BRUTAL REALITY
BEFORE THE WORLD EVEN LEARNED HIS AGE, IT could glean that the young man who runs Saudi Arabia takes extraordinary chances with violence. Mohammed Bin Salman, the prince now known by the global shorthand of MBS, was utterly unknown when his father ascended to the Saudi throne in January 2015. It was a routine transfer of power from one elderly royal to another, until King Salman delegated a massive share of his authority to his son. Within two months, the newly minted Defense Minister launched a war in Yemen that has shattered what was already the poorest country in the Arab world. He turned out to be 29.
More than three years on, none of the tens of thousands dead in Yemen have drawn a fraction of the attention now concentrated on Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist and commentator who fled the kingdom after finding himself on MBS’s bad side, and re- portedly paid for it with his life. The grisly crime
