Episode 263 Scott Adams: Explaining the Khashoggi Situation
Date: 2018-10-16 | Duration: 20:32
Topics
Did the crown prince authorize what happened to Khashoggi?
Transcript
The Simultaneous Sip
Alright, if you get in here early, you are going to enjoy the rare treat of a multiple simultaneous sip. I don’t do this often, but when I do, it’s gonna fry your brain. Grab your cup, your mug, your vessel, your stein, your glass, fill it with the beverage of your choice—I like coffee—and raise it to your lips for the simultaneous sip. There’s more where that came from.
Did the Crown Prince Lie?
Let’s talk about Saudi Arabia and the Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Let’s just call him the Crown Prince. What you’re wondering is: did he lie to the President? Did he lie to President Trump when he said he didn’t know anything about it? And did President Trump believe him?
Let me give you some answers to the question. Now, I can’t read minds and I wasn’t there, so I can’t know with a hundred percent certainty what the situation is, but I’m going to describe to you an alternate theory compared to the two you’ve heard. Decide for yourself if I’m wrong about this. I would be so surprised—we’ll never know—but if I’m wrong, I would be really surprised.
First of all, if you watch CNN, they’re using careful wording, but they’re saying things such as, “President Trump seems to believe Saudi Arabia’s denial.” I don’t know if they’ve said he believes directly, or they say he seems to believe, or he acts like he believes Prince bin Salman.
Does that mean President Trump believes him? President Trump has never said what he believes; that is not in evidence. What President Trump has done is say that Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince, denies it. He’s simply explaining what the Prince said, and he’s not adding his opinion. Do we know the President’s opinion? No, because he hasn’t spoken it. This is diplomacy. In diplomacy, you never know what somebody’s opinion is; you only know what they’re doing.
The Two Versions of Reality
Here’s the explanation of what I think happened. There are two stories, or two versions of reality out there, and I think they’re both ridiculous.
One is that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia didn’t know anything about the situation with Khashoggi being allegedly killed, dismantled, put in plastic bags, and removed from the Turkish embassy. It seems impossible that he wouldn’t know.
The other story is that he’s just lying. So you have two versions: one is he totally knew because it was a major deal, he’s the head, and the Security Service isn’t going to act without approval. The other is that he didn’t know and there was some kind of rogue activity.
Both of those hypotheses are possible, but compare them to the version I’m going to give you now. This version is based on how any big organization works, and Saudi Arabia is a big organization.
The Dilbert Filter
You could call this the “Dilbert filter.” You have a boss who has an opinion about his critics. He may or may not have spoken specifically about Khashoggi, but everyone around him, including the head of his security forces, would absolutely know what he thought and felt and preferred about the fate of his critics.
They would know, for example, that his first choice would be to co-opt them: find a way to buy them off, find a way to maybe nudge them, threaten them softly, incent them in some way, or bring them into the inner circle to somehow control them. They would have known that in a general way, Prince bin Salman wanted to control his critics, and the first choice would be peacefully. If you could do it peacefully, why the hell wouldn’t you? That part seems pretty reasonable, and it’s reasonable that his security forces would know his preferences.
Now, is it likely that the Prince was involved in detailed planning of a murder? Do you think he ever sat in a room and said, “Look, we’re going to need two planes. Make sure they can’t be tracked. Put together a team. I’ve got a list—I want you to bring Ahmed and Bob…“? I don’t know what their names are, but “here are some good guys. You’re going to need a cleaner-upper, a fixer, a trigger guy, and maybe a torturer.” You can’t really see that. You can’t imagine that the Crown Prince was involved in detailed planning.
An Underling’s Decision
It’s very unlikely he was involved in detailed planning, but it is also a hundred percent likely that his security forces know what his preferences are. What is the price of failure if you’re in Saudi Arabia’s security force and you know the boss wants you to find a way to make your biggest critic ineffective? Failure is kind of a bad deal. You don’t want to be the underling that failed. Even if there was no direct order, you know you’re supposed to make these things happen. You don’t need details.
I think it is ridiculous—not impossible, but very unlikely—that the Prince knew there was a plan to kill this guy in the embassy and cut him up and remove him. The reason is that I don’t think he’s that dumb. It’s the sort of thing an underling decides to do because the underling is trapped. The underling needs to make something good happen with Khashoggi, but all of the peaceful co-opting mechanisms are ineffective, or they know they won’t work. They realize they might only have one chance to physically get a hold of him on Saudi soil, and the embassy is Saudi soil.
It feels exactly like an underling decision—somebody high up enough that they could put together a team and have the budget, but could it be true that the Prince had no idea this was going to happen? Answer: absolutely.
The “Rogue Operation” Explanation
It could be a simple case of deniability. He might have known the broad strokes, or maybe he didn’t know the day or the details. But I think it’s even more likely that he just told his underlings to “take care of it.” He probably didn’t have a deadline or a specific plan. He probably didn’t want to hear a specific plan if it was something he might not like.
When he describes this as a “rogue operation,” that’s close to true, meaning they did not have specific orders from him. When he says it was an interrogation that was botched, is that accurate? Well, if you’re the Prince and you told your guys to “take care of this critic,” but you assumed they’d do it in a peaceful way that doesn’t have any blowback, imagine how he felt when he got the news that a team of his guys just got caught dismantling a prominent critic in his embassy.
Do you think he said to himself, “Oh my god, I got caught”? I’ll bet not. I’ll bet he said, “Oh my Lord…” or however they swear. I’ll bet he said to himself that if anybody had told him they were even going to try this in the embassy, he probably would have called it off. So when he calls it a botched interrogation, it’s definitely botched from his perspective.
[Precedent: The Ambiguity of “Take Care of Them”]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvR8W4i7-ZA&t=628s)
Is he completely in the clear? Well, if he suggested they “take care of” this problem and he didn’t want to hear the details, he was talking to people who—when you say “take care of somebody”—they know how to take care of them, if you know what I mean.
There is precedent for this defense. I have a personal connection to it, which is weird. A co-worker of mine back in my corporate days, Mike Goodwin, wrote a book about his father’s experience in World War II. He was a Navy flier who was shot down and captured by the Japanese. His father was beheaded for entertainment for the Japanese troops. They would tie an American to a pole, make him dig his own grave, and then whack his head off. It was a ceremonial thing that got the troops going.
When the war was over, the people who ran this prison camp were brought up on war crimes. What was the defense? He said, “We got an order from the top that said to shobun.” I might have that word wrong, but I think it’s shobun. The order was shobun, which is something like “take care of them.”
“Take care of them” is completely context-dependent. The people at the camp who murdered for entertainment said, “We were just following orders. Our boss said take care of them, so we took care of them. What else would that mean?” When the boss was put on trial, he said predictably, “I just said take care of them. It’s a prison camp; we take care of them. I didn’t know they were going to kill him.”
Because it was a war crime and the Japanese were on the losing side, they were found guilty. But there is precedent for the idea that there could be ambiguity from the top guy to the people who are using the sword.
The Cost-Benefit Analysis
It’s almost certainly going to morph into one of those situations. I would say the odds that the Crown Prince authorized this specific act—the murder of this guy in the embassy—I would personally put close to zero because the cost-benefit would just be stupid for the Prince.
The Prince’s cost-benefit analysis is different from an underling’s. An underling can not only get fired but executed if they really mess up. You’re going to do anything you can to get the job done, and you’re going to take a higher-level risk. If an underling had great pressure to solve this problem or wanted to stand out, they might take an oversized risk.
This was definitely an oversized risk. An underling might make an unwise cost-benefit decision that felt like their best choice at the time. But if you’re telling me that the Crown Prince knew this plan and knew this guy was going to be dismembered in the embassy, I would say there’s very little chance of that. His cost-benefit analysis was different. He would be better off keeping the critic than having any chance that this would happen in a city with twenty witnesses, the staff, fifteen people flying in, and a girlfriend on the street.
If you tell me the Crown Prince took that chance and thought that was a smart play, you also have to tell me he’s an idiot. Is he? The evidence is exactly the opposite. The evidence is that he’s actually a skilled operator, albeit a young one. It just doesn’t make sense as something even a young leader would do, but it makes sense an underling would do it.
Distractions and Twitter Strategy
Khashoggi was a potential political rival and they wanted him gone. I know they had some benefit from having him gone; that is not in dispute. What I’m saying is that the cost-benefit analysis of doing it in the way they did it would not have made sense for the leader, but it might have made sense for a rogue underling who thought they were doing what was best for the leader.
Somebody asked if the “Horseface” tweet was meant to distract from the Saudi Arabia thing. I would say yes. It’s never just one thing. I think the President’s tweet about Stormy Daniels and the “horseface” comment was meant to change the focus to something silly, while also focusing on the fact that he won the court case. It’s intentional, but there are other reasons too—he tweets on anything that’s a victory.
All of the possibilities that have been discussed are actually plausible. It’s plausible that the Prince ordered the hit and then just lied about it, but you have to compare the odds of that to the alternatives. The odds that he had nothing to do with it, not even indirectly, also seem low. But the odds that he expressed a preference and an underling botched something seems pretty likely.
Alright, I’m gonna get off now and do something else. I’ll talk to you later.