Biden Shakes Saudi Ruler’s Hand 2 Days Before 9/11

After he campaigned to make Saudi Arabia's MBS a "pariah"

Today marks the 22nd anniversary of 9/11 and the first time a president won’t be participating in any memorial events. While many are critical of Biden’s absence, intentionally or not, President Biden is honoring the request of 9/11 victims’ families who have asked that he not attend any memorials unless he declassifies U.S. government documents that could shed light on Saudi Arabia’s role in the attack — which Biden has not done.

Candidate Biden vowed to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” over the grisly murder of journalist Jamaal Khashoggi, refusing to meet with its de facto ruler, Mohammed Bin Salman, or MBS as he’s known. That ended when he shared a fist bump with the young crown prince during a visit last year to the oil-rich Kingdom following soaring gas prices due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “Joe Biden Can’t Quit the Saudi ‘Pariahs,’” as my colleague, Jeremy Scahill, put it in a column for The Intercept.

And on Saturday, Biden shook MBS’s hand for the first time — just two days before 9/11 — a striking metaphor for the president’s betrayal of his campaign promise.

Saudi Arabia’s role in the 9/11 attacks — in addition to being the home country of most of the hijackers — remains a matter of official contention. The 9/11 Commission, despite meeting with Saudi intelligence officer Omar al-Bayoumi as part of their field work, a man who settled and hosted the two San Diego-based hijackers, obscures many of the most damning material implicating the Saudi Kingdom. In Washington, the attitude was not only that the oil superpower had the U.S. over a barrel, literally (which isn’t actually untrue) but also that the sensitivities of implicating even factions within the royal family as supporting the strikes would have been too difficult for the American public to understand. And so 22 years later, Saudi Arabia continues to get special treatment, and the tale remains an open wound in American society.

Another open wound is the alarming rate of suicide experienced by veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. One grim statistic: since 9/11, the number of U.S. veteran suicides dwarfs the number of soldiers killed in combat. This is the legacy of Washington’s foreign policy luminaries sending young men and women off to war — for two decades — without understanding or caring about the human cost.

As we reflect on 9/11, we have to acknowledge the unique impact the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had on the young men and women who served, especially with regard to suicides, which are still exacting a heavy human toll. The latest record keeping shows that an average of 16.8 veterans every day are committing suicide.

The Veterans Administration (VA) finds in its 2022 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report, just released, that veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars continue to have alarmingly disproportinate suicide rates compared to the general civilian population.

“In each year from 2001 through 2020, age- and sex-adjusted suicide rates of Veterans exceeded those of non- Veteran U.S. adults. The differential in adjusted rates was smallest in 2002, when the Veteran rate was 12.1% higher than for non-Veterans, and largest in 2017, when the Veteran rate was 66.2% higher. In 2020, the rate for Veterans was 57.3% higher than that of non-Veteran adults.”

Source: Veterans Administration

And an article in JAMA Neurology, published in August found that veterans suicides rose more than tenfold from 2006 to 2020 during which time the suicide rate remained relatively flat in the U.S. adult population. Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), which has been diagnosed in over 460,000 service members between 9/11 and 2020, is one of the single greatest contributors, the researchers found.

Meanwhile, Military Times reports this week that “The Pentagon’s blueprint for curtailing military suicides, captured in 100-plus pages and 127 recommendations to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, is noteworthy for what it lacks — scant if any reference to preventing, better diagnosing and treating traumatic brain injuries, also known as TBIs.”

The problem doesn’t just affect veterans. According to the United Services Organization (USO), the most nonpartisan group one could imagine, suicides amongst active duty military members today are at an all-time high, “and have been over the past five years at an alarmingly steady pace.”

Beyond the politics of the VA and the Pentagon, and their many supporters and detractors, isn’t it time that we start acknowledging that these are 9/11 casualties as well, and that there was something about the kneejerk response in going into war and the way those wars were fought on the ground that might give us some pause as we yearn for a repeat of the same “unity” that the U.S. attacks triggered.