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Comment by mafribe | Hacker News Reader

PR fluff piece. He's working 16 hours a day to make the world a better place? Gosh, what a saint ... I wonder how much the Saudi-Arabia's PR agency had to pay to get it into a mainstream publication. See also: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

No meaningful questions of 'marginal' topics like the pointless the Yemen war, the support of ISIS and other unsavoury organisations. And exactly why does the interview accept him has head of state at all? Why should the House of Saud govern, and not be replaced by a democracy?

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A toppled government in a fundamentalist region suffering economic fallout from the falling global demand for oil does nota democracy fuel. While I agree with everyone that sees SA as a terror-governed state, perhaps you've been around for some portion of the past 50 or so years and have witnessed what Western-exported democracy looks like in the Middle East right now.

SA's problems are plenty, but it shares the entire region's SPOF economy. Tackling that shouldn't be dismissed because we don't like the government. Suffering the hardest happens to the least of people, so making the transition to a post-oil economy as smooth as possible - House of Saud in tact - still prevents an incredible amount of suffering.

I agree with you in many ways, and have been critical of military means that were marketed as "bringing democracy". Irak, Libya, and Syria come to mind as terrifying recent examples. Incidentally the House of Saud supported the military actions in all three cases.

But yhere is a world of difference between a journalist asking critical questions, and bombing a country.

It's a journalist's task to ask autocratic rulers critical questions. The Bloomberg piece does not do this, instead raving "how comfortable meeting him was".

The target audience of this piece is the US population. The house of Saud invests a great deal of money in misleading the US population, so as to ensure that the US continues its support of the status quo, which is highly convenient for the House of Saud, but a disaster for just about anybody else. See e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/04/20/...

The question how to engineer a peaceful transition away from the House of Saud to a meaningful democracy (or even a more enlightened dictatorship such as Dubai), is a deep and complex one, and I don't purport to have an answer. But it's good to understand how autocratic rulers such as the House of Saud manipulate public opinion.

I agree with this. The piece itself is super fluffy.

That said, I can understand, to a degree "comfort" netting him, etc. It is a head of state, but more importantly, the whole government/ruling family is quite mysterious. You have no idea how practical his ideas will be, especially at that scale.

Still, though, you're right. Any amount of serious journalism here would have been welcome.

>It's a journalist's task to ask autocratic rulers critical questions.

Not always, unless you are doing a hit piece. Sometimes it is also a task to simply gather information on a subject that people know very little about. Sometimes the process of gathering info is so sensitive that you don't want to do anything to influence the observations you make like cause discomfort and create moments of silence.

There were some important revelations in this article. It shows the leadership is trying to make changes. It highlights the stakes involved. It shows the geopolitical map of Saudi Arabia. That is not fluff.

> It's a journalist's task to ask autocratic rulers critical questions.

No it's not. It is, as a whole, the job of journalism to do that, but not necessarily a specific journalist's job.

A journalist's job is to tell the truth, not necessarily the whole truth. There is often quite a bit of value in getting the perspective of a single person or entity on a specific subject without attempting to add full and complete context.

> "It's a journalist's task to ask autocratic rulers critical questions." Yes in theory.. Look at it from a "who benefits and how, POV" and this puff piece makes sense. Oil's been bearish for a remarkable length of time.

It's in Bloomberg's best interests to make the ME look less like a one-trick pony so general market consensus goes up (any volatility = TV going off mute + viewership retention & people going to their Bloomberg terminals, etc).

It's in the journo's best interests because he gets '8 exclusive unprecedented hours' upping his profile so his executive editor will choose him for the next interview with Bill Gross or whomever.

It's in the House of Saud's best interest for a wide variety of reasons. Everyone's got to get their pound (Franc, greenback, yen, ruble, or .. )

W/r/t having a nation with a PR/lobby in the US - I guarantee you every nation with a GDP of eh maybe half a trillion will have one. Look at the registered employee list of K-street firms and their clientele.

The closest thing you'll get to 'hard hitting questions' (and I'm not talking hit-pieces, I'm talking about Kronkite and Murrow) is the BBC Newshour (Lyse Ducette and Owen Bennet Jones -- though Americans find it dry, I couldn't love their coverage more, although it's a bit of a family love-affair), PBS Newshour (basically everyone on their staff), and to some extent Shane & Sooresh's VICE which has retained some of the best producers and on-the-ground coverage I've seen in recent news.

> Oil's been bearish for a remarkable length of time.

Yes, and it's largely because of Saudi Arabia:

"Saudi Arabia has maintained a high level of oil production despite the slump in crude oil prices, arguing it needs to protect its market share in an economy in flux because of the glut of U.S. oil."

http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Industry/2015/07/13/...

> I guarantee you every nation with a GDP of eh maybe half a trillion will have one. Look at the registered employee list of K-street firms and their clientele.

Case in point: Here[1] is an article that spends a considerable chunk talking about how Norway pours money into Brookings Institution and Center for Global Development and others to influence US policy.

"The country has committed at least $24 million to an array of Washington think tanks over the past four years, according to a tally by The Times, transforming these nonprofits into a powerful but largely hidden arm of the Norway Foreign Affairs Ministry. "

Lobbying the US government is basically essential for any foreign power because of the outsize influence the US has on the world.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/politics/foreign-powers...

Now you're just getting your facts wrong. Saudi Arabia most certainly did not support the second Iraq war. They went along with it but were mortified when the US essentially handed it over to Iranian control/influence.

I am not a lover the SA regime, but it's important that one's lack of geopolitical knowledge doesn't spread more misinformation.

Yes, you are right. Sorry. Alas, I can't edit my original message any more.

>Western-exported democracy

By democracy, you mean dictatorship, right? The Shah and Saddam were both supported by Western oil, industrial, and finance interests and were hardly "democratic".

> perhaps you've been around for some portion of the past 50 or so years and have witnessed what Western-exported democracy looks like in the Middle East right now.

Does it occur to you that the problem here is that Western-exported democracies aren't democracies, but instead puppet states? This has little resemblance to a real democracy founded by members of its own nation with their own cultural values.

There's a big difference between invading Saudi Arabia and setting up a banana republic, and journalism that criticizes the Saudis for their authoritarianism.

> Tackling that shouldn't be dismissed because we don't like the government.

No one is doing that. We can accurately describe all of Saudi Arabia's issues, including their authoritarian rulers.

There's a related blog post here (also many other insightful posts):

https://geopoliticsmadesuper.com/2016/04/20/why-saudi-arabia...

In short: liberal democracy requires liberal elites to be present and not vastly outnumbered. Without this condition fulfilled what you get after a revolution is what you had before despotism: tribalism and sectarianism, permanent civil war and the likes.

liberal democracy requires liberal elites to be present and not vastly outnumbered.

If the elites are not vastly outnumbered, they kind of aren't elite anymore, they're just normal people.

I mean liberal elites vs. conservative elites, not elites vs normal people, obviously :)

Sure, we should definitely just give up and accept that there just aren't enough liberal elites in Saudi Arabia, so they won't ever be able to handle democracy. /sarcasm

It's an entirely Western colonist idea that poor people in developing countries can't handle democracy and therefore have to accept dictatorships (which just happen to align with Western interests).

> It's an entirely Western colonist idea that poor people in developing countries can't handle democracy and therefore have to accept dictatorships (which just happen to align with Western interests).

Look, no one is able to "handle democracy" before being prepared for this. Isn't this obvious? Even the Tsar Peter the Great, who wanted to modernize Russia, went and for a couple of years studied technical skills in Holland (IIRC - I may be wrong on all the details here...) instead of simply saying "let's make our shipyards modern! now!".

I never said that the societies in the Middle East can't ever do democracy. I just said that if they tried right now the results wouldn't be pretty. Give them another two or three decades of successive education and liberalization and they will be able to build a modern, well-functioning democracy overnight!

> Does it occur to you that the problem here is that Western-exported democracies aren't democracies, but instead puppet states?

I think the relationship between the West and western-supported regimes is a lot more complicated.

I question your implicit presumption that democracy has to be western-exported, and that the Saudi government must be toppled by outsiders to change (although I am doubtful of internal forces yielding any such change any time soon).

Reposting an open challenge to the HN community from a week ago:

Someone should make a plugin that counts the number of times a brand is mentioned in an "article" and uses ML/crowdsources votes to show a "sponsored content" or "submarine" score. Even if there is some interesting point to be made, I hate being manipulated into reading longform ads.

Additionally I would love to see an investigation by "straight" or freelance journalists into the world of PR/submarines that includes the going rates for pieces like this, getting on the front cover of a magazine like Bloomberg business week, etc.

As to the substance of the article: want to move off oil? You're going to need to start taxing your citizens. Now that will be an interesting transition to watch.

> Why should the House of Saud govern, and not be replaced by a democracy?

How would that fix any of the issues that SA is facing right now?

I don't know. The population of Arabia is probably best placed to discuss this. (Note that calling it "Saudi Arabia" implicitly accepts the rule of the House of Saud.)

Understanding the mechanisms the House of Saud uses to stay in power is probably a small first step in the transition to something better.

Well fundamentally, its main reason for backwards laws (e.g. non-equality for women) is that the House of Saud derives its legitimacy from a rather orthodox religious sect, in exchange for enforcing said orthodox sect's backwards religious rules.

Switching to a democracy would mean nobody need pander to the Wahhabi sect.

That assumes the people wouldn't vote for an orthodox religious government. I'm almost certain, for quite a while, they would.

See: http://clarionproject.org/analysis/islamists-using-democracy...

Sure. That's exactly what happened in e.g. Egypt /s it didn't.

We have to face the reality here; if the "religious sect" is so powerful that it can challenge the absulotist monarch, then it's definitely powerful enough to play divide-and-conquer with different democratic parties.

Well, its a story of one man working within constraints of a certain political system. Irrespective of your overall judgement of that system, the story conveys information about the direction this man claims to want to take inside the system. It's not a fluff piece in that sense.

Those down voting: it's valuable information to know what people like that guy are thinking. You can put as much or as little weight on that information as you want but the optimal weight is unlikely to be zero

About journalists asking why shouldn't Saudi Arabia have a democracy, this is an interesting interview:

https://amp.twimg.com/v/f72f7279-f0e4-4953-9549-d2243b49a20b

Oh yes, because democracy worked so well for Muslim countries in an US and EU sponsored experiments across Muslim world...

Not all countries can handle democracy, its not a magic cure.

What you are saying is factually true yet you are downvoted. You are in good company, galileo must've been downvoted a lot too.

The truth is that you cannot bring democracy overnight to a place and expect it to stick. It seems that the people of said country have to fight for it tooth and nail before it sticks.

Relevant: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/04/20/... ("The Saudi government and its affiliates have spent millions of dollars on U.S. law, lobby and public relations firms to raise the country’s visibility in the United States and before the United Nations at a crucial time.")

"Why should the House of Saud govern, and not be replaced by a democracy?"

That is a very, very naive question tho, don't you think?

Mandela: Why should we have apartheid, and not equality?

eric001: That is a very, very naive question tho, don't you think?

Democracy is sown via stability. Stability is sown via dictatorship.

Sometimes it takes a dictator to bring about democracy, simply because he dictates it that way.

You know the answer ?

if he'd knew, he wouldn't ask.

> He's working 16 hours a day to make the world a better place?

Might be paid propaganda, but it looked like the guy was much more worried about Saudi Arabia's future than making "the World" a better place. That self-interest looks pretty credible to me.

Do you know how well all the other attempts at installing democracies have gone in middle eastern countries? Iran, Syria, Iraq, Libya and so on... It's insanity to think that this time we could do it better.

How about letting the people take the lead in changing the system. It won't be what other countries would like to see, but it will probably be a lot better than the experiments you mention.

It's impossible to do that without favouring one side or another. You could say that 'the people' did take the lead when choosing the rulers of Saudi Arabia or any other country. It just so happens that some people had more money / weapons / power than the others. Is there a way to make things fairer? Well, you could try taking the money / weapons / power from different groups, but then you're making a choice and favouring certain groups to the detriment of others.

It won't happen overnight and it won't happen in all countries in the short term.

However, Al-Saud family was heavily financed and armed by the British during 1900 onwards. People's allegiences were divided among the Sharif of Mecca Hussain bin Ali, the House of Rashid, the Ottomans, and the Al Saud-Wahhabi alliance. It is not hard to imagine that these forces would have evolved in different ways during industrialization, post-Colonial and Cold War times.

Besides, there have been external forces at play to further or curtail the direction Saudi affairs are going in during the times of King Saud and King Faisal respectively. So it is not as if the people have necessarily chosen the kingdom system of Saudi Arabia while the West has installed democracies.

While not democratic, I think Sharif Hussain of Macca, the Ottomans, and to a lesser extent King Faisal of the Al-Saud would have moved things towards a more representative system. King Faisal's efforts brought women's education to Saudi Arabia and added a little (if only a trickle) to scientific education in some countries in Africa and Asia through student financial aid programs.

So there are various contradictory forces at play locally and globally and nothing stays constant.

Yeah Faisal was relatively "progressive" compared to his peers in the royal family but his successor Khaled was relatively weak and Juhayman Al-Otaibi[1] incident in 1979 freaked the hell out of House of Saud and forced them to run back into the arms of the Wahabis for the fear of losing legitimacy and rule to those then ascending Islamic radicals with their more "puritanical" rhetoric.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Mosque_seizure

That's not how it happened at all. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as a unified state, can be traced to the Treaty of Darin of 1915 between the United Kingdom and Abdul-Aziz Al Saud (aka 'Ibn Saud'). In the treaty, the UK agreed to protect the sovereignty of the House of Saud, and in return Ibn Saud agreed not to attack British protectorates in the Middle East and to support Britain against the Ottoman Empire.

This treaty (and the subsequent Treaty of Jeddah in 1927) legitimized their control over their territory and allowed Ibn Saud to go on to create the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.

The Arab people had no part in the creation of the Saudi state. It was created by conquest combined with the support of foreign powers (the United Kingdom).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Saud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Darin

> pointless the Yemen war, the support of ISIS and other unsavoury organisations

Not pointless if you follow the politics of the region. Those are all done for breaking Iran's expanding sphere of terror.

> PR fluff piece.

That's what I thought when I saw the bloomberg cover. I wonder if he paid the article or bloomberg really cares if SA does this or that.

> Why should the House of Saud govern, and not be replaced by a democracy?

By whom, you?

Saudi Arabia using its massive funding to build tech cities have nothing to do with it's foreign policy.

Why should there be a democracy why not be replaced by X?

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