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All right.
Introducing Bill Hartung.
He wrote the book Prophets of War.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Bill?
Good.
Good.
Very happy to have you here.
Donald Trump.
He goes to Saudi.
He sells them $110 billion worth of weapons.
And happily, much of the world is outraged about this.
And I don't think you're making an apology in this piece, but you say at Defense News that there's less than meets the eye in Trump's Saudi arms deal.
Yes.
What he did is he's taking credit for tens of billions of dollars of deals that Obama made.
Obama, up until now, had the record for the most arms offers to Saudi Arabia, $115 billion over his two terms.
So the idea that Trump could throw together $100 billion for this one trip seemed a little suspicious.
So he's claiming credit for some Obama deals, some stuff that's probably never going to happen that they're just kind of putting out there.
My concern is, you know, not just that number, of course, I mean, the fact that Trump would exaggerate something is no big surprise, but they're going to sell precision-guided munitions, which Obama had blocked, which are going to be used in the war in Yemen, and the Saudis have had this brutal bombing campaign, they've killed thousands of civilians, they've hit hospitals and funerals and marketplaces.
Basically, Representative Ted Lieu of California said, these look like war crimes.
And if there could be a real investigation, which the Saudis have blocked, I'm sure that's what they would find.
So, yeah, the first thing I was wondering when I heard $110 billion is, well, that must be some real big-ticket items, but they don't sell heavy bombers to countries like Saudi Arabia, right?
I guess you're going to give them some F-35 pieces of junk to sit out there in the desert and rot or what?
Well, they're not going to sell the F-35 because they have this policy of Israel maintaining a qualitative military edge over the Saudis and the other Gulf states.
So Israel's getting the F-35, Obama offered F-15s to the Saudis a couple of years ago.
But see, that seems like that would give the Saudis an advantage over the Israelis if they're stuck driving that Turkey around.
Because the F-35 is such a piece of junk, yeah.
But on paper, since it's got a higher number, it's supposed to be better.
I see.
And a lot of this thing with Saudis is symbolism, because Trump is basically saying, we're in your corner, do what you want, be it in Yemen, be it anywhere else in the world.
And so that, to me, is almost as troubling as the number of $110 billion.
But this is a way of Trump saying, you know, I'm not going to impede you in Yemen in any possible way, even not the modest kind of thing that Obama did.
Well, and, you know, I wonder if we're too used to the same old, same old that, you know, this is in a sense, it's a way of recycling American petrodollars that we spend on gasoline.
And they invested in bonds and they invested in American companies and that kind of thing as a way, American real estate, as a way of putting the money back.
Just like Ned Beatty explains in the movie Network.
We put the money there, they have to put it back and all of that.
And yet I wonder if, hey, maybe it's not the status quo.
Maybe they really are arming up for an attack on Iran.
Maybe the carte blanche that you just described goes, you know, as far as we try to convince ourselves that we didn't need to to worry anymore.
Yeah, I think the Saudis, well, especially with their new defense minister, Prince bin Salman, who's the son of the sheik who's running the country, has had a very aggressive policy.
He sort of has this idea he's going to be the new leader for decades to come.
And this war in Yemen was his idea, and he's prosecuting it in a very brutal fashion.
He's also very much trying to step up tensions and confrontation with Iran.
And I think the Saudis' preference would be for the U.S. to take on Iran in some fashion, bombing, harassing their shipping, who knows what it would lead to.
But once the Saudis load up on all these weapons, it's not inconceivable that they could take a shot at Iran also, although I think at the moment it's more in the nature of a cold war.
But, you know, cold wars can get out of hand.
So it's, you know, throwing any more weaponry at them, even if the number that Trump is talking about is exaggerated, they shouldn't be getting a single thing from the United States given their activity in Yemen and their general role in the world.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, this is the thing, and in fact, I guess it's the Trump effect.
It seems like people are noticing, you mentioned Obama had sold him all these weapons and gave him carte blanche to bomb Yemen, helped him bomb Yemen for the last year of his administration.
And hardly anybody said a word.
But Trump is just so radioactive that he connects himself to the Saudis and all of a sudden everybody's up in, you know, all their righteous indignation.
But they're right.
All their complaints are perfectly true.
Saudi's a totalitarian state.
Saudi supports all our enemies, which, by the way, America does to, you know, people like the Al Nusra Front in Syria and that kind of thing.
But, you know, for the American president to just go and pretend like everything is perfectly fine there and sit there and attack Iran as the the supporters of all terrorism in the world, like he's Michael Ledeen or something, it's it's pretty incongruent.
And people are noticing it's you know, he makes these kinds of contradictions so obvious and yet it's pretty obvious to why this continues, right?
All that money.
I mean, how much money are we really talking about here?
If it's not one hundred and ten, you say it was one hundred and fifteen billion over the Obama years.
How many in the Bush years?
How much how much money do the Saudis really spend on American weapons?
Well, you know, I would say certainly over the last three administrations, one hundred fifty billion.
And, you know, some of these deals fall apart because they decide they can't agree to terms and so forth.
Basically, there's this huge stockpile of tens of billions of dollars of weapons, fighter planes, attack helicopters, combat ships, missile defense systems, bombs and guns and artillery and pretty much everything you can think of in the Saudi military.
It's made in the USA or sometimes in the United Kingdom.
And of course, there's U.S. maintainers on the ground, mostly contractors who help them keep the things running.
And as you mentioned, alluded to, the Obama administration was helping refuel their aircraft for the war in Yemen.
So it's not like Obama was the good guy and Trump is the bad guy.
It's more like Trump is making a bad situation worse.
And make it a little bit more obvious for the average person to to see, too.
And I guess for the average liberal, it makes it OK to attack him over it, whereas they wouldn't want to, you know, done that last year because of their partisan interest.
But that's fine with me.
I mean, hypocrisy or not, complaints about the war in Yemen, I'll take them for what they're worth.
And there are some people who were in the administration, especially in the State Department, who were not happy about the Yemen war.
And now they're free to talk.
So that's, you know, something.
But, you know, we still need a lot more people speaking out about this, especially given, you know, that there's there's a potential famine and that the United Arab Emirates is talking about attacking the main port where the humanitarian aid comes in.
So Trump essentially by doing this big weapons deal and trying to define the war in Yemen as a war against Iran, which it is not, there's all kinds of internal reasons the war is going on.
You know, there's a danger that that next step will happen, although even among the Trump people, amazingly, there's some disagreement about whether, you know, encouraging a famine in Yemen actually serves anybody's interest.
So, you know, it's so outrageous that you're even getting some pushback inside the Trump administration, which is unusual.
But basically.
Elaborate about that a little bit.
Do you know who's taken whose side, who's complaining about the famine there inside the White House?
Well, I think Mattis, I think Mattis's ideas, he made a statement about how we have to wrap this up as soon as possible.
There's got to be a peace agreement and so forth.
But I think his idea of a peace agreement is the Saudis win, you know, and or they have such a strong military position that the Houthi and their alliance steps back, which is not going to happen.
So but I think there was some discussion from Mattis.
I mean, the State Department, there is no State Department other than Tillerson.
You know, I think there was some discussion, certainly among the queer people, about whether this was a good idea.
But the point of the matter is, since they're not restraining them in any way and they're making weapons deals not only with them, but with the United Arab Emirates, it's in essence kind of a green light.
I mean, he's leaving it up to them to do what they want to do.
So it's a very dangerous moment for the people of Yemen.
Now mostly, is it right?
I mean, I guess I always heard this and it seems like there's some evidence of this in the recent war these last two years that mostly the Saudis are just buying all of this stuff as a political deal.
It's a jobs program.
As Newt Gingrich said, yay, celebrate, the Saudis are going to be investing in all this infrastructure.
Andrew Exum wrote in The Atlantic about, yeah, you know, all these, not even just they're going to spend, you know, the extra money will be invested in infrastructure in the country, but actually just the arms manufacturers themselves, that we ought to be celebrating this military Keynesianism and all we get out of it.
And then so the idea is that all this equipment in Saudi really just sits there.
Their only military force, or the vast majority of their military force, is just an internal suppression force.
And when it comes to fighting real wars, that's what Americans are for.
Like for example, or that's what Iraqis are for, like in the 1980s, to die to contain the Iranian revolution there and keep it out of Saudi Arabia, that kind of thing.
And in fact, I even heard, it's just rumors, but it's rumors passed on by Andrew Coburn, the great journalist, and Dan Simpson, the former ambassador.
Both of them had unconfirmed reports that there were actual Americans flying in the back seats of the F-15s helping to bomb Yemen these last couple of years, because these Saudi perfumed princes, they can't even really fly.
Maybe they can fly a little bit, but they need Americans to help them kill the people they're actually trying to kill, not just in the targeting, but even holding their hands all the way to the targets there.
Is that really right, then, that their military is basically just for show, mostly?
Well, I think historically that's been the case for sure.
I think there's this arms lobbyist who used to talk to us because he talks to everybody because he's basically a PR guy.
And he said, well, when you buy American weapons, you're buying a relationship with the United States.
The idea being, we'll bail you out in a pinch.
You're essentially buying an alliance, and the currency of the alliance is, we buy your weapons, you protect us.
But of course, the war in Yemen is not about protecting them.
And in fact, it's kind of a change in the sense that now they're using the weapons.
They're not using them well, if there is such a thing, although the targeting of civilians seems to be deliberate.
It's not just because they don't know what they're doing.
But there have been, the UAE, for example, has hired mercenaries to bring in from Colombia and other places in Latin America.
And certainly for years, the Saudi military force was kind of a Potemkin military force.
I mean, they weren't really using it that much, except, as you said, for internal repression.
And the north of Grumman has a unit called Vanell Arabia that actually trains the Saudi National Guard, which is part of the internal security force that protects the regime.
And they got a $4 billion contract a couple of years ago to continue to equip and train that force, which they've been doing since the 90s or earlier.
So between maintaining the equipment, training the National Guard, the U.S. has a presence not just in helping with the Yemen war, but possibly helping if there's a need to put down a rebellion inside Saudi Arabia.
Alright, so now if we can zoom out a little bit to just the larger defense budget here.
And Gareth Porter says, this is the real great game, right?
Forget, you know, petrochemicals and all of this and the Caspian Basin.
The real great game is control the defense budget.
And let's see, I got the National Priorities Project, Mother Jones Assessment, and also the great Robert Higgs at the Independent Institute.
They all independently came up with the number of right around approximately, give or take a couple of billion, a trillion dollars a year that the American people spend on the military.
And that includes the cost of the VA and that includes the care and feeding of the hydrogen bombs and all of that.
But I wonder, does that sound about right to you?
And then secondly, whatever the correct number is, can we continue on like this?
I mean, it seems like they have continued on like this since 1947.
There must have been people in 1947 who said, we're not going to be able to continue on like this.
And now, you know, look at all the weapons been sold and everything's still humming right along.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think the US is a declining power and they're unfortunately going out with a bit of a bang, if you will.
And I think to continue to throw that kind of resources at the Pentagon and military related functions has all kinds of issues in terms of driving the deficit, in terms of starving basic public investments.
I mean, I take Amtrak to Washington, which is in very serious problems just in terms of keeping the tracks, you know, able to be used and so forth.
And all over the country, you've got these kinds of problems.
So I think we're going to have a declining domestic quality of life if we keep doing this and we're going to have the deficit problem.
And the thing is, when you sell these weapons, you can't always control how they're used.
There was some indication that Obama wasn't that thrilled about the Yemen war, but he felt that he had to bolster the Saudis because of the Iran nuclear deal.
The Saudis threw a tantrum, like as if we were going to switch horses and become an ally of Iran at some point.
So and of course, you had the Afghan rebels who use US weapons and turned around and helped arm what became Al-Qaeda.
And you've got weapons in Iraq falling into the hands of ISIS.
And you've got your weapons in Yemen that were supposed to be for the regime, which fell apart.
Now they're being used on all sides of the conflict.
There's Saudi using US weapons.
There's the Houthi have captured US weapons, and even possibly Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had gotten hold of some.
So you know, it's got serious security problems, not just in those regions, but just in undermining the US internationally.
And then there's this huge domestic cost.
So they can sustain it if they're willing to starve the domestic economy.
But at some point that comes home to roost.
I mean, even Eisenhower, who certainly was no peacenik, said, well, you know, if you're going to have security, the first thing you need is a sound economy, healthy, educated population.
And without that, you know, even if you're a militarist, it just doesn't, it's not possible to keep it going.
So I think we should be reducing, especially since they did, you know, at least reduce the number of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan substantially.
The Pentagon budget should be coming down.
It dips slightly, but now it's under Trump on the way up again.
So it does feed these companies, it feeds certain sectors of the economy.
I think it could be, it's possible to change it, but, you know, there's also the whole culture of militarism has to be addressed.
Right.
So let me ask you this, because you've been in this business for a long time, trying to shape people's opinions about this and all of that.
And I guess the what I'm interested in is when you combine the power of the military industrial complex and their influence on Capitol Hill, other PR firms and all their think tanks, and for that matter, all their shills on the TV news and all of this all together, you know, it's not just the anti-war movement, but the fiscal conservative movement and the any and everything, I guess I'm trying to phrase it like any and everything that's the counterweight to them.
How does it shake out?
Is it just 99% to 1% or it's 60-40?
Or is it within the realm of possibility in our lifetimes that this military lobby can be brought to heel?
I mean, for that matter, just throw in the opinions of the generals, which matter just as much as all the lobbying and all the think tanks and all that.
It sort of seems like we're so outnumbered.
And with our own tax dollars, you know, throw in the one anecdote of the scandalous report that Lockheed had spent 14 million, 14 measly million dollars on lobbying in the first quarter of 2014 or whatever it was when that's the remainder on a on a decimal of a percent of the money that they take home from the Treasury every year.
In other words.
So, yeah, what what's how much power do we got compared to them and what can we possibly do to to turn it around?
Well, one thing that's interesting is there is a convergence of groups on the right and the left.
There's an overlap on these issues of Pentagon waste.
Why can't the Pentagon be audited?
There's strong anti interventionist tendencies that are that overlap with parts of the right and the left.
You know, people like Grover Norquist are talking out about auditing the Pentagon and there's groups like the National Taxpayers Union and, of course, Cato Institute, which I mean, Cato has actually the probably the more ambitious proposals for how deep we can cut the Pentagon of of anyone far more than any Democrat has come out for.
So at least there's there's opposition across the spectrum to unbridled Pentagon spending, which is in our favor.
And then, you know, the interesting thing about Trump is a lot of his people were attracted to this.
What was a lie, of course, that, well, he opposed the Iraq war.
He thought we were he gave us, I think, his first speech to Congress.
He said we had wasted six trillion dollars in Iraq that could have been used to rebuild America.
So I think although these things are not truthful, I think they indicate that some of his base cares about that kind of stuff.
You know that it's not just a bunch of raving militarists.
So I think there might be some potential to to build a coalition that could rein in some of this stuff to some degree.
But, you know, as you said, they have a lot of tools at their disposal because they have the revolving door of generals going in and out of government.
Even Mattis, Mattis was on the board of General Dynamics right before he came in to run the Pentagon.
And his deputy is coming from Boeing and the secretary of the Air Force had a dubious lobbying relationship with Lockheed Martin.
And so so they got that piece covered.
They usually have eight hundred to a thousand lobbyists per year, which is almost two for every member of Congress.
So it's a fight, you know, but in the past there have been movements that have have made a difference.
You know, the Vietnam War movement, I believe, although the movement against the Iraq war had its ups and downs, I think it did force Bush to sign a set of forces agreements that were supposed to get U.S. troops out.
But of course, it didn't stop the flow of money sufficiently.
So, yeah, it's a tough fight.
I think part of my problem is I'm not fully objective.
I'm just stubborn.
And so I feel like we can do this and we have to do this and that we can build a coalition to do it.
But the other side is very well moneyed.
And they've also they're good at capturing and framing the debate.
So, for example, in Washington now, John McCain and others are saying that Trump's buildup is not enough and the generals are saying, well, our planes are falling apart.
You know, if that were the case, to any degree, it's because of mismanagement.
It's not because they don't have enough money.
I mean, they have more than the peak of the Reagan buildup and we're spending more than the next eight countries combined, six of which are U.S. allies anyway.
You know, so the money's there.
The strategy makes no sense.
And the last couple of wars have been a disaster, not just for those countries and primarily for those countries, obviously, but also for what it's done to U.S. troops and vets and the U.S. deficit and sort of starving out other things that the country needs.
So, you know, the fight has to be carried on and even small victories can make a big difference.
I mean, the caps on the Pentagon budget probably reduce what they got to spend over these last five years by a couple hundred billion dollars.
So even when you make what to the Pentagon is a modest dent, it does free up significant money to do other things.
And, you know, ultimately, of course, the question is not just the money, but how they're using the weapons.
And I think that is kind of the point of contention that we have to fight the hardest on, that there not be a war with Iran, that they're not continuing to escalate in Syria, that they not pump up troops in Afghanistan again.
And I think that stuff is a little more stark to people because it does mean, you know, more troops generating more veterans, many of whom aren't being taken care of well and so forth.
So I think it's kind of a two front thing.
One is they're wasting our money.
The other is they're putting lives at risk.
And so those being the case, I think there's always going to be pushback.
But how long it takes to build enough to really, as you said, bring them to heel is uncertain.
All right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry.
I got a million more questions, but I'm so late for my next interview.
But I appreciate your time again for coming back on the show, Bill.
Appreciate it.
Well, yeah.
Thanks for having me.
All right, you guys.
That is Bill Hartung.
He is at the Center for International Policy, CIP online dot org.
He has this piece at Tom Dispatch dot com.
The American way of war is a budget breaker.
And this one is at Defense News dot com.
There's less than meets the eye in Trump's Saudi arms deal.
And check out his book, his books, Prophets of War, Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military Industrial Complex.
And how much are you making on the war, Daddy?
A quick and dirty guide to war profiteering in the Bush administration.
I'm Scott Horton.
Check out all my stuff at Scott Horton dot org at Libertarian Institute dot org.
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