Congress Is Forcing a Confrontation With Saudi Arabia
On October 2, Jamal Khashoggi, a well-known critic of the government of Saudi Arabia, walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain paperwork he needed to get married. He never walked out. Since then, Washington’s foreign-policy establishment has begun turning against Mohammed bin Salman, the brash, ambitious crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Within days, Turkish officials details of Khashoggi’s alleged grisly murder by a team of 15 Saudi operatives. , where Khashoggi was a columnist, that U.S. intelligence agencies had collected intercepts of Saudi officials discussing a plan, approved by bin Salman, to lure the journalist back to the kingdom from his home in Virginia and detain him. As the international outcry grew, the Trump administration—whose foreign policy has largely shrugged at the protection of human rights—refrained from pressuring the Saudis, until
