Friends,
This original article is a very long expose by The
New York Times. I am sending out a portion of this sordid story. If
you want to read the complete article, let me know.
Kagiso, Max
Why Bombs Made in America Have Been Killing
Civilians in Yemen
President Trump sees arms deals as
jobs generators for firms like Raytheon, which has made billions in sales to
the Saudi coalition. The Obama administration initially backed the Saudis too,
but later regretted it as thousands died.
A Saudi-led bombing of a
funeral hall in Sana, Yemen, in 2016 killed at least 140 people and injured
another 500. A bomb shard was linked to the American company Raytheon. Credit...AP Photo/Hani Mohammed
May 16, 2020
Year
after year, the bombs fell — on wedding tents, funeral halls, fishing boats and
a school bus, killing thousands of civilians and helping turn Yemen into the
world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Weapons
supplied by American companies, approved by American officials, allowed Saudi
Arabia to pursue the reckless campaign. But in June 2017, an influential
Republican senator decided to cut them off, by withholding approval for new
sales. It was a moment that might have stopped the slaughter.
Not
under President Trump.
With billions at stake, one of the
president’s favored aides, the combative trade adviser Peter Navarro, made it
his mission to reverse the senator. Mr. Navarro, after consulting with American
arms makers, wrote a memo to Jared Kushner and other top White House officials
calling for an intervention, possibly by Mr. Trump himself. He titled it “Trump
Mideast arms sales deal in extreme jeopardy, job losses imminent.”
Within
weeks, the Saudis were once again free to buy American weapons.
The intervention, which has not been
previously reported, underscores a fundamental change in American foreign
policy under Mr. Trump that often elevates economic considerations over other
ones. Where foreign arms sales in the past were mostly offered and withheld to
achieve diplomatic goals, the Trump administration pursues them mainly for the
profits they generate and the jobs they create, with little regard for how the
weapons are used.
President Trump has encharged
his trade adviser Peter Navarro with growing American manufacturing,
particularly in the arms industry. Credit...Doug Mills/The New
York Times
Mr.
Trump has tapped Mr. Navarro, a California economist best known for polemics
against China, to be a conduit between the Oval Office and defense [sic] firms.
His administration has
also rewritten the rules for arms exports, speeding weapon sales to
foreign militaries. The State Department, responsible for licensing arms deals,
now is charged with more aggressively promoting them.
“This
White House has been more open to defense [sic] industry executives than any
other in living memory,” said Loren B. Thompson, a longtime analyst who
consults for major arms manufacturers.
No
foreign entanglement has revealed the trade-offs of this policy more than the
war in Yemen. There, Mr. Trump’s embrace of arms sales has helped prolong a
conflict that has killed more than 100,000 people in the Arab world’s poorest
nation, further destabilizing an already volatile region, according to a review
of thousands of pages of records and interviews with more than 50 people with
knowledge of the policy or who participated in the decision-making.
American arms makers who sell to the Saudis
say they are accountable to shareholders and are doing nothing wrong. And
because weapon sales to foreign militaries must be approved by the State
Department, the companies say they don’t make policy, only follow it.
“The Weekly” —
Watch how arms sales to Middle Eastern allies that were meant to shore up
American jobs are contributing to a humanitarian crisis: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/the-weekly/saudi-arabia-yemen-raytheon.html.
Video
Back
0:00/1:10
TRANSCRIPT
“Our economic policy can be summed up in three
very beautiful and simple words.” It’s a common refrain. “Jobs, jobs, jobs.”
“You’re talking about jobs. What I’m doing here, we’ve created an incredible
economy.” But when promises of jobs are tied to the arms trade, where do we
draw the line? And what happens when this promise collides with the mistakes of
a previous administration? “We found ourselves locked into this terrible
situation, unable to wrap it up and handing it off to an administration that
was going to handle it even worse than we did.” It’s a scenario that has
plunged the U.S. deeper into one of the world’s most catastrophic conflicts.
“These were not mistakes. These were deliberate and precise attacks, and
everybody in Yemen knows that the bombs causing this suffering are made in the
United States.”
00:00
1:10
Credit...Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
But
as the situation in Yemen worsened, at least one firm, Raytheon Company, did
more than wait for decisions by American officials. It went to great lengths to
influence them, even after members of Congress tried to upend sales to Saudi
Arabia on humanitarian grounds.
Raytheon,
a major supplier of weapons to the Saudis, including some implicated by human
rights groups in the deaths of Yemeni civilians, has long viewed the kingdom as
one of its most important foreign customers.
After
the Yemen war began in 2015 and the Obama administration made a hasty decision
to back the Saudis, Raytheon booked more than $3 billion in new bomb sales,
according to an analysis of available U.S. government records.
Intent
on pushing the deals through, Raytheon followed the industry playbook: It took
advantage of federal loopholes by sending former State Department officials,
who were not required to be registered as lobbyists, to press their former
colleagues to approve the sales.
And though the company was already embedded
in Washington — its chief lobbyist, Mark Esper, would become Army secretary and
then defense secretary under Mr. Trump — Raytheon executives sought even closer
ties.
They
assiduously courted Mr. Navarro, who intervened with White House officials on
Raytheon’s behalf and successfully pressured the State Department, diminished
under Mr. Trump, to process the most contentious deals.
They
also enlisted the help of David J. Urban, a lobbyist whose close ties to Mr.
Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo go back to the 1980s, when all three
men were at West Point.
As
the nation turned against the war, a range of American officials — Democratic
and Republican — tried three times to halt the killing by blocking arms sales
to the Saudis. Their efforts were undone by the White House, largely at the
urging of Raytheon.
Approached
a half-dozen times, Raytheon representatives declined to speak with reporters
about foreign sales. “We believe further dialogue regarding foreign military
sales is best directed to officials in the U.S. government,” Corinne Kovalsky,
then a company spokeswoman, said in December.
Lawmakers
from both parties have condemned the continued arms sales in the Yemen war,
expressing both humanitarian and security concerns: Some of the weapons have
wound up in the hands of militant Islamic groups in the country.
“We
don’t know how these weapons are really being used or whether they may be
turned against U.S. troops in the future,” said Senator Mike Lee, Republican of
Utah, who has publicly criticized the administration’s approach to the
conflict. “This war was never authorized by Congress.”
Others
say the president’s arms sale policies diminish the United States.
“People look to us. We’re the only country
in the world that is ever capable of using this immense power that we have in a
way that’s more than just about our naked self-interest,” said Representative
Tom Malinowski, a New Jersey Democrat who was born in Communist Poland and led
the State Department’s human rights bureau under President Barack Obama.
“President
Trump has proudly said that we should continue to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia
because they pay us a lot of money,” Mr. Malinowski said. “He seems to see
foreign policy in the way he viewed the real estate business — every country is
like a company and our job is to make money.”
The
Trump administration has defended arms sales to Saudi Arabia as being vital to
job growth and the American economy.
“We’ve created an incredible economy,” Mr.
Trump told Fox Business in October 2018, after the killing of the journalist
and American resident Jamal Khashoggi sparked calls to stop selling to the
Saudis. “I want Boeing and I want Lockheed and I want Raytheon to take those
orders and to hire lots of people to make that incredible equipment.”
Raytheon hired former U.S.
officials to press for approval of arms deals with Saudi Arabia, one of its
most important clients. Credit...Pascal Rossignol/Reuters
Records
show that foreign military sales, facilitated by the U.S. government, rose
sharply after Mr. Trump became president. They averaged about $51 billion a
year during Mr. Trump’s first three years, compared with $36 billion a year
during the final term of Mr. Obama, who also oversaw a big increase.
Arms
industry groups say defense [sic] jobs rose more than 3.5 percent to about
880,000 during Mr. Trump’s first two years, though the numbers, the most recent
available, do not specify how many were in manufacturing.
The White House referred requests for
comment to the National Security Council, where a spokesman said that “Iran and
its Houthi proxies” had targeted Saudi Arabia and had endangered Americans. “We
remain committed to supporting Saudi Arabia’s right to defend against those
threats, while urging that all appropriate measures are taken to prevent
civilian casualties,” said the spokesman, John Ullyot.
To be continued.
Donations can be sent
to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206,
Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at]
comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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