Secretary of State Mike Pompeo decided to continue support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen — over the objections of some State Department staffers — due to a potential loss of billions of dollars in weapons sales to allies in the region, per the Wall Street Journal.

The big picture: Pompeo certified to Congress last week that he believes Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were working to reduce civilian casualties in Yemen, despite concerns from State specialists on the region. State's Bureau of Legislative Affairs was the only internal group to argue for Pompeo's full support of the Saudis, according to the WSJ report, claiming that "failure to certify may also negatively impact future foreign military sales and direct commercial sales to the region." State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert told the Journal that while "our Saudi and Emirati partners are making progress, we are continuing discussions with them on additional steps they can take to address the humanitarian situation."

Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) told a radio station today that he intends to try, once again, to block U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia. While the particular news hook this week is the Saudi government's possible complicity in the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Paul has long been opposed to the U.S. role in helping support, among other things, the corrupt and repressive regime's highly destructive war in Yemen.

Sen. Bob Menendez (D–N.J.) has also, Bloomberg reports, "notified the Trump administration he would use an informal procedure to block sales to Saudi Arabia because of his concern about the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen."

Paul told the Louisville station WHAS that he knows his position on this currently differs from the Trump administration's, "but who knows, the president may come around on this if there is any evidence they killed this journalist."

The Saudis insist that Khashoggi left their consulate in Turkey, where he is presumed by many to have been killed after entering to get a legal document related to his planned wedding.

Back in June 2017, Paul was a main sponsor of a symbolic Senate resolution opposing that year's $510 million weapons deal with Saudi Arabia. (The bill failed by a vote of 47–53.) The Senate has the power, via the 1976 Arms Export Control Act, to force a vote on presidential arms sales decisions within a 10-day period.

The Bloomberg story today notes that Sens. Bob Corker (R–Tenn.) and Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) have also made noises that suggest they might be willing to rethink aspects of our support for Saudi Arabia over the Khashoggi matter.

The Saudi-led war on Yemen, with active cooperation from the U.S., has killed over 5,000 civilians, may be starving many millions more, has helped prop up Al Qaeda, and has generally damaged the nation in ways that could make it a cauldron of chaos for decades to come. Regardless of Khashoggi's fate, Paul is correct to do everything he can to stop the U.S. from enabling the mayhem there.

There are indications now that the Saudi Arabian government may have murdered a prominent Saudi journalist who advocated domestic reforms and opposed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. A Turkish investigation concluded that a 15-member “preplanned murder team” killed Jamal Khashoggi when he was visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Not surprisingly, Riyadh has flatly denied Turkey’s allegation, but that denial seems to have even less credibility than most Saudi statements. Khashoggi has contributed articles to the Washington Post and numerous other prominent Western news outlets, and he has an abundance of influential friends in such circles. They do not seem inclined to let this incident fade away.

Khashoggi’s disappearance and apparent murder—as appalling as it may be–should be overshadowed, though, by Saudi Arabia’s far more extensive human-rights abuses and outright war crimes. That is especially true regarding the way it has conducted the war in Yemen. There is abundant evidence of multiple atrocities that Riyadh and its United Arab Emirates (UAE) junior partner have committed and continue to commit. The coalition’s war strategy has created a famine as well as a cholera epidemic. Among the many deliberate attacks on innocent Yemeni civilians was an August incident in which coalition aircraft attacked a school bus, killing 40 children.

Yet, incredibly, just weeks later, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo certified that Saudi and UAE forces were making a reasonable attempt to avoid inflicting harm on civilians. Pompeo’s certification was necessary to meet the requirements of a congressional statute barring aid, especially military aid, to countries that do not take appropriate precautions. The latest certification preserves the fiction that Saudi and UAE forces are not guilty of war crimes and that the United States is not a willing accomplice in such crimes.

As I describe in a recent National Interest Online article, such brazenly false certifications are nothing new. Both the Trump administration and its predecessors have displayed that sickening cynicism with respect to numerous countries and their “friendly” dictatorial regimes, most notably Egypt and Pakistan. Indeed, similar phony certifications were routine fare in the 1980s, when Washington repeatedly whitewashed massive human rights abuses on the part of foreign allies. Some of the worst offenders were in our own hemisphere, including Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Colombia. More recently, the worst offenders are concentrated among Washington’s Middle East allies.

The pervasive dishonesty of U.S. officials should be a matter of national shame. Pompeo has carried on a long and dishonorable tradition. Congress may have intended that a requirement certifying that U.S. aid recipients are complying with human-rights standards would pressure those regimes to avoid egregious abuses. If that truly was the intent, and not just empty congressional posturing, then that strategy has failed.

If Congress intends to get serious about enforcement, the country with which to start is Saudi Arabia—especially regarding its conduct in Yemen. Congress needs to cut-off all military assistance to Riyadh and the UAE immediately. Beyond that issue, the legislative branch must insist that human-rights certifications accurately reflect reality. Even leaving aside the Saudi regime’s possible murder of a dissenting journalist, Riyadh does not come close to meeting the most basic human-rights standards for receiving U.S. aid. Americans have endured more than enough whitewash episodes from administrations over the decades regarding Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia reversed days of denials on Friday evening and admitted that journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi was killed by Saudi agents inside the country's Istanbul consulate.

But the new official story is "not even close to credible," says Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.), who today reiterated his call for a reevaluation of the U.S.–Saudi relationship, including putting an end to military cooperation with and arms sales to Saudi Arabia.



Indeed, the new Saudi explanation of how Khashoggi was killed strains credulity.

Saudi Arabia's foreign ministry now says the journalist was killed after being placed in a choke-hold during a fist fight that broke out inside the consulate on October 2. Khashoggi, who was living in Turkey, visited the Saudi consulate to obtain some paperwork necessary to marry a Turkish woman. Once there, he was confronted by a team of 15 men, most of whom were part of the Saudi security services, who had flown to Istanbul from Saudi Arabia earlier that day, according to The Washington Post. Saudi Arabia says it has detained 18 individuals involved in the incident and is continuing to investigate.

Earlier in the week, The New York Times reported that Khashoggi was beheaded and dismembered inside the Saudi consulate, citing audio recordings provided by an unnamed senior Turkish official.

For the official story to hold up, you'd have to believe that a 59-year-old journalist tried to Jean-Claude Van Damme his way out of a confrontation with more than a dozen highly trained operatives. And you'd have to come up with an explanation for what happened to Khashoggi's body.

Paul is hardly the only one to question the legitimacy of this story. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–S.C.) has tweeted that it would be "an understatement" to say he's skeptical of the latest Saudi explanation for Khashoggi's death, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R–Fla.) says the story of a "fist fight gone bad is bizarre." (Consider how rare it is for Graham and Rubio to land on the same side as Paul on a foreign policy issue.) Rep. Adam Schiff (D–Calif.), the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, tells the Post that "if Khashoggi was fighting inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, he was fighting for his life with people sent to capture or kill him."

President Donald Trump, on the other hand, seems accepting of the shifting explanations. On Friday he called the newest version of the Saudi's story "a good first step," and the White House says it will continue seeking further investigation.

Khashoggi's death has generated so much international attention because it represents a brazen attack on a critic of the Saudi government who was living outside Saudi Arabia and who had close ties to American media outlets. (Khashoggi was a contributor to The Washington Post and other publications.) But the difference between this latest atrocity and Saudi Arabia's long history of brutally repressing criticism and violating human rights is one of degree, not kind.

The kingdom's ongoing proxy war with Iran has caused horrific bloodshed in Yemen, including the killing of 40 children in August when a school bus was struck by an American-made missile. The conflict has also caused a widespread famine that threatens to kill millions more.

In an op-ed for Fox News published earlier this week, Paul says Khashoggi's killing should be "a turning point in our relationship, where we as Americans stop and ask ourselves what we have been propping up."

Saudi Arabia is the largest buyer of American weaponry in the world, and it inked a $110 billion weapons deal with the Trump administration in 2017. Trump has pointed to that large purchase agreement as a reason to hold off on punishing Saudi Arabia for killing Khashoggi.

Paul says that is a poor reason to continue supporting "outright evil," and that Saudi Arabia's need for American firepower gives America leverage over the kingdom. The fact that Saudi officials have been pressured into changing their story to admit fault in Khashoggi's killing seems to prove the senator's point, as least in some small way.

"The Saudis need our help and weapons," Paul writes in his Fox article. "And we should make sure that this need causes a change in their behavior."

[b]...The problem with our relationship with Saudi Arabia is not about Saudi Arabia. It is about us. The United States should not be in the business of selling security guarantees overseas to the highest bidder. We are constantly told that the US military guarantees our own safety and so it should be.

No, this is about returning to a foreign policy that seeks friendship and trade with all nations who seek the same, but that heeds the warning of George Washington in his Farewell Address that “a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils.” If we care about the United States we must heed this warning. No more passionate attachments overseas. Friendship and trade over all.

Rep. Justin Amash (R–Mich.) today had a blistering response to President Donald Trump's statement on the death of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi last month.

Khashoggi, who moved to the U.S. earlier this year, disappeared during a visit to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October. The Saudi government admits he was killed but claims it was not a government-sanctioned assassination. However, The Washington Post reported Friday that it was in fact Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who ordered Khashoggi's killing.

In a statement titled "America First," Trump called Khashoggi's killing "an unacceptable and horrible crime." But the president also pointed to the Saudi government's claims. "Our intelligence agencies continue to assess all information, but it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event—maybe he did and maybe he didn't!" Trump wrote, adding that "we may never know all of the facts surrounding" Khashoggi's death. The president also touted the Saudi government's plans to invest in the U.S., particularly via "the purchase of military equipment from" American defense contractors.

That wasn't enough for Amash, who blasted Trump's statement on Twittter as "repugnant":



For more than a month, Amash has been pushing to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for Khashoggi's murder. In October, the congressman announced he was co-sponsoring legislation that would block U.S. military assistance and arms sales to Saudi Arabia unless the kingdom was found to have had no involvement in Khashoggi's disappearance.

Even before Khashoggi vanished, Amash repeatedly called for the U.S. to halt arms sales to the Saudis, in part due to the Saudi government's involvement in the Yemeni Civil War. In fiscal year 2017, the U.S. sold $5.5 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia, according to the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

Amash wasn't the only libertarian-leaning Republican to criticize Trump today. In a series of tweets, Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) also slammed the president's statement. "I'm pretty sure this statement is Saudi Arabia First, not America First. I'm also pretty sure John Bolton wrote it," Paul wrote, referring to Trump's national security adviser.

Trump, for his part, appears to be sticking to his guns. "It's a very complex situation. It's a shame, but it is what it is," he told reporters today. "It's America first."

It is not in our national security interests to look the other way when it comes to the brutal murder of Mr. Jamal Khashoggi. I firmly believe there will be strong bipartisan support for serious sanctions against Saudi Arabia, including appropriate members of the royal family, for this barbaric act which defied all civilized norms.

Most libertarians are familiar with Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex and its nefarious influence on US foreign policy. Many have read Major General Smedley Butler’s short book War is a Racket, in which he lays out the ways in which war is in the economic interests of certain groups, while other groups pay the cost. Some may even have read Robert Nisbet’s warning about the way in which the military-industrial complex has expanded to universities, as researchers seek out government funding from the vast military-industrial blob. While all of these warnings are indeed correct, they neglect another equally nefarious influence on American foreign policy; foreign governments.

Every year foreign governments spend hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying the US government for everything from foreign aid and trade deals, to trying to influence US military policy. This lobbying is generally ignored, but after the recent gruesome murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi Arabian government, there has been increased scrutiny on the cozy relationship between the Saudi regime and US politicians — a relationship maintained through the Saudi’s vast entourage of over two dozen DC-area lobbying firms.

According to a recently released Center for International Policy (CIP) report — one based entirely on publicly available information — the Saudi government spent approximately $27 million on US lobbying firms in 2017. So there is no doubt that there’s plenty of good money in pestering politicians on behalf of the Saudis. Not only the lobbyists but for the politicians as well. CIP found that Saudi lobbying firms donated nearly $400,000 to the campaigns of members of Congress they “had contacted on behalf of Saudi interests.” And if this weren’t blatant enough, CIP identified “twelve instances in which that contact and contribution occurred on the exact same day.”

What has Saudi Arabia gotten in return? The CIP report notes that “the timing of many of these political contributions coincides closely with key Congressional events, involving the Justice Against State Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) votes and votes to block arms sales to Saudi Arabia.” Let’s also not forget the US support, in the form of mid-air refueling and intelligence, for the Saudi-led coalition into Yemen that has led to a humanitarian disaster — complete with the threat of mass starvation and a widespread cholera outbreak .

This mid-air refueling has been stopped for now as a result of the Khashoggi affair, but, according to CNN ’s Sam Kiley, “it's an opportunity to appear a little bit cross over the alleged murder of Jamal Khashoggi while making sure that the Kingdom's strategic trajectory stays on course.”

It is even possible that all of this lobbying might manage to save Saudi Arabia from the ongoing Khashoggi murder fiasco. NBC reports that the Trump administration has weighed expelling Fethullah Gulen, an exiled Turkish cleric and enemy of the Erdogan regime, “in order to placate Turkey over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.” The Trump administration denies this, but the fact that such action is even in the realm of possibility speaks to the success of Saudi lobbying efforts.

The outrageous abuses by the Saudi regime — both domestically and abroad — are nearly endless. But, unfortunately, they are not the only foreign power pouring lobbying money into DC to influence US military policy. In 2017, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), the UAE spent over $21 million on US lobbying. The UAE has a large ground presence in Yemen as part of the Saudi-led coalition and has been accused of running secret prisons where Yemenis are tortured. Former US Army Colonel Stephen Toumajan is currently the head of the UAE Joint Aviation Command, where, by his own admission to BuzzFeed News, Toumajan claimed that he was “instrumental in the modernization of the UAE fleet with investing over $10 billion in American aircraft and services.”

But US entanglement with the UAE’s sordid business in Yemen doesn’t even stop there. An in-depth investigative report from BuzzFeed News found that former US special forces had been serving as an assassination hit-squad in Yemen for the UAE. In a stunning report, a former Navy Seal recounted to BuzzFeed News how he, along with a former French Foreign Legionnaire, ran a hit squad made up of former US special forces in Yemen — whose targets included not only armed terrorists but politicians as well.

As of 2008, it took over $350,000 to train a Navy SEAL, and then an additional $1 million to deploy him overseas. As Ryan McMaken points out, this means that the US taxpayer is effectively subsidizing the training of “what are essentially death squads designed to eliminate the regimes' enemies” for the UAE.

The Saudis and the UAE obviously feel it is necessary to grease US palms with tens of millions of dollars in order to ensure that arms sales get approved, US assistance in the Yemeni war continues, and the Pentagon continues to turn a blind eye to misconduct from former US service members. This leads to the question, what would US policy toward these two onerous regimes be without millions of dollars in lobbying money?

With such blatant bribery of US officials, it seems impossible to trust US foreign policymakers to judge American national interests in an unbiased and levelheaded way. Factor in the even larger amount of influence wielded domestically by the military-industrial complex and it seems hopeless to expect American foreign policymakers to actually be acting in the American national interest. It is little wonder that American foreign policy has been a complete disaster for decades.

CNN broke an important story today outlining how Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have intentionally transferred American-made weapons to violent non-state actors. Intended as a government to government sale, everything from American rifles to Oshkosh armored vehicles to TOW anti-tank missiles have made their way into the hands of “Al Qaeda-linked fighters, hard-line Salafi militias, and other factions waging war in Yemen.”

Although the extent of the problem in Yemen is disturbing, the illegal dispersion of American weapons is nothing new. And the fact that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are unreliable customers should not come as any surprise.

American experience in the Middle East has long demonstrated that sending weapons into conflict zones is a recipe for trouble. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example, the United States provided Iraq with a vast amount of weapons and equipment in order to rebuild the Iraqi army. Later, however, the Islamic State (ISIS) wound up with almost an entire division’s worth of American equipment after defeating the Iraqi army in 2014, helping fuel its emergence. This equipment found its way into Syria, where ISIS also stole American-supplied rockets just weeks after they were sent to arm Syrian rebels fighting ISIS and Assad.

Nor is the problem of dispersion limited to the battlefield. American weapons often wind up crossing national borders to be sold to the highest bidders on the black market. The CNN report notes that Yemeni black markets are showcasing American weapons, but so are markets in Somalia, South Sudan, Mali, Cote d-Ivoire, and Latin America.

Losing weapons to adversaries and criminals makes life difficult enough. What makes the Yemen case particularly troublesome is the fact that Saudi Arabia and the UAE felt free to give up control over American weapons on purpose. The Saudi coalition hoped to gain traction and support from the militias in the complex political landscape of the protracted conflict. The fact that such transfers were technically illegal meant little.

Though arms sales advocates argue that selling weapons to allies will allow the United States to influence their behavior, Yemen illustrates the exact opposite. When arms sales customers have more immediate concerns in their own backyard, their willingness to take direction from Washington, D.C. dwindles.

Policy makers should take this report as an opportunity to rethink U.S. arms sales policy. As we have shown in previous research, these challenges are not impossible to predict. Some countries to which the United States transfers weapons, like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Afghanistan, Sudan, and Iraq, represent greater risks for unintended negative consequences than others. A more prudent arms sales policy would acknowledge that promises and end-use monitoring are insufficient to prevent the misuse of American weapons abroad. In some cases, not selling weapons may be the only way to prevent downstream problems.