Those still scratching their heads over President Trump’s 636-word screed last month on the U.S.-Saudi relationship need not despair. The following quiz should clear up any misconceptions about the country with which we are to remain a “steadfast partner” in the Middle East region.
Hint: Some answers may be used more than once.
Sec. 1. Islamic Extremism
16 free response questions. Time limit: 10 minutes.
- In which country were 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers born, raised, educated and radicalized?
- With which country’s religious and political establishment do Boko Haram, ISIS, al-Qaeda and AQ’s affiliates share their Salafi extremist ideology?
- With which country, other than Pakistan, did the U.S. most closely coordinate to aid to the extremist Afghan mujahideen of the 1980s?
- Which single country, other than Pakistan, provided the greatest support to the Afghan Taliban during its rise to power in the 1990s and war with the U.S. since 2001?
- Which single country provided the greatest support to the Sunni Arab insurgency in Iraq that killed thousands of Americans and eventually gave way to ISIS?
- Which country, along with its allies, provided support for Daesh as recently as 2014?
- Which country, also in coordination with its allies, supported the jihadist-dominated Syrian opposition with arms, financing and training from 2011 until last year?
- Which country fights alongside al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen and allows AQAP fighters to escape cities with guns and cash?
- Which country remains the top financier of an exiled pro-regime change Iranian terrorist cult blacklisted by the U.S. State Department until 2012?
- Which country ominously threatened to strike the Toronto skyline with a 9/11-style terror attack over Canadian criticism of its human rights record?
- Which country’s princes threatened the U.K. with terror attacks over a government investigation into fraudulent arms sales?
- Which country promised to terrorize the United States economically if held to account in court for its alleged role in the 9/11 attacks?
- Which country is recognized by the World Economic Forum to respect fewer rights for women than all but six other countries on earth, one of which is its puppet state in Yemen?
- Which country’s criminal prosecutors aggressively pursue the death penalty for women’s activists and Shia clerics under the flimsy guise of fighting terrorism?
- In which country does the state practice religious apartheid against Shias, apostates, atheists and non-Muslims?
- Which country can accurately be described as the world’s foremost purveyor of radical Islam, both within its borders and without?
Sec. 2. Domestic Policy
8 free response questions. Time limit: 5 minutes.
- Which country arrested, detained, expropriated and abused hundreds of members of its royal family last year in a transparent power grab by its young crown prince?
- Which country has imprisoned women’s rights activists en masse without trial and subjected them to sexual harassment, torture and extended solitary confinement?
- Which country’s crown prince personally ordered the beating, torture and mutilation of a dissident journalist on foreign soil by a 15-member hit squad armed with a bone saw?
- Which country subsequently and repeatedly lied to the international community about the journalist’s killing once global suspicions were aroused?
- Which country arrests members of its intelligentsia, including economists and political theorists, who challenge state power by calling for reform?
- Which country, alongside Russia and OPEC, manipulates global oil prices at will by restricting or increasing production, thus contributing to economic instability in resource-dependent nations like Venezuela and Libya?
- In which country has the royal family plundered over $1 trillion of its citizens’ oil wealth by treating the nation as its own personal fiefdom?
- In which country does the government gamble hundreds of billions of petrodollars on ill-conceived, high-risk megaprojects championed solely by the ruling crown prince?
Sec. 3. Foreign Policy
18 free response questions. Time limit: 10 minutes.
- Which country’s leadership was the fastest to champion the 2013 military coup against freely elected Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi?
- Which country finances Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s repressive military junta as it jails political prisoners and holds mass show trials for members of the Muslim Brotherhood?
- Which country led a 2011 military intervention in Bahrain to crush popular opposition to the unrepresentative al-Khalifa monarchy?
- Which country continues to this day to provide financial support for Bahrain’s repressive rulers?
- Which country, in conjunction with its regional partners, blockaded the emirate of Qatar last year in an attempt to turn Qatar into a puppet state?
- Which country would have invaded Qatar but for an intervention from then-U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson?
- Which country kidnapped the prime minister of Lebanon, held him under house arrest and forced him to resign to create a casus belli with Hezbollah, then claimed Lebanon had declared war?
- Which country froze its trading and investment relationship with Canada over Canadian qualms about its treatment of political prisoners?
- Which country, under pressure from Israel, closed its doors to nearly three million Palestinian refugees for the religiously vital Hajj and Umrah pilgrimages?
- Which country continues to ignores the plight of the Palestinians altogether, leaving Turkey’s Recep Erdogan as the sole symbolic leader of the Muslim world?
- Which country’s intervention in Yemen has pushed the Middle East’s poorest nation into the most dire humanitarian crisis in the world today?
- Which country’s forces in Yemen have used child soldiers, rape, torture, starvation and disease as weapons of war, in violation of international law?
- Which country’s king has granted a blanket royal pardon for any soldier accused of such crimes?
- Which country keeps Yemen from rebuilding its civil society by blocking food, fuel and medical supplies from entering Yemeni ports?
- Which country pressed on with a military assault against Hodeidah despite international warnings that it would kill upwards of 250,000 people?
- Which country bears the greatest responsibility for the 50,000 Yemenis who have died violently in war since 2016?
- Which country bears responsibility for the 85,000 Yemeni children under the age of five who have died from malnutrition since 2015?
- And which country, despite all the above actions, do U.S. officials argue remains our single closest ally in the Arab world?
The answer to every preceding question, and it should be obvious even to the least observant reader, is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Yet while the Saudi regime’s behavior is well known to the U.S. and the international community, one question continues to escape the calculus of U.S. decision makers. Simply:
Sec. 4. American Interests
One essay question. No time limit.
- Why?
To expand further, why must the United States continue to ally with a country that so obviously shares neither our values nor our interests? How does it serve the U.S. population, even in the slightest, to indulge the Wahhabi clique in Riyadh and Mecca? Or does the alliance serve other interests, rather than merely the public interest?
Feel free to take as much time as you need.
