Ben Freeman and William Hartung call on Congress to hold the Saudi government accountable for its many crimes, including the murder of Jamal Khashoggi one year ago today:

Yet, one year after Khashoggi’s killing, and 4 ½ years into the brutal Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, Congress and the president have yet to hold Saudi Arabia accountable. That cannot be allowed to stand. On the anniversary of Khashoggi’s murder, we owe it to him to stand up to the Saudi lobby and the president, and once and for all punish the Saudi government for what it has done.

It is a measure of the Saudi crown prince’s inept and destructive behavior that he has managed to damage the U.S.-Saudi relationship so badly in just a few years. He has transformed a mostly unthinking bipartisan consensus in favor of backing the Saudi government into a serious debate about withholding U.S. support and cooperation from the kingdom entirely. The crown prince’s reckless foreign policy and the atrocious war on Yemen in particular have demonstrated to most Americans that the Saudi government is a menace and a liability, and his use of torture and murder against domestic critics has exposed his would-be cheerleaders in the West as fools. Saudi and American interests are diverging sharply, and it is time that the nature of the relationship changed to reflect that. The current U.S.-Saudi relationship needs to end, and so does the renewed U.S. military presence on Saudi territory.

This is not only the right thing to do in terms of U.S. interests, but it also happens to be extremely popular. Saudi Arabia has not been this politically radioactive in the U.S. since 2001, and according to a recent Gallup survey the American public has a more unfavorable view of the Saudi government than they did back then. Two-thirds of Americans have an unfavorable view of the kingdom, and that tells me that the other third hasn’t been paying much attention. According to a different poll, only 13% say they would support U.S. military action in response to attacks on Saudi Arabia, and just 22% wrongly consider the Saudis to be a U.S. ally. If ever there was a time to make a break with the Saudis, this is it.

Saudi Arabia isn’t an ally, and even as a client they have proven themselves to be worse than useless. The U.S. has supported their disgraceful war on their neighbor for more than four years, and they are no closer to achieving any of their stated goals than they were when they began in 2015. The Trump administration has brought the U.S. dangerously close to war with Iran as a result of policies they encouraged and agitated for, and regional tensions are higher than they have been in at least a decade because our government has been doing whatever the Saudi and Emirati governments want. The entanglement with the Saudis hasn’t been worth keeping for a very long time, and now the time has come to get rid of it.