Intelligence is not to be confused with intelligence, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan once noted. But when senators of both parties come out of a CIA briefing and none of them have doubts about what they've just heard, then it's probably safe to bank on America's spooks.
No telling what was in the briefing. Or what tapes were played or photographs shown. But senators told the press they were convinced that the crown prince of Saudi Arabia was involved in the killing of a Washington Post journalist and legal American resident. And, as a former president celebrated this week once said, this aggression will not stand.
The White House begs to differ. But its argument seems to be: Who ya gonna believe? Us or your lying eyes?
Call this White House non-traditional, inasmuch as the president goes with his gut, whatever that means, and doesn't necessarily believe what his experts tell him. On many subjects. The intelligence pointing out that Prince Mohammed bin Salman was behind plans to kill and dismember Jamal Khashoggi was just the latest uncertainty in Trumpland. After the CIA briefing, even senators in the president's party were anything but uncertain.
"There is not a smoking gun," said Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. "There's a smoking saw."
The papers report that an operation such as the one that killed Mr. Khashoggi--involving the Saudi Arabian consulate in Turkey, a Saudi hit team, and a top doctor of forensics from Saudi Arabia brought in to do the dismemberment--is pretty good circumstantial evidence. But when you start finding communications between the Saudi prince and the leader of the hit team during the assassination, you're getting close to collusion.
So . . . Will there be a price to pay? According to United States senators, there better be.
"You can't chop up a guy in a consulate, particularly who's an American resident, who is an opinion journalist for The Washington Post, and expect us to do nothing about it," fumed Lindsey Graham.
"Let me put it this way," said Sen. Bob Corker. "If the crown prince went in front of a jury, he would be convicted in 30 minutes."
Democrats are saying similar things. Who says bipartisanship is dead?
President Trump, for his part, is for once is acting presidential. For there is another tradition among American presidents: excusing any and all sins, crisis after duplicitous crisis, having to do with Saudi Arabia. Maybe it's a presidential habit. Or maybe there's a checklist in the Oval Office. More likely, it has to do with the Saudi Arabian checkbook.
Since at least World War II, American and Saudi leaders have found nice things to say about each other. The interests of both depended on it. Even though Saudi and American values are about as similar as the geographies of both countries.
President Trump says the economic relationship with Saudi Arabia is too important to throw away just because some meddlesome journalist got hacked up. "We may never know the facts," he said, noting that His Beneficent Majesty Mohammed bin Salman, from whom all good things flow--beheadings, mutilations, the occasional death sentence carried out in another country--might have known about the killing. "And maybe he didn't."
It'd be more advisable to put more trust in what the senators saw and heard. To paraphrase the always paraphrasable George Schultz, when the CIA shows something, it's shown.
Saudi Arabia and United States have been great allies for many years. It has worked well. But when any leader of one of the predominant countries of the world decides to kill a journalist/critic on foreign soil, you have to wonder: How powerful is he? Or how powerful does he think himself to be? And what's next?
Americans need to remember what happens when the world looks the other way as a ruthless, amoral national leader exerts power like this. The world should condemn the Saudi leader, and the Saudis need to find a new national leader. Or suffer the consequences.
Editorial on 12/09/2018