Paul Wood

Day by day, you could almost see America’s moral authority draining away in Iraq. The weapons of mass destruction that the US had invaded the country to find didn’t exist. And it sometimes seemed as if a monstrous trick had been played on American troops: they were promised a welcome with ‘flowers and sweets’; they got roadside bombs and suicide attacks. In 2004, a year after the invasion, a 19-year-old Marine — outside the US for the first time in his life — looked up at a minaret sounding the call to prayer and asked me: ‘What are they saying? “Kill Americans?

‘Death to Khamenei. Death to the dictator.’ Iran’s new president, Ebrahim Raisi, is sworn in today against a backdrop of protest, the sound of chanting echoing in his ears, whether literally or figuratively. The chants are often about the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, but are also directed at the regime as a whole. ‘Clerics get lost’ is another favorite. Street demonstrations began three weeks ago in the province of Khuzestan but spread to many other places, including the capital, Tehran. People are angry about water shortages and the wretched, broken state of the economy. The question now is whether the protests will build and, if so, whether Raisi will live up to his terrifying reputation and crush them.

The US and other western countries are faced with a dilemma: how to bring to justice a man with the blood of thousands on his hands when you have to do business with him. Ebrahim Raisi’s path to the presidency of Iran is strewn with corpses. He comes to office this month already under American and European sanctions for the mass murder of prisoners in 1988. Some 5,000 may have been killed, though we can only guess at the true number of dead. It was a crime against humanity in the strict legal meaning of that term. At an earlier stage in his career, Raisi is said to have personally supervised the torture of dissidents, but in the 1988 case his responsibility was bureaucratic. He was a grim fanatic, eager to carry out orders. He was — and remains — Iran’s hanging judge.

An executive in charge of a security company based in Arkansas has given the New York Times a document confirming that they trained four members of Saudi Arabia’s so-called Tiger Squad, responsible for murdering the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi. As has now been established by several different investigations, Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, injected with a drug — perhaps morphine — and suffocated with a plastic bag, his body then cut into pieces, apparently on the Saudi deputy consul’s desk. This latest information raises the question of what the US might have known about the Tiger Squad and its operations. Could the US intelligence agencies have warned Khashoggi not to go to Istanbul?

A few weeks ago, the Saudi human rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul was summoned to the offices of the General Directorate of Investigation at the Interior Ministry in Riyadh. Ostensibly, the Saudi secret police — the Mabahith — simply wanted to tell her that her appeal against her conviction for ‘treason and terrorism’ had been turned down. But her brother, Walid told me it was really a warning: Keep quiet, we’re watching you; the Americans may have got you out of prison; we can send you back whenever we want. She has been out of prison since February, serving the rest of her sentence on probation. Though aged 31, her long black hair is now streaked with gray, the outward sign perhaps of what her family say was an attempt to ‘break’ her in prison.

These are dangerous times for the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and perhaps for Jared Kushner too. The Biden administration has released an intelligence report accusing MbS of ordering the killing of the Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. What does President Trump’s son-in-law have to do with this? Kushner went to Saudi Arabia in October 2017, staying up until 4 a.m. to ‘swap stories and plan strategy’ with MbS, as the Washington Post reported at the time. The following month, MbS began a crackdown, arresting and torturing enemies who included some of the richest and most powerful men in the Kingdom. Meanwhile, dissidents abroad were persuaded to come home, or — in some cases — simply kidnapped.