MBS: The Making of An Absolute Police State
CDHR Commentary: Entrusted with all the state’s powers by his ailing father, King Salman, and with the help of and consultations with lucratively paid international institutions, retired experienced regional and global public officials and professionals from all walks of life, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has been forewarned that, due to his age, actions and lack of experience, he would be targeted by well-known and influential senior princes, businessmen, media tycoons and religious authorities. To preempt potentially fatal consequences, MBS began a calculated process of unprecedented deterrent actions; he unbridled masked men to round up people posing real and imaginary threats to his life and his agenda of dominating the country’s domestic and external affairs. To justify his actions and secure public support, MBS cunningly blamed the people he rounded up and housed in a luxurious hotel for bankrupting the country. They were mostly members of his family, privileged business families and media tycoons. They were subjected to mental and physical torment and coerced into paying MBS’s government $100 billion ransom. Those who paid were released from the hotel, put under house arrest, and banned from traveling.
Except for wealthy business families and all members of the large parasitic ruling family, MBS’s actions were praised by most Saudis and potential foreign workers and investors. Throughout the country’s history, citizens, millions of migrant workers, and foreign businessmen in Saudi Arabia have been subjected to extortion by the ruling family and government employees, from top to bottom. Unsurprisingly, MBS’s rooting-out-corruption program is not applicable to him and his ruling faction of the royal family who control the state’s revenues, expenditures, and all government agencies and state institutions. Furthermore, the root causes of corruption remain intact: there is no accountability, transparency, public scrutiny, free press, or freedom of expression. On the contrary, clad in MBS’s consolidation of all state powers and his reform agenda is unprecedented political suppression, ruthless treatment and severe punishment of peaceful human rights, social justice and freedom of expression activists.
Although aimed at attracting investors and creating a domestic consumer market, MBS’s social initiatives are positive, albeit centuries overdue. However, despite being exalted as “Saudi Arabia’s progressive reformer,” MBS has not only proved to be an outright autocrat, but a brazen cruelty-inclined tyrant, under whose watch death sentences and executions have doubled. Saudis who know MBS personally compare his actions to Stalin’s 1937 purge and label him a psychopath and killer. As this and other accounts have highlighted, there has been an escalation of death sentences handed down to peaceful critics of the government’s mishandling of public revenues, of high unemployment and of excessive punishment of citizens for sharing publicly known information on social media.
Despite MBS’s brutal domestic political practices and ruinous regional policies, he is being vigorously pursued by superpowers, specifically the U.S. and China, whom he has strategically played against each other, especially since the U.S. “pivoted toward Asia” under the Obama/Biden Administration. “Pivoting toward Asia” without a strategic plan to ensure stability and protection of American economic interests left a vacuum in the Middle East of which China took advantage and began to play the role the U.S. and western countries have played for centuries. Realizing the fallout of the pivot, the Biden Administration is refocusing its attention on the Middle East, explicitly the oil rich Gulf Arab States, as demonstrated by the Administration’s desperate efforts to coax Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed to form an alliance to stabilize the Middle East and prevent China from controlling vital economic and strategic slices of the region.
Given the cost and potential fallout of the Biden Administration’s strategy, the stained history and mindset of MBS and Netanyahu, their mistrust of and resentment toward Biden, the strategy is not only dead-on-arrival, but if it were to succeed, the region would likely descend into more instability, increased violations of human rights, communal strife and digitalized methods of tracking journalists, pro-democracy, and human rights activists. MBS is demanding security for Saudi Arabia (the ruling family) as well as development of Saudi nuclear ventures and removal of all obstacles and laws against Saudi access to the newest American top-of-the-line military hardware and a state for the Palestinians, none of which will be accepted by Netanyahu’s extremist government.
In view of contemporary global economic and strategic priorities, the U.S. is unlikely to re-engage in the Middle East to the extent it has in the past. The question is, will normalizing relations and reconciling differences between Israel and its neighbors, including Iran, provide peace, stability, and prosperity for their populations and/or the peoples of the region without transformation of their antediluvian ossified anti-democratic social, educational, and political systems, particularly the Saudis’? The answer is no.
Emboldening a tenacious generation of the 21st century’s modern, innovative, creative, and visionary public servants to lead by example, not by the sword, is the key to begin an era of transformational leadership along the lines of the Arab Spring which was torpedoed by the same men the Biden Administration is now courting.
