Trump’s Big Saudi Arms Deal Will Cause More Misery for Yemen

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On Monday, the first day of trading since the announcement that Saudi Arabia had agreed to buy a hundred and ten billion dollars in U.S. weaponry, defense stocks jumped. “General Dynamics (GD.N), Raytheon (RTN.N), and Lockheed Martin (LMT.N) all hit record highs before easing to trade up between 0.4 percent and 1.6 percent,” Reuters reported. “Boeing (BA.N) was up 1.3 percent and the second-biggest boost to the Dow.”

In Donald Trump’s world, that counts as another win. “Tremendous day,” the President said on Saturday, when the arms deal was first made public, “hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States and jobs, jobs, jobs. So I would like to thank all of the people of Saudi Arabia.”

Of course, the “people” of the desert kingdom didn’t have anything to do with making the deal. It was done by the ruling House of Saud, which has had intimate ties to the Pentagon, U.S. intelligence agencies, and American defense companies since 1943, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared, “The defense of Saudi Arabia is vital to the defense of the United States.” During the past seventy years, the Saudi monarchy has struck many, many arms deals with the U.S., including a $60.5 billion agreement with the Obama Administration, in 2010.

So what, if anything, is different this time?

First, the agreement marks another policy U-turn from Trump. During his election campaign, he described the Saudi government as “people that push gays off buildings,” and said they “kill women and treat women horribly.” Trump also suggested that Saudi Arabia was behind the terrorist attacks on 9/11. “Take at look at Saudi Arabia, open the documents,” he demanded. Instead of following up this declaration now that he is President, Trump has agreed to supply the Saudi defense forces with more U.S.-made tanks, planes, helicopters, ships, bombs, and other weapons systems.

The second notable aspect of the agreement is its scale. The Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, wasn’t exaggerating when he described it as “huge.” As Tillerson explained, it covers five broad categories: air-force modernization; air and missile defense; border security and counterterrorism; maritime and coastal security; and communications and cybersecurity.

Third, and perhaps most perniciously, the deal means that the United States is stepping up its support for Saudi Arabia’s proxy war against Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East, in which more than ten thousand civilians have already been killed, an unknown number of whom were blown to pieces by American-supplied bombs. In a piece published at the Hill, Kristine Beckerle, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said her organization had documented eighty-one attacks by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen over the last two years, many of which were “possible war crimes. In almost two dozen of these cases . . . we were able to identify the U.S. weapons that were used.”

Trump and his colleagues are too busy boasting about, and exaggerating, the economic benefits of the new arms agreement to pause and consider its broader implications. But, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned more than half a century ago, what’s good for the military-industrial complex isn’t necessarily good for America, or the world.

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