalities. | |
| We've talked about Mohammed bin Salman as an impetuous, young, irresponsible, corrupt leader of Saudi Arabia who aggrandized power very quickly and oversaw the national military, the National Guard, and the Interior Ministry. | |
| At the same time, he terrorized hundreds, if not thousands, of his own business people as well as part of his family in order to get to power. | |
| Erdogan, however, is the reverse. | |
| He came up through power, through terrorizing people, corruption, and he spent 20 to 30 years doing this, starting off as the mayor of Istanbul and eventually incarcerating journalists and... | |
| And military generals who are against him. | |
| So really, what is the difference? | |
| In effect, we have a younger version of Erdogan, or we have an older version of Mohammed bin Salman. | |
| In my point of view, I think there is a major difference. | |
| And the difference is the following. | |
| Erdogan doesn't want to please anyone. | |
| He is who he is. | |
| Turkey has a long-standing history as a nation-state. | |
| It was part of the Ottoman Empire, which Saudi Arabia was part of. | |
| If you remember Lawrence of Arabia in that film, you see the breakout of Saudi Arabia. | |
| In effect, Erdogan has created an economy which unfortunately has 200 billion in debt. | |
| And the opposite, Salman has gone out of his way to be liked by the movie people in Hollywood, by the investment bankers on Wall Street, and by the high-tech leaders like Bill Gates and Zuckerberg here in the United States. | |
| So that he can plan for a future where there will be no more oil in Saudi Arabia. | |
| What he intends to do, quite frankly, I think is impossible, but his plan is to IPO Saudi Arabia and making it a $2 trillion initial public offering. | |
| Of course, all of our bankers on Wall Street, J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, are all interested in underwriting this IPO. | |
| So his concern is to look moderate, it's to be anti-Islamist, and Erdogan's concern is to be pro-Muslim, pro-Muslim brotherhood, and basically will be a recourse or a sanctuary for any Arab who has defected from Saudi and basically will be a recourse or a sanctuary for any | |
| As a matter of fact, Khosigi was a major supporter of the intelligence network in Saudi Arabia before he was killed in Turkey, and at the same time, he was a mild critic of Ben Salman. | |
| So why did bin Salman kill him? | |
| The answer isn't because he was a dissident. | |
| The answer really lay in the fact that bin Salman was competing with Khosiji who was setting up his own think tank in the United States and wanted to create his own narrative About Saudi Arabia and the faults within Saudi Arabia and the machinations of bin Salman. | |
| Bin Salman cannot tolerate it. | |
| He's too young, too egotistical, and too immature. | |
| In turn, bin Salman went to Turkey. | |
| He was killed in the Saudi Arabian consulate and was dismembered. | |
| The evidence for that is in the Apple Watch. | |
| There's an old saying by Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher, who said, Beware of the monsters you kill, because you too will become that monster. |
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