Significantly less American than Anwar al-Awlaki, the US citizen Obama ordered assassinated. Jamal Khashoggi was a US resident, but never gained citizenship.
Every Confederate killed during the Civil War was a US citizen too (secession is illegal and not recognized). At some point, if people are trying to kill you, you kill them back.
By the end of the war we were the ones marching on them, killing them in their cities, and burning them down.
War is war. The world would be a better, safer place for us if every single al Qaeda member worldwide were dead. I'm glad the US military is trying to get as many of them as possible. The main issue I'm worried about here is collateral damage -- that can cause the actions to be counter-productive.
So if the military decides your rhetoric calling for the extermination of a group of people is too extreme, you're fine with them drone striking you? As what you're doing isn't drastically different to what al-Awlaki did.
>Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki was a 16-year-old United States citizen who was killed while eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant in Yemen by a drone airstrike ordered by U.S. President Barack Obama on October 14, 2011.
>Nawar "Nora" al-Awlaki was an eight-year-old American citizen who was killed on January 29, 2017, during the Raid on Yakla, a commando attack ordered by U.S. President Donald Trump
>Anwar Nasser Abdulla al-Awlaki was an American imam who was killed in 2011 in Yemen by a U.S. government drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki became the first U.S. citizen to be targeted and killed by a drone strike from the U.S. government.[7][8] US government officials argued that Awlaki was a key organizer for the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda...
A green card is a residency card; it does not confer citizenship. Lots of Journalists with American citizenship have residency cards of other countries in order to be able to work from those places. It does not make them Japanese, or Korean or Chinese, etc.
> They did murder an American journalist for criticising their rules in his writing
In your quest to bust the myth that they killed an American journalist you are missing the point. The point is that they did murder a journalist. Here I am going to extend this even further: they murdered another human being.
This reminds me of a great exchange in a classic movie: https://www.quotes.net/mquote/9306 The exercise to map this to our discussion is left to the reader.
this is what it means to be a sovereign state - they _can_ do this. And if the subject being murdered is a citizen of the USA and the gov't doesn't respond with something, then they are implicit.
However, if the subject is not a citizen of the USA, then the USA does not have the legal right to respond (other than to talk trash about it).
I'm not saying the murder was just - it isn't. I'm saying that there's no mental gymnastics, and there's little to limited things the US can respond with.
Saudi Arabia's abysmal human rights record makes that kind of trade pretty embarrassing for the US. Not embarrassing enough to cut ties, but there is some tension there.
US-Saudi relations have been strained since the Iraq War (KSA supported Saddam as a bulwark against Iran) [0][1], and faced a further tumble during the Arab Spring because of the US not pushing back against Qatar's support of the Muslim Brotherhood leading to strained Saudi relations in Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and Libya [2] (Khashoggi was a casualty of the Saudi-Qatar rivalry - it's open knowledge on the Hill [7], doesn't excuse his murder though)
While American weapons do still top Saudi purchases, this is largely in brownfield weapons systems such as the F-15E [3]. For new weapons platforms, the Saudi Armed Forces have increasingly pivoted to Europe (Eurofighter) [4], South Korea (replace the F-15e's munitions and planes with next-gen KAI platforms) [5], and the PRC (UAVs and Cruise Missiles) [6]
In my opinion, all of this is due to Americans - both policymakers and voters - having Orientalist perceptions and stereotypes of the Middle East that are still stuck in the 80s and 90s and which has lead regional powers to hoof it on their own.
The old guard of Saudis who were extremely pro-American all passed away or retired from political life and the newer generation of Saudis have become increasingly disillusioned with the US. Also, the Saudi govt is stopping it's foreign scholarship program and so if you're paying out of pocket, European programs make more sense or Saudi universities which ain't that shabby anymore either due to extremely competitive hiring packages to EU and Asian nationals.
Addendum:
Totally forgot about the Fracking boom in 2014-16 causing a trade war between the KSA and USA [8]
I didn't know US' relations with Saudi Arabia were strained. SA imports hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons from USA every year.