Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu and Republican Rep. Justin Amash introduced a resolution Wednesday that would keep the Trump regime from selling Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates $8.1 billion in weapons based on a bogus claim of the need for an emergency response to deal with alleged Iranian threats. The bill was put forth shortly after a congressional hearing on arms sales to Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s most oppressive autocracies. Since 2015, the Saudis have been intervening in a civil war in Yemen, killing thousands of civilians, many of them children, with weapons labeled “Made in USA.”
The bill was introduced the day after Lieu and Sen. Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to the State Department’s inspector general requesting that he investigate the involvement of Charles Faulkner, a State Department official, in the decision to deploy emergency powers to waive a required congressional review of planned arms sales. Faulkner allegedly used his position to speed up potential arm deals for Raytheon, a defense contractor client of his former lobbying firm. In a press release, Lieu stated:
According to the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Faulkner, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs, was reportedly forced out of his position last month "after working on efforts leading to the emergency declaration" to accelerate arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE without the typically-required Congressional review. The report indicated that Mr. Faulkner was also involved in efforts last year to encourage Secretary of State Pompeo to certify that Saudi Arabia and the UAE were taking "demonstrable actions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians" from their U.S.-armed military operations in Yemen, and said that "failure to do so would jeopardize pending arms sales to the Gulf, which included the stalled Raytheon deals."
Faulkner was discussed at Wednesday’s arms-sales hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, but that wasn’t all. Catie Edmondson and Edward Wong report:
In a contentious hearing, lawmakers from both parties pressed R. Clarke Cooper, the assistant secretary of state in the bureau of political-military affairs, to detail when the administration first developed the plan to declare an emergency and sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates against Congress’s will. [...]
Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee asked whether the emergency declaration was being discussed within the administration when Mr. Pompeo and Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan briefed legislators in a closed-door meeting on threats posed by Iran, which took place three days before Mr. Trump declared the emergency on May 24.
During that briefing, lawmakers “did not hear a single word about an emergency or a plan to move ahead with this sale,” said Representative Eliot L. Engel, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. “It’s a slap in the face.”
Cooper repeatedly refused to discuss the “predecision” discussion about the emergency move, noting that the arms-sales speed-up to the Saudis was undertaken because of a “significant increase in intelligence threat streams” regarding Iran. Previous assertions that there recently have been more, and more serious, threats emanating from the Islamic Republic have been challenged by many observers who say that threats from Iran—politically and religiously a foe of the Saudis—have not significantly increased. In May, Pompeo and Trump claimed that an unspecified attack on U.S. operations by Iran was imminent. Diplomats and Iran experts found that claim wanting, too.
Just hours ago, Pompeo accused Iran of being behind an attack on two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman, the Norwegian-owned MT Front Altair and the Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous. Given the record of trumped-up assertions by the current State Department, this one needs to be taken with a salt shaker close at hand.
The clash between the two Middle East powerhouses is a complicated matter of long standing that includes jockeying for power, with Iran having considerable influence in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, and Saudi Arabia in Qatar, Jordan, and Egypt. The civil war in Yemen is, to some extent, a proxy war between rebels armed in part by Iran and the forces of the pro-Saudi Yemeni president-in-exile.
Trump’s reckless bluster directed at Iran from Twitter and elsewhere has done nothing, of course, to tamp down tensions. Rhetoric from Tehran’s leaders has also heated up since the United States initiated an economic war against their nation after Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear accord that curbed Iran’s nuclear development program in exchange for relief from economic sanctions. Pompeo’s objective, he has said, is to reduce Iran’s oil exports to zero, probably an impossible task. However, a year ago, those exports peaked at 2.7 million barrels a day, and they have now dropped to less than a million a day. They could fall as low as 300,000 barrels a day by year’s end. The dwindling sales have raised the specter of hyperinflation coupled with harm to the social programs and subsidies the Tehran government pays out of government revenue, about 60% of which comes from foreign oil sales.
Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton, an ultrahawk who for more than two decades has been calling for bombing Iran, seem to believe that making the Iranian economy scream will generate enough opposition to cause an uprising that will overturn the rule of the mullahs.
At the hearing Wednesday:
“The administration has presented us no evidence that the gulf countries face any substantially new threat from Iran that would justify declaring an emergency, or that these weapons, which the Saudis need to keep bombing Yemen, would even be useful if such a threat arose,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, Democrat of New Jersey and a former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor.
“If we allow these arms sales, the effect will be to prolong a war that does not serve U.S. interests, while signaling to the Saudis that they can get away with anything,” he continued.
Malinowski is right. But given the assassination and dismembering last October of journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, which U.S. intelligence sources say was likely ordered by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—a pal of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner—the Saudis already know they can get away with anything, and get a wink and a nod for it from the current occupant of the White House.