On Saturday, May 20th, U.S. President Donald Trump and the Saud family inked an all-time record-high $350 billion ten-year arms-deal that not only will cement-in the Saud family’s position as the world’s largest foreign purchasers of U.S.-produced weaponry, but will make the Saud family, and America’s ruling families, become, in effect, one aristocracy over both nations, because neither side will be able to violate the will of the other. As the years roll on, their mutual dependency will deepen, each and every year.
Sixteen years after the Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud (who was nicknamed “Bandar Bush” for his intimacy with the Bush family) served in Washington as Saudi Arabia’s U.S. Ambassador and he and his wife personally paid tens of thousands of dollars to the Sauds’ minders who paid for the apartments and for the pilot-training of 9/11 jihadists, and the U.S. government hid this fact from the U.S. public for fifteen years until it was made public but suppressed by the U.S. press so that Americans still don’t know about it, the U.S. and Saudi aristocracies are now becoming bound together even more strongly than before, because of this record-shattering deal that Trump’s team negotiated with the Sauds.
The U.S. government officially blames Iran for the 9/11 attacks and has fined Iran $10.5 billion for those attacks. The Sauds hate Iran and claim that Iran poses an “existential threat” to them. These new weapons will, the Sauds claim, “protect” them from Iran. Right after Trump won the 2016 election, he staffed the top level of his incoming Administration with people who consider Iran to be the main source of terrorism. In a 5 February 2017 Super Bowl television interview, Trump was asked what his policies would be regarding Iran, and he answered (video here, transcript here): “They have total disregard for our country. They are the number one terrorist state.” But he provided no specifics. This ‘defense’ deal is a big specific part of the answer, to that question. The U.S. will now be even more tightly allied with the Sauds (the world’s wealthiest family) than was previously the case
According to a report in the New York Times on May 18th, President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner participated importantly in these negotiations, when he spoke by phone with the CEO of the biggest American weapons-maker, Lockheed Martin, to request her to discount a crucial radar-system, so that the deal could be accepted by Saudi Prince Muhammed bin Salman al-Saud, and she said yes, which was necessary in order for the entire $350 billion package to be accepted. Unreported, however, about this matter, was whether any concession was made by the Trump Administration to Lockheed Martin, in order to be able to win from them this crucial discount. Whether any such verbal commitments were made, might never become publicly known, but this is the way that deals are made.
The intensifying U.S.-jihadist alliance will be bad news for the governments that have been fighting consistently against jihadists (who are supported by the Sauds), such as Russia in Chechnya and Syria. The Saudi regime will now be able to stand behind the U.S.-backed Al-Qaeda-led forces in Syria that are fighting to overthrow and replace Syria’s existing government, which is backed by Russia.
As I had headlined on May 16th about this gargantuan trade-deal that had already been negotiated but was to be withheld from official announcement until President Trump would meet with Prince Salman on May 20th to sign it, “Trump’s Plan Finally Becomes Clear”, and this plan really is the center-piece for fulfilling Trump’s campaign-promise to restore American manufacturing. Thousands of new American workers will need to be hired in order to make the weapons that will be used to further destroy Syria, Yemen, and other countries where the public resist becoming ruled by fundamentalist Sunnis and Sharia law, such as the Saud family prefers. Russian Television (RT) has reported extensively about this, and on May 19th even reported bombings by the Sauds’ regime against a Shia town inside Saudi Arabia itself, headlining “‘You might get shot any time’: Saudi forces raid Shia town as Riyadh welcomes Trump”. Video was shown there of buildings that had been wrecked by the Sauds’ bombings and mortars. ‘News’media in U.S. and allied countries are not reporting anything of this. The Washington Post (in line with U.S. ’news’media generally) says that Russian Television is not to be trusted because RT provides ‘fake news’. As regards those bombings, perhaps the U.S. government’s view is that no news is good news. Reporting on this would certainly not be good for business — not in the United States, anyway.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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