Congressional frustration with President Trump’s Saudi Arabia policy should not delay the confirmation of an American ambassador to Riyadh, said a key Senate Democrat.
Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut suggested that 67-year-old retired four-star Army Gen. John Abizaid could sail smoothly through the Foreign Relations Committee, despite disagreement between lawmakers and the administration about U.S. policy towards the Gulf ally. Committee members have been frustrated by Trump’s restrained reaction to the monarchy’s involvement in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi last year.
“I’m sure there’ll be some tough questioning and some criticism of the administration, but I think that our priority should be getting General Abizaid confirmed as quickly as possible,” Murphy told reporters Tuesday evening.
“He’s not responsible for what the administration has done on Saudi Arabia,” Murphy, often an arch critic of the Saudis, added. “He is our best shot at trying to press some of our concerns there.”
The United States has been without an ambassador to Saudi Arabia since January 2017, shortly before Trump assumed office.
Abizaid, who is testifying before the panel this morning, is of Lebanese heritage and was nicknamed “the mad Arab” at West Point before rising to lead Central Command from 2003 to 2007. The posting gave him responsibility for U.S. military operations in 20 countries, from Egypt on his western flank, through the Persian Gulf, to South and Central Asia, to the eastern corner of Kazakhstan. If confirmed, Abizaid would also be tasked with helping the State Department orchestrate the establishment of a Middle East Strategic Alliance. The bloc, dubbed the Arab NATO, will require a detente in an ongoing diplomatic feud between Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the tiny Gulf state that hosts the CENTCOM headquarters where Abizaid served for four years.
“I think he shares a lot of our concerns about Saudi Arabia’s support for political repression and for Salafist causes around the region,” Murphy said, referring to the jihadists inspired by the form of Islam predominant in Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia’s historic ties to the same ideology as that of some of the world’s most dangerous terrorist groups is just one challenge Abizaid would face as ambassador. His diplomatic appointment would come with a smaller area of responsibility than his CENTCOM role, but Saudi Arabia’s prominence in the region means he’d confront a thicket of rivalries and alliances, in addition to a fraught relationship between the Trump team and Congress.
His hearing takes place just two days after the committee hosted administration officials to explain the refusal to submit a proper report on Saudi Arabia’s violations of the Global Magnitsky Act, a federal law targeting human rights violators that senators invoked last year after Khashoggi was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey.
“It was insufficient and not terribly satisfying,” Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, told reporters Tuesday. “We need to learn a lot more.”
[Opinion: Crown Prince Mohammed has learned nothing from Jamal Khashoggi’s killing]
New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, the committee’s top Democrat — who has accused the administration of refusing to require “full accountability” for the murder by not imposing any sanctions on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — dismissed the hearing as a disaster.
Chairman James Risch said the committee is working to craft legislation that will force the president’s hand in the Khashoggi case, in part because of how the hearing unfolded. “There are many paths forward and we did discuss, at some length, the pros and cons of the various paths,” Risch told the Washington Examiner. “And I’m not ready to outline those yet, but we’re working on it.”
That dispute could foreshadow a tough confirmation hearing, but not if Murphy has his way.
“I hope that it doesn’t turn into a litigation of all of our complaints about the president’s policy towards Saudi Arabia, in part because we need to get General Abizaid on the ground as soon as possible,” he said.
