Naval base shooting: Trump defends the Saudis
When a Saudi Arabian pilot killed three Americans and wounded eight others at a naval base in Florida, President Trump’s “first instinct” was to “tamp down any suggestion that the Saudi government needed to be held to account,” said David Sanger in The New York Times. Within hours, he announced that King Salman had called with regrets, then added that the king would “take care of the families and loved ones of the victims.” Trump, who has long-standing business ties to the kingdom and exempted it from a travel ban targeting majority-Muslim countries, did not provide any “assurance that the Saudis would aid in the investigation.” Nor did Trump ever use the word “terrorism.”
The Saudi leadership probably was horrified by the shooting, said Jim Hanson in FoxNews.com. Still, with 850 Saudi pilots and soldiers currently being trained by the U.S. military, “we need to take a serious look at the vetting procedures.” In what appears to be the shooter’s Twitter feed, 2nd Lt. Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani had been ranting against the U.S. for months, calling it “a nation of evil” that commits crimes “not only against Muslims but against humanity.” Several other Saudi trainees were reportedly questioned about allegedly videoing Alshamrani’s shooting spree, which ended when he was shot dead. “How did someone with these beliefs make it through screening in Saudi Arabia and here in the U.S.?”
There’s another critical question, said Joel Mathis in TheWeek.com. “Why is the U.S. still so intertwined with Saudi Arabia’s government?” America has been the world’s top oil producer since 2013, and we no longer depend on the Saudis’ oil. As a supposed ally, the Saudis are little better than our enemy Iran: The kingdom imprisons and tortures dissenters, still engages in “second-class treatment of women,” bombs and starves the people of Yemen, and orchestrated the “gruesome assassination” of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi. With Trump, all foreign policy is personal, said Max Boot in The Washington Post. Trump has publicly stated that he has sold the Saudis $50 million worth of real estate. Today, the royal family continues to book hundreds of rooms in his hotels, single-handedly turning one of them profitable. Trump’s “policy is ‘Me First,’ not ‘America First.’” That’s why, with three Americans dead, he acted as if he were “auditioning for the job of press secretary at the Saudi Embassy.”
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