07/06/16 – William Hartung – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing William D. Hartung.
He is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.
And he's a senior advisor to Security Assistance Monitor.
And here this one is at Jim Loeb's blog.
LoebLog.
Why is the United States still backing Saudi Arabia in Yemen?
Welcome back to the show, Bill.
How are you, sir?
Good.
Good.
Good.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
Just how much in terms of dollars does America, weapons, does America sell to Saudi Arabia?
Well, since President Obama came into office, about $50 billion in contracts have been signed for major arms sales.
So it includes fighter planes, attack helicopters.
They've sold some combat ships, all nature of bombs and ammunition, armored vehicles.
Basically almost an entire armed forces worth of equipment.
Okay.
Now, I guess I don't really know this, but I've always sort of heard that they don't really have an army.
The U.S. Army is their army.
And most of this stuff just sits in piles because the perfumed princes of Saudi Arabia wouldn't dare get their hands dirty in combat, other than flying a fighter jet, a very kind of elitist thing to do, bombing Yemenis from the sky, that kind of thing.
But as far as driving tanks around or shooting artillery or anything like that, they mostly just have kind of an internal security force, and the army is mostly toothless.
And most of this equipment is really just about the purchasing of it and the recycling of American petrodollars to American politically connected companies and that kind of thing.
What do you think about all that?
I think that's right.
I mean, even in Yemen, as you suggest, they've mostly been doing bombing, and they've bombed markets, hospitals, schools, water supply systems.
They've been accused of potentially committing war crimes because they don't take care to avoid hitting civilians.
They've used cluster bombs.
But in terms of the fight on the ground, there's been evidence of some mercenaries from Latin America being hired.
United Arab Emirates has sent some troops in.
And there's some small number of U.S. Special Forces.
We don't know how many.
The reporting hasn't been very good on that.
But they're also involved on the ground in Yemen.
So I think that piece of it is definitely on target.
And the recycling of petrodollars goes back to the Nixon era when there was a steep increase in sales to Saudi Arabia and Iran when OPEC raised oil prices.
And I think that's been an ongoing issue and an incentive for the arms sales.
I think also from the Saudis' point of view, the notion of buying arms from the U.S. is sort of a protection racket.
The U.S. has always implicitly said, well, if somebody threatens your regime, we will defend you.
It's not a formal alliance, but it's an understanding.
And that understanding is sealed in some cases with these big arms deals.
Well, and we talked about with some other guests over the past year or so that, well, the Obama policy in Yemen seems to be placate the Saudis by letting them bomb Yemen.
Obama, the U.S. administration doesn't seem to have their own interest in war against the Houthis, really, other than kind of going along with the Saudis.
And it seems like there's a real conflict of interest there where maybe, just hypothetically, say the U.S. wants to break policy with the Saudis and say, you know, we really mean it.
Stop backing al-Qaeda in Syria and stop, you know, fighting for al-Qaeda in Yemen right now.
But they can't say that because the Saudis have a $50 billion contract.
And so, you know, the military guys and the industrial guys, they would rather keep our relationships with those Gulf countries cut or two at the status quo level, no matter what the politics of the region are, because they have their more parochial interest to maintain.
Yeah, I think that's definitely a piece of it.
I think also the longstanding relationship with Saudis as a country that can control, to some degree, the oil market.
The Saudis over the years have funded various aspects of U.S. foreign policy.
They threw some money into the Iran-Contra scandal.
They helped back the Afghan rebels.
And they've given humanitarian aid in cases where the U.S. would like to see that happen.
So it's also been a case of how they spend the petro money, which is viewed as being in U.S. interests.
Of course, on the other hand, many of the 9-1-1 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.
They've spread this very extreme version of Islam, which has helped foster some of these jihadist groups.
So there are many, many downsides to maintaining this relationship.
And I think you're right.
The Yemen war is something, all other things being equal, the Obama administration would not support.
But they're sticking with the Saudis at the moment.
They've also said they're going to be in the Saudis' corner, and they're reassuring them, quote-unquote, that they're not going to tilt towards Iran, despite the nuclear deal.
And so there's been some acceleration of sales with that rationale as well recently.
But there's very little criticism of the Saudis, their terrible human rights record, what they've done in Yemen.
Maybe it's whistled in their ear, but they haven't really made a big public statement about it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there's this famous quote from The New York Times.
I just happen to have it handy here on Twitter, where they talk about this is the first real discussion The New York Times even had about the Yemen war more than a year into the thing.
But they're talking about the decision-making, and they said, among other reasons, the White House needed to placate the Saudis as the administration completed a nuclear deal with Iran, Saudi Arabia's archenemy.
That fact alone eclipsed concerns among many of the president's advisers that the Saudi-led offensive would be long, bloody, and indecisive.
And then next paragraph, Obama soon gave his approval for the Pentagon to support the impending military campaign.
So it's just to placate them over a side issue when really it's funny because, I mean, obviously they feel like their position in our Middle Eastern order is threatened and all of that.
But, hey, at least we're securing Iran's nuclear program far better than ever before for them.
It seems like when we're in the middle of securing their interests, it's a strange thing for Obama to then have to apologize and placate them by helping them wage a war in order to make it up to them.
Yeah, I mean, it's completely twisted logic.
The Iran deal benefits Saudi security because it locks down and prevents an Iran nuclear weapon.
But the Saudis have sort of this political interest in keeping Iran sort of in a box and making sure they're kind of the favored country of the United States.
So it's almost like they're throwing this temper tantrum saying, well, you know, you dealt with them on the nuclear issue, but don't start trading with them and leaning towards them on political issues and taking an even-handed approach instead of being entirely in our corner on a lot of the issues in the region.
So, yeah, the logic is twisted.
It's very much sort of Saudis right or wrong at the moment.
There's no kind of thinking about the long-term effects on U.S. interests and on the people of Saudi Arabia, because if this regime goes on in this way, there's no telling what kind of government might follow if they're overthrown.
Right.
Do you think there's much of a risk of the Saudi government falling?
It's something people don't talk about very much.
Yeah, I think in the short term, no.
But I remember back in the 70s, in the early 70s, the United States was funneling huge quantities of weapons to the Shah of Iran.
And the assumption was he would be in power forever.
And then seven years later, he was overthrown and the Khomeini regime came into power.
They're certainly doing things that are making the country more unstable.
Their new economic plan is cutting subsidies that have helped sort of placate the population.
They're talking about selling off parts of the oil company.
So their quote unquote modernization could lead to a less stable situation, especially since they've been repressing all manner of critics, not just armed groups, but anybody who says anything critical of the regime.
So the combination of the repression, the pulling back of support for the public, the wasteful and unnecessary devastating war in Yemen, you know, all these things, I think, make the regime less stable.
But they've been very skillful in sort of holding off that sort of thing in cases where other governments in the region have not.
But I think certainly it's a possibility.
I wouldn't put any time frame on it, but I think they're making themselves more vulnerable to that possibility by their current policies.
Well, as you alluded to earlier, their ability to control the global oil price has really been diminished at this point.
And I talked with an expert named Michael Clare, a professor who studies this, who says if they try to do the usual game, which is cut production to drive the price up at this point, they'd only be cutting off their own nose to spite their face and the rest of the global market would just continue going on as it is.
And they wouldn't really be raising the global price.
They'd only be cutting their share of it.
And so there's so much diversified oil resources being produced in the world right now that they're no longer in that kind of position where maybe they could save themselves that way.
I think that's right.
And they're in a bit of a quandary about what to do about their potentially reduced oil revenues over time.
And one of their strategies has been, well, we're going to start investing all over the world.
And that's going to be sort of what's going to sustain us over time is plowing this oil money into various kinds of investments.
But of course, the investment climate in the world has been quite unstable in the last five to ten years.
So whether that strategy will really save them or not is an open question.
Yeah.
Okay, now I'm going to pass on a crazy rumor, but it comes from an interesting source.
And my only purpose in telling you, Bill, is so that maybe you can ask around, see if anybody else has heard this.
I was talking with former Ambassador Dan Simpson, who's now a newspaper writer and a real expert on Pentagon policy and stuff.
And we're talking about this.
And he said that he has heard that there are U.S. American pilots are actually flying as the co-pilots with the Saudis in their bombing campaign in Yemen, that they're literally holding their hands all the way to the targets.
And I don't know if you've ever heard that.
Have you heard anything like that?
I haven't.
I mean, it's interesting that the role of U.S. Special Forces on the ground in Yemen has got such little attention.
The Washington Post mentioned it the other day, and it's sort of looming in the background.
But even absent whether they're providing pilots, they're providing targeting information, they're refueling their aircraft.
Of course, they're supplying the bombs and the aircraft that are doing the war.
So I don't know if the U.S. would take that additional step, but it's certainly worth asking anyway.
And there's been so little detailed coverage of the war that it's hard to determine some of these things.
Yeah, by the way, as far as American Special Forces on the ground, as far as I've heard, that's all with an eye toward bombing al-Qaeda targets or Islamic State targets, not in fighting the Houthis.
But then again, I guess you need guys on the ground with laser designators for the planes above anyway.
So is it JSOC?
They're fighting on both sides of the war on the ground there?
I'm not sure.
I mean, the reports have been that they're trying to fight al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and there's even allegedly some ISIS presence.
My guess is that's what they would try to do.
It's such a complex conflict, I can't say for sure what's happening on the ground.
But they do typically need somebody down there with a laser pointer to hit their targets, right?
Well, for the greatest level of accuracy, they have somebody to call on the strikes.
Of course, the Saudis haven't been particularly accurate, but it's not clear they want to be.
I think they're hitting civilian targets partly as a way to terrorize the population and also thinking somehow the Houthis will back down if they wreak enough destruction.
Well, so far I don't know of any indication of that.
I mean, there have been some negotiations, so maybe I guess if a hawk wanted to say, yeah, we bombed them to the negotiation table.
But how's that going?
We have a ceasefire with bombs still going off at this point, right?
Yes, the ceasefire is being violated.
The UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon put out a statement to that effect just about a week ago.
He's trying to get involved in the peace talks, which have not been going very far.
The Saudi side wants the Houthi to completely disarm, which I think that's a nonstarter given how vicious this war has been.
I don't think there's the trust there to do that.
And if there's not some concessions on the side of the former government and the Saudis, it's not clear that's a fair bargain for them.
So if they don't get over that hump, it's hard to see how they move to a real political settlement.
I mean, if they could actually have a real ceasefire and humanitarian aid flow, then short term that would be an improvement.
But the actual political settlement doesn't seem to be moving at the moment.
All right.
And now you do talk about in the article that there's a bit of a move in Congress to begin to check this.
John Conyers and Rand Paul, what are they doing?
Well, Conyers had an amendment to stop the transfer of cluster bombs to Yemen, which they've used in a number of cases near civilian areas.
And cluster bombs are illegal under an international treaty.
But the United States and the Saudis have not signed that treaty.
But the United States has its own kind of narrow policy that says, well, you know, the cluster bombs that are dropped should have less than a one percent dud rate because the little munitions that come out of the cluster bombs can sit on the ground unexploded and they serve almost like little landmines.
If somebody picks them up, they can lose a limb or be killed or can impede agriculture because they're in the fields and so forth.
So that particularly egregious aspect of the trade is what Conyers was going after.
And they lost by only about four votes, I believe.
So in the past, the Saudis would never be a critical vote against the Saudis, probably even make it to the floor, much less get this many votes.
So I think that's, you know, a hopeful development.
Also, in the Senate side, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Rand Paul have a bill that would stop the flow of air to ground munitions of all sorts that are being used in Yemen, unless the Saudis met a series of conditions that they're very unlikely to meet.
But, you know, that one hasn't really moved in the Senate.
But there's some groups like Oxfam and others, Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, that have been keeping a close eye and doing some of the best reporting what's going on there.
And there's other groups in the non-governmental community that are trying to make this a bigger issue.
So I think at least there's a start in that direction.
And the Saudis have a huge lobby in Washington.
And, you know, they're spending a lot of money to sort of put a gloss on this and kind of downplay what they're doing in Yemen.
Yeah.
Well, one of the real problems here, of course, is it's an election year.
So there's never room in the news cycle for a boring old story like a war in Yemen.
Most of the TV news people probably never even heard of it.
It's certainly not a political issue unless.
I mean, what it would take, I guess, would be for one of the candidates to figure out that if they could figure out a way to explain it in a way that showed just how contradictory and horrible it is, maybe they could use a little get a little bit of mileage out of it that way.
But is Donald Trump smart enough to understand the war in Yemen well enough to explain how contradictory it all is, fighting for and against al Qaeda at the same time, all this time and all this kind of thing?
No way.
So it's just a dead issue.
It's you and me, Bill.
And, you know, occasionally a report from Human Rights Watch, something like that.
Yeah.
Well, I think, you know, there's a network of people, but we're we're definitely outspent and we're it's an uphill fight for sure.
I think we should keep pounding on.
I think we might be able to break through.
But you're right.
It's not going to be part of the presidential debates because Clinton's not going to distance herself from Obama on this.
And, you know, Trump's kind of off the cuff stream of consciousness approach to foreign policy, I don't think, would be able to take this kind of thing into account.
Actually, you know, think it through terms of its consequences.
It'd be so easy to blame it on her, too.
Hey, look, everybody.
She held a one man election as a way to regime change the old sock puppet dictator.
And it led right to the war.
And now the old dictator is allied with his old enemies, brought his army's army divisions with him.
And Obama's got us flying air cover for al Qaeda against him.
And how do you like that?
That wasn't too hard, but he could.
I think I mean, he's criticized the Iraq war, the initial Bush invasion, I think partly just to hit Bush over the head with it.
And he's been critical of what's happened in Libya.
But he seems to wait until the damage is already done and it's in the headlines.
And he doesn't really seem to delve into things that aren't already well on the public agenda for discussion.
Yeah.
Boy, I miss Ron Paul.
I'll tell you what.
But anyway, no, it's good, though, as you say, this is probably the best thing Rand's ever done.
If he's saying halt all weapons sales to Saudi until they stop killing civilians in Yemen, that's a pretty good one.
Well, they're focusing on the bombs and the missiles, but I think that's a good start.
Oh, airdrop munitions, you say?
Yeah, they haven't gone against the bigger sales, which would be an even bigger fight, of course, because there's tens of billions of dollars at stake.
But anyway, I think it's moving in the right direction, at least.
And at least there's a debate in Congress, which wasn't the case for a long time.
But I think it's one of those things where people have to keep fighting the good fight and see if there's an opening politically to make a difference.
I mean, at some point, even the Saudis might decide it's not in their interest.
Of course, they've done so much damage already, it's horrifying.
But it's bleeding their treasury.
It's hurting their international reputation because other countries are more aware of this, are making a bigger deal about it.
So there might come a point where they want to cut their losses, but it doesn't seem to have happened yet.
Well, and I guess there still remains a big question as to whether Yemen will exist as a single country at the end of this thing.
It was already pretty tough to hold it together under the Saleh regime, right?
Yes.
I mean, there was a period where there was a north and southern Yemen some while ago.
The Houthis are stronger in the north and they've always felt kind of abused by the central government.
So some sort of, you know, looser federation or even a breakup of the country, it's very hard to know.
I mean, the longer this war goes on, the harder it's you can see how they could put Yemen back together again.
Yeah.
Although then again, you know, war is the health of the state.
I talked with a Yemeni reporter named Nasser Araby a couple of times and he said, oh, we're all Houthis now.
And he's not a Zaidi and he's not, you know, from the north or part of their tribe at all.
But just like all Americans supported George W. Bush with a 90 percent approval rating after September 11th kind of thing.
They're saying, hey, you know, we're all Republicans now if we're under attack.
So maybe they'll maybe the socialists and the Houthis and the Salafists and everybody will get along better than ever before after this.
Who knows?
Well, there is kind of a common outside enemy in terms of what the Saudis are doing.
So who knows what that'll do?
And I'm kind of kidding about including the Salafists there.
Yeah.
Well, that may be pushing it.
In fact, that's one more little thing I'll leave you with is what he told me.
I asked him about Al-Qaeda there and he said, oh, they're growing so strong and they're doing so much better.
And USA and Saudi are flying as their air cover.
And and that's what's happening.
It's terrible.
And I said, OK, so tell me about the Islamic State.
And he said, OK, actually, everything I just said about Al-Qaeda.
Actually, that's the Islamic State, because everybody's calling themselves that now.
And the reason why he said is because America has killed so many old Al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan and has killed so many old Al-Qaeda leaders in Yemen that now all the young bucks basically have no leadership.
So they can kind of make their own decisions about what they want to do.
And they've decided that ISIS is the hotter brand name now.
So they're going with Baghdadi and his guys.
And it's more or less the same group is now kind of converting over en masse to the Islamic State.
So look forward to more of that.
Yeah, I mean, this whole idea that any of this is going to be solved by force should be clearly debunked by the just the emergence of ISIS in the first place, which which came in many ways out of the invasion of Iraq.
So, you know, the idea that more bombing is going to fix the problem that bombing helped create, I think, is absurd.
But it seems to carry a lot of weight in some circles in Washington and the media, even at this late date.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for coming back on the show, Bill.
Really appreciate it.
Yes.
Thanks for having me.
All right.
Now, that is William D. Hartung.
He is the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy.
And he's a senior advisor to the Security Assistance Monitor.
This really great article.
Please help make it viral, guys.
Very important piece here at Loblog.com.
Why is the United States still backing Saudi Arabia in Yemen?
That's the Scott Horton Show.
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