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Biden’s $650 Million Arms Sale to Saudi
Arabia
By Charles
Pierson on December 9, 2021
The vote
wasn’t even close.
On December 7, the US Senate
voted 30-67 against a joint resolution (S.J. Res. 31) which would have blocked a $650
million US arms sale to Saudi Arabia. Only two Republicans voted in favor
of the resolution: Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Senator Mike Lee of
Utah who had co-sponsored the resolution together with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Twenty Senate Democrats voted for the sale to go ahead.
The $650 million arms sale which the Biden
Administration announced on November 4 is for 280 advanced medium-range
air-to-air missiles (“AMRAAMs”) and 596 missile launchers. Raytheon
Technologies is the principal contractor in the deal.
In 2015,
Saudi Arabia, leading a coalition of Arab states, launched a military
intervention in Yemen to restore Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi who had
been overthrown the year before by the county’s Iran-backed Houthi
rebels. Nearly a quarter of a million Yemenis have died in the years
since then. Most deaths in the war are attributable to the Saudi-led coalition.
It looked
like a Biden Administration would usher in a new policy. During the
November 20, 2019 Democratic presidential candidates’ debate, Biden was asked
about Jamal Khashoggi. Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist residing
in the US was assassinated in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2,
2018. The CIA determined that Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman had personally ordered the hit.
Biden was asked whether he would
“punish” the “senior Saudi leaders” responsible for Khashoggi’s
murder. Biden said yes; he would make the Saudis “pay the
price” for Khashoggi’s murder. Plus: Biden “would make it very
clear we were not going to, in fact, sell more weapons to [Saudi Arabia].”
This was a dramatic departure
from the policy of Biden’s former boss, President Barack Obama. Obama had
taken the US into the war on the coalition side in 2015 in an attempt to
mollify the Arab states which opposed Obama’s prospective nuclear deal with
Iran. Obama provided the coalition with intelligence-sharing, target
spotting, spare parts for coalition warplanes, arms sales, and (until November
2018) in-flight refueling of coalition aircraft. President Donald Trump
continued US participation in the war, even boasting about all the cool weapons
the US was selling Saudi Arabia (“Saudi Arabia is a very wealthy nation, and
they’re going to give the United States some of that wealth, hopefully in the
form of jobs, in the form of the purchase of the finest military equipment
anywhere in the world.”).
For the first few months of 2021,
it seemed like Biden would break from the Obama-Trump policy on Yemen. In
his first major foreign policy address on February 4, President Biden announced that the US was cutting off
support for “offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms
sales.”
Was the $650 million deal with
Saudi Arabia a “relevant arms sale”? One would think so. But,
according to the Biden Administration, the AMRAAMs are “defensive.”
They are anything but. The
AMRAAMs are offensive weapons. They can shoot down aircraft flying in or
out of the capital’s Sana’a International Airport. Sarah Lazare observes that
[U]pon
closer examination, the distinction between “offensive”
and “defensive” Saudi weapons begins to disappear. So-called defensive
weapons are part of a military apparatus that is enforcing a brutal
blockade, shutting out aid for Yemen and creating a climate of
intimidation and fear. The weapons transfer sends a message to Saudi
Arabia, at precisely the moment it is refusing to lift its blockade, that U.S.
support is unconditional.
(Sarah Lazare, “Biden Is Wrong.
There Is No Such Thing as “Defensive” Saudi Weapons in the War on Yemen,” In
These Times, Nov. 22, 2021.)
Capitol lawmakers and civil
society groups have sent several letters to Biden beginning in March asking how
the Administration distinguishes defensive from offensive weapons and
operations. They are still waiting for an answer.
Maybe Richard Walton got it right
in his discussion of the Cuban Missile Crisis: “[I]t is always the other side’s
weapons that are offensive.”[1]
* * * * *
President Biden came out
strongly against S.J. 31. Biden seems to have
bet all his chips on the possibility of arranging a ceasefire in Yemen, yet the
belligerents are still at an impasse. The Houthis won’t agree to a
ceasefire until the Saudi coalition lifts the blockade. The Saudi
coalition won’t lift the blockade until the Houthis agree to a ceasefire.
And around and around it goes.
Arming the Saudis and Emiratis is
not the only way Biden has broken his promise to end US support for “offensive
operations” in Yemen. Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution
says that the US still “provides Saudi Arabia with considerable military
support.” This includes transfers of spare parts without which coalition
warplanes would be “grounded.”
Instead, as the Quincy
Institute’s Annelle Sheline writes: “Saudi air strikes have continued at
comparable levels as those observed during the last year of the Trump
administration, signaling that U.S. support for offensive operations is unchanged, despite Biden’s statement to the
contrary.”
The National Defense [sic]
Authorization Act
S.J. 31
was not the only defeat for Yemen this week. Another (perhaps temporary)
defeat is the National Defense [sic] Authorization Act.
Congress
is considering the annual defense [sic] budget: the National Defense
Authorization Act (“NDAA”) for Fiscal Year 2022. This year’s NDAA weighs
in at $768 billion. That’s more than President Biden had requested, and a
substantial increase from the by no means meagre $740.5 billion NDAA for the
year before.
The House
version of the NDAA passed on September 23. The bill incorporated an amendment
from Representative Ro Khanna that would have forced the US to end its support
to the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen, a much more ambitious goal than
was represented by S.J. Res. 31.
This good
news had to be regarded cautiously. Similar amendments from Khanna to end
US assistance to the Saudi coalition also made it into the NDAAs for FY 2020
and FY 2021. Both were stripped in conference. So, it was obvious
that Congressman Khanna’s amendment would face an uphill battle again this
year.
The slope
has now gotten steeper.
On December 7, the House approved
a compromise version of the NDAA which omits
the Khanna amendment and other progressive measures. The compromise NDAA
now heads to the Senate.
A statement was issued by Representative
Khanna, Representative Tom Malinowski (D-NJ), and Representative Gerry Connolly
(D-VA) after the vote. The statement blames “a small group of
senators—for reasons that are not publicly explained or challenged” for
excising a host of progressive amendments from the compromise NDAA, “including
provisions to rebalance our relationship with Saudi Arabia in the face of the
Kingdom’s disastrous war in Yemen and its campaign of reaching into other
countries to threaten and kill its critics.” The three lawmakers promised
to fight for Congress to debate the deleted amendments.
How many
more Yemenis need to die before President Joe Biden and Congress tell Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to go to Hell? This week’s
catastrophic votes signal that the US Congress is perfectly willing to see more
Yemenis die.
Notes.
[1]
RICHARD J. WALTON, COLD WAR AND COUNTERREVOLUTION: THE FOREIGN POLICY OF JOHN
F. KENNEDY (1972), page 141.
Article
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URL
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