I spent three years as Defense and Army Attaché in the US embassy in Saudi Arabia. Then eight years heading US Defense Intelligence for the Middle East. After I left government, I went back many times on private business. I’ve been in just about every Islamic country—Algeria’s the only one I missed. And I can tell you without hesitation: Saudi Arabia stands alone. Not for good reasons.
The country looks good. I’ll give them that. The infrastructure is modern, gleaming, built to impress. The medical facilities are first rate, though nearly all are run by expats because the Saudis haven’t bothered to learn how to run them themselves. If you fly into Riyadh or Jeddah, you see glass towers and highways and all the trappings of a modern state.
Then you get out of the car and feel it. The atmosphere. The weight of oppression generated by a clerically dominated regime where a parasitic royal family exercises ruthless, unrestrained power on behalf of a theocracy. The Wahhabi sect. The Hanbali school of Sharia. A variety of Islam so uncompromisingly rigid that internal reform is not just unlikely—it’s structurally impossible.
When I was there, the Saudis I dealt with delighted in taking me to the weekly public executions. They’d pressure me to go, watch my face, see if I’d flinch. They were looking for weakness.
The drill was always the same. They’d march some condemned African or South Asian out into the square in front of the central mosque. An African slave—always a slave, always African—would be standing there with a sword. The condemned would kneel. The sword would swing. The head would roll. Sometimes it took more than one swing. The crowd would watch, silent or murmuring, and then go back to their shopping.
On other days, a woman judged an adulteress would be carried into the square sewn into a bag. They’d deposit her on the ground and stone her to death with rocks taken from a conveniently located pile nearby. The bag was so the rocks would break bones before they hit flesh. More humane, supposedly.
This is not the distant past. This is now. This is the twenty-first century. This is America’s ally.
Biden says he’s going to reassess ties. He released the intelligence report on Khashoggi’s murder, fulfilling a campaign promise. The report says what everyone already knew: the crown prince approved the operation that killed and dismembered a journalist in a consulate. The exiled opposition wants justice, wants sanctions, wants the murderer-in-chief held accountable.
But Biden is also trying to sideline Prince Mohammed without breaking off the relationship entirely. Because Saudi Arabia is one of America’s core relationships in the Middle East. Because oil. Because bases. Because Iran. Because the whole rotten edifice rests on a bargain we made decades ago and can’t figure out how to unmake.
Here’s the truth: they need us a hell of a lot more than we need them.
Without American weapons, without American protection, without the American umbrella that keeps Iran from doing what Iran would like to do, the Saudi regime would not last five years. The royal family knows this. The clerics know this. Everyone knows this.
And yet we keep propping them up. We keep sending arms. We keep looking away from the executions, the slavery, the oppression, the medieval barbarism that defines their system. We keep telling ourselves that stability matters more than decency, that alliances require compromise, that the alternative would be worse.
Maybe. But I’ve watched a slave swing a sword through a man’s neck while Saudi officials watched me watch. I’ve seen the bag. I’ve seen the rocks. I’ve breathed that air of absolute tyranny, felt the weight of it pressing down on everyone who lives there, including the ones who pretend they’re free.
We should demand major reforms. We should tell them plainly: this stops, or we stop. We should mean it.
They need us more than we need them. It’s time we acted like it.
