President Joe Biden took a defensive tone in the run-up to his visit to Saudi Arabia on Friday. “I have never been quiet about talking about human rights,” he said at a news conference in Israel on Thursday. But his reason for going to Saudi Arabia, he said, was much broader: to promote U.S. interests and reassert our influence in the Middle East. And anyway, Biden added, he was “going to be meeting with nine other heads of state. It’s not just — it happens to be in Saudi Arabia.” That’s a shorter version of the argument the president has made for weeks since his first official Middle East vis…

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