Hani Mohammed/AP Photo
The rubble of houses destroyed by Saudi-led airstrikes in Sanaa, Yemen, June 2017
Saudi Arabia’s war against the Houthi movement in Yemen has little relevance to U.S. national strategic interests. Yet the U.S. continues to support a Saudi-led war on an impoverished country increasingly devastated by COVID. Why? The undue influence of U.S. arms manufacturers in the White House.
The revelation that the administration is advancing an additional arms sale to Saudi Arabia prompted anger over Trump’s insistence on benefitting the arms industry regardless of congressional resistance and Yemeni misery. News of the second major arms deal came just 12 days after Trump fired State Department Inspector General Steve Linick. One of the reported subjects of Linick’s investigation, the “emergency” sale of U.S.-made weapons to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and other countries despite congressional resistance in May 2019, emphasizes a problem exemplified by, but not limited to Trump: the power of the defense industry to influence the U.S. government’s foreign-policy decisions.
In a memo last May, Secretary of State Pompeo claimed that the weapons sales were necessary to counter the threat posed by Iran, thereby invoking an emergency waiver so as to sidestep the 30-day congressional review mandated by the Arms Export Control Act. Linick was investigating why Pompeo had, for the first time ever, invoked this state of emergency justification despite the fact that available intelligence revealed no heightened threat from Iran.
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That Linick’s investigation of the arms sale seems tied to his ouster reaffirms the likelihood that the alleged danger posed by Iran was inflated in order to force the sale through. Although Pompeo claimed that the weapons were needed to defend against Iran, the sale actually provided Saudi Arabia with additional U.S. weapons to use against the Yemeni people, as well as additional money for the weapons manufacturer Raytheon.
The influence of the arms industry, and its profiteering in the Middle East, has reared its head repeatedly in Trump’s White House. The bombing of a school bus full of Yemeni children in August 2018 raised congressional resistance to arms sales to Saudi Arabia. A month later though, Pompeo—urged on by Charles Faulkner, a former Raytheon lobbyist turned State Department staffer who was subsequently ousted from State for trying to steer billions of dollars to his former employer—assured lawmakers that the Saudi-led coalition was taking sufficient precautions to protect civilians. Just weeks later, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi prompted widespread condemnation of Saudi Arabia and passage of two bipartisan bills to end U.S. support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen. Both bills were vetoed by Trump.
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper is another Raytheon alumnus. The former vice president of government relations at Raytheon was urged by Sen. Elizabeth Warren in July 2019 to recuse himself from all Raytheon-related matters in order to avoid conflicts of interest in his cabinet position. Esper refused.
The intersection of arms manufacturers’ profit motives and the way public officials define the national interest is not exclusive to the Trump White House. In October 2015, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin offered assurances to the Obama administration that weapons sales to Saudi Arabia would not undermine human rights, despite a slew of executions carried out in the Kingdom and the war on Yemen, which had begun months before. Defense company executives emphasized the utility of weapons sales as a means of cementing a security partnership for decades and reiterated the imperative for more arms sales. Between 2010 and 2014, the Congressional Research Service recorded $90 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The 2017 Saudi arms deal signed by President Trump committed to a sale of $110 billion immediately, and $350 billion over ten years.
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For decades, the U.S. military has tried to encourage Gulf partners to develop a workable security architecture that would allow them to rely less on the U.S. defense umbrella. Yet during an event hosted by the Gulf International Forum titled “Why Has the Gulf Failed to Form a Sustainable Defense Structure?” former Centcom Commander in Chief Anthony Zinni explained that Gulf governments are loath to give up their privileged bilateral relations with the U.S. for the less-than-reassuring support offered by their fellow Gulf Cooperation Council members. This dynamic will persist unless the U.S. commits to a reduction of military force in the region by requiring Gulf states to take responsibility for their own security. Were the U.S. to stop supporting some countries in the region while antagonizing others, the Gulf states would have to resolve their differences among themselves based on calculations of their own military strength, making the prospect of war more costly.
Yet a U.S. drawdown is highly unlikely while the defense industry maintains allies in the White House and on Capitol Hill. The longer that U.S. national security is defined by the calculations of lobbyists committed to arms sales, the longer the U.S. will continue to pursue policies that support the interests of weapons manufacturers. The belief that the United States promotes global peace is directly undermined by the agenda of those who profit from war.
