Whats the real story here KB? There is some sort of geopolitical upheaval going on behind the scenes and this is clearly just a proxy war of sorts. Any idea what kind of political shift and infighting is actually happening?
Palace intrigue. Keep in mind that Saudi Arabia is a lot closer to Keeping Up With The Kardashians than it is to The West Wing. The royal family has total sway, but they have to fight the clerics for control, and there are a bunch of peasants (and foreigners) whose existence depends on their largesse. MBS busted onto the scene hard as a schemer and master manipulator who sees himself as a modern ibn Saud. He's going to modernize Saudi Arabia. He's going to bring the country beyond oil. And he's going to do it the Saudi way, which is through court intrigue, manipulation and nonparliamentary maneuvering. He's proclaimed that Jared Kushner is in his pocket. He knows that Trump likes to take money from the Saudis. And he knows that Turkey has been faltering ever since a half-baked coup attempt got a lot closer to unseating Erdogan than Erdogan thought was possible. Jamal Kashoggi, for his part, was the nephew of Adnan Kashoggi, the world's premiere arms dealer for a generation. He embedded with Saudi jihadis fighting alongside the mujahedin in Afghanistan. His family is legacy, but not royal, but just like the bin Ladens, the Kashoggis have been palace courtiers for generations. And he's been vocal in his disapproval of MBS' maneuverings. Bear in mind: MBS is the kinda guy that can lock up and shake down 500 royals and aristocrats and get away with it. He can bomb Yemen back to the stone age and get away with it. He can fire the oil minister and defense minister and take both of their jobs as his own and get away with it. And frankly he was unprepared for the world to give a shit about a Saudi dissident disappearing in Turkey: Why the outrage, Prince Mohammed asked in English. Government officials and business leaders had turned from lavishing praise on the prince to criticizing him. Two people familiar with the call said Mr. Kushner, along with national security adviser John Bolton, delivered a tough message that Prince Mohammed needed to get to the bottom of Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance fast. Mr. Trump warned of “severe punishment” if the U.S. determined the Saudi government was implicated, and sent U.S. Secretary Mike Pompeo to Riyadh to press the Saudis for answers. The prince’s confusion soon turned into rage. “He was really shocked that there was such a big reaction to it,” said a person close to the royal court. “He feels betrayed by the West. He said he would look elsewhere and he will never forget how people turned against him before evidence was produced.” Fundamentally? The Saudis did this in such a slap-dash fashion because they thought they could. They've discovered they can't. It's going to be an interesting recalibration.On Oct. 10, eight days after Mr. Khashoggi went missing, Prince Mohammed called Jared Kushner, the adviser and son-in-law to President Trump, according to people briefed on the phone conversation.
The question is what changed? By all logic this should have been a non issues especially in comparison to all the other issues you mentioned so why weren't they able to get away with it this time? Is this Turkey hitting back or is more powerful factions hitting back at Saudi? I dont actually think that the world truly gives a shit about Khashoggi so why do they? Someone is mobilizing conventional and social media to strike back MBS and the house of Saud but its unclear to me who or why now?
What changed is he's a Washington Post reporter. The Saudis control the Arabian press. Erdogan controls the Turkish press. But the Washington Post's masthead is "Democracy Dies in Darkness" and no matter how badly the Republicans wish it weren't so, they're a minority party in power and Trump himself is widely viewed in the press as a populist puppet of powerful foreign interests. We make much of the Fourth Estate. How much they matter is up to question but how much they think they matter is not. Really, if the Washington Post had chosen to let this slide we probably wouldn't be talking about it. But since the Washington Post started barking about it, all the other dogs are barking about it and suddenly, the Fourth Estate is acting like a political power. I don't think anything changed. I think MBS is a 33-year-old prince with a demonstrated skill at propaganda and intrigue but no tested skill at diplomacy and "murdering a journalist" is a diplomacy test, not a propaganda or intrigue test. I think MBS saw it as an intrigue test because he wanted to send a message to other dissidents ("you are never beyond our reach") but didn't consider that not all the factors of the equation were under his control. The world has been low-level annoyed at Saudi Arabia for decades and irritated at MBS in particular; bringin' a bonesaw to a marriage fight turned out to be the spark the conflagration needed.
I was thinking this was a Turkish power play. Erdogan is an absolute monarch as well so the fact that they are releasing so much footage and data to the media means his interest are in getting this to blow up as much as possible. The coverage this is getting on social media, reddit, etc makes me think that there are a lot of powerful actors at work spreading the outrage for their own purposes. I agree that its an outrageous story but the fact that its being talked about so much in spite of so much Saudi money looking to make it go away makes me wonder if there is some other powerful actor moving behind the curtain. I'm surprised you attribute this to an independent move by the WaPost and the 4th estate. I could see that being the spark, but someone else has provided the fuel and keeps pouring more onto the fire.
I think where we disagree is in how much power Turkey has to play with. They spent half the cold war on the outs with Europe over Cyprus. They're currently trying to figure out if they wanna sidle up to the US or Russia. Erdogan isn't an "absolute monarch" - he's a nominally elected official who has rolled back democracy every chance he gets but he doesn't get to issue edicts the way the Saudis do. As far as Saudi Arabia, they've belonged a lot more to the Republicans than the Democrats (especially since Carter let the Shah in back in '79). Bush-era Saudi Arabia might as well have been a Republican protectorate. Democrats made much of the fact that 15 of 19 9-11 hijackers were Saudi and Michael Moore pointed out in Fahrenheit 911 that the only guys in the sky on September 7 were the bin Laden family and their coterie. As such the Saudis are an excellent bete noire for Democratic foreign policy expression. The Turks basically had to own up to bugging the Saudi embassy, which everybody pretty much knew they did. By letting things trickle out the way they have people are pretty much okay with the Turks bugging embassies. It took 'em a while to get there tho.