Trump bypasses Congress on Saudi arms sales, citing Iran threat

Fox News.com ^ | May 24, 2019 | Alex Pappas

[Kaslin]

The Trump administration on Friday informed Congress the president will invoke his emergency authority to bypass lawmakers' approval of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, citing the threat to the United States from Iran.

The move comes as Trump announced plans Friday to send about 1,600 troops to the Middle East amid rising tensions with Iran.

"Iran’s malign activity poses a fundamental threat to the stability of the Middle East and to Americans at home and abroad. We took this step of prudent diplomatic deterrence to augment our partners’ long-term capacity for self-defense and threat mitigation," a senior State Department official told Fox News.

The official added, "Congress won’t act, but we will. "

The administration is using an emergency loophole in the Arms Export Control Act to move ahead with sales of $7 billion in precision-guided munitions, other bombs, ammo and aircraft maintenance support to Saudi Arabia, along with the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, without lawmakers' approval.

The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Republican Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, said he was "reviewing and analyzing the legal justification for this action and the associated implications."

[bert]

If you paid attention, you would know that Usama bin Ladin fled Saudi Arabia to found Al Qeada.

AQ has never been in SAudi Arabia as a meaningful force. AQ is in fact the enemy of Saudi Arabia.

[Shadow44]

Yet Al-Qaeda receives support and assistance from elements of the Saudi government and Intelligence Service, especially in Syria today.

[Zhang Fei]

[And why should we care if Iran takes its natural place as hegemon of the region?]

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Why would we indulge your preference that Iran should control 40% of the world’s oil and be able to target us with nukes and ICBM’s?

[Shadow44]

Iran doesn’t have the force projection to control the realistically control all of the oilfields, and they don’t have ICBMs. Even if they did, why would they use them? Because they’re so crazy that they don’t mind being nuked off the face of the Earth?

[Zhang Fei]

[Yet Al-Qaeda receives support and assistance from elements of the Saudi government and Intelligence Service, especially in Syria today.]

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Just as China and Russia receive support and assistance from elements of the US government and intelligence service. Countries are not monolithic.

[Shadow44]

Al-Qaeda is a Saudi proxy army. It was made up of mujahedeen which nobody disputes were Saudi proxies, and Bin Laden’s family is tied to the hip of the Saudi Royal Family. Then suddenly 9/11 happens and Al-Qaeda hates the Saudi government, despite being armed and funding to engage in advancing the same geo-strategic interests and receiving continuous support from the Saudi government.

[Celtic Conservative]

Well, the Binladin group will have a hard time ginning up terrorists because the Saudis just nationalized a good chunk of it.

CC

[Zhang Fei]

[Al-Qaeda is a Saudi proxy army. It was made up of mujahedeen which nobody disputes were Saudi proxies, and Bin Laden’s family is tied to the hip of the Saudi Royal Family. Then suddenly 9/11 happens and Al-Qaeda hates the Saudi government, despite being armed and funding to engage in advancing the same geo-strategic interests and receiving continuous support from the Saudi government.]

---

What geo-strategic interest of the Saudi royals was al Qaeda advancing when it struck the US on 9/11? Basically, al Qaeda put the Saudi royals in the cross-hairs.

The 9/11 attacks were a supersized coup attempt against the Saudi royal family by bin Laden. The idea behind the attacks was that the US would invade Saudi Arabia and topple the al-Saud family, thereby uniting the Muslim world behind al Qaeda’s plan to make bin Laden the first Caliph since the Ottomans were removed from power by Kemal Ataturk. Assuming al Qaeda was able to eject the US from Saudi Arabia the way the Afghans ejected the Soviets, the bin Ladin family would graduate, from mere retainers to a royal family, to being the royal family.

In addition, Saudi Arabia also suffered a huge hit to its favorability rating among Americans in the wake of 9/11. It went from 47% favorable and 46% unfavorable in Feb 2001 to 29% favorable and 67% unfavorable in Feb 2019, almost 18 years after the 9/11 attacks. In a traditional Arab society where collective responsibility is pretty much a given, there’s no question that the bin Ladin family has a lot to answer for.

[faithhopecharity]

thanks for all that, very interesting

the one item we definitely don’t need is all these Islamics in USA!
the dangerous results of that are so obvious already...
and growing by the day
as more and more and more flood into America

[Shadow44]

Look at what happened afterwards. Iraq was invaded, and the US was spending billions to reshape the Middle East. The plan failed because Iraq turned into a quagmire and killed American support for more countries to be invaded. Instead, no war with Iran happened and the power vacuum was filled by the Iranians.

If there’s anything to be learned by this, is that these interventions are doing nothing but bankrupting and weakening us.

[Zhang Fei]

If there’s anything to be learned by this, is that these interventions are doing nothing but bankrupting and weakening us.

Bankrupting? That's way exaggerated. Government spending (federal, state and local) is about 40% of the economy. All of our spending in the Middle East and Afghanistan combined* is $75b a year, or about 0.375% of the $20T economy. It won't come close to bankrupting us. We spent the equivalent of 200% of the economy over 4 years of WWII and we came out just fine.

Liberals scream** about defense expenditures all the time, and I used to believe them. Then I looked at the numbers and realized that they're full of crap. Note that when Eisenhower talked about the military industrial complex, we were spending 10% of economic output on defense. We're now spending 4.5%.

* Page 16 shows a line-by-line itemization.

** To a liberal, every dollar of the economy not spent on the welfare state or hiking civil service salaries is a dollar wasted.

[Shadow44]

If you think the trillions of dollars we spent fighting those wars was better spent than on domestic issues, than I don’t know what to say.

We could have built the Wall dozens of times over with it.

[Zhang Fei]

[Al-Qaeda is a Saudi proxy army. It was made up of mujahedeen which nobody disputes were Saudi proxies, and Bin Laden’s family is tied to the hip of the Saudi Royal Family. Then suddenly 9/11 happens and Al-Qaeda hates the Saudi government, despite being armed and funding to engage in advancing the same geo-strategic interests and receiving continuous support from the Saudi government.]

---

The neocons who advanced this argument are full of crap. And when I say neocons, I don’t mean Jews. I mean people who think inside every foreigner is an American struggling to get out, and one man one vote will usher in American-style democracy. In Egypt, they did that and they got the al Qaeda’s civilian wing (the Muslim Brotherhood) ruling the country. My point being that people have different customs and traditions handed down from generation to generation, along with mother’s milk, that have nothing to do with our narratives or even the ruling government’s narratives. Look at how quickly the Soviet Union devolved into over a dozen countries despite over a hundred years of Russification efforts, enforced with gulags that killed tens of millions and forcible relocation efforts that took troublesome minorities thousands of miles from their ancestral lands.

Arabs don’t take their marching orders from the government. That’s why they make such lousy soldiers, from the perspective of the ruler. Nobody wants to die for the leader - everyone wants to be last man standing. Read a Middle Eastern history book about all the different regimes that have come and gone and it’s full of intra-regime intrigue - fathers killing sons, siblings killing siblings, sons killing fathers, grand viziers killing sultans, generals rising in revolt, etc.

The idea that the Saudi royals are feeding their subjects Wahhabism and making them radical rather than singing along to avoid being killed is a joke. In these places, every man thinks he could be sultan, and pointing to the irreligion of the incumbents is an excellent way to rally followers and raise the flag of revolt.

[Zhang Fei]

[If you think the trillions of dollars we spent fighting those wars was better spent than on domestic issues, than I don’t know what to say.

We could have built the Wall dozens of times over with it.]

---

We have plenty of money for the wall. It’s pocket change. The problem is not and has never been money. Congress simply doesn’t want it. Neither does Trump. If Trump had wanted it, he would have forced Congress to approve it along with the tax cuts, which the GOP really, really wanted. But he did not. If we want a wall, we are gonna need to primary people like Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn *and* replace them with reliable wall-supporting Republicans.

The Chamber of Commerce keeps funding incumbent RINO’s and multiple primary opponents to the point that no single challenger can beat the incumbent RINO. If you have $10m to spare to fund a PAC that attacks Graham while simultaneously promoting one of his challengers, I suspect you could probably defeat Graham while electing that challenger. But it’s a lot of dough, and there are a lot of open borders RINO’s.

[Shadow44]

The idea that the Saudi royals are feeding their subjects Wahhabism and making them radical rather than singing along to avoid being killed is a joke. The Saudis did radicalize their subjects. They drove out the Hashemites when they conquered Mecca and imposed Wahabbism. And they have spent billions of dollars promoting Wahabbism across the globe.The Sauds were the original patrons of Al-Wahhab himself. I'm not suggesting Arabs would be like Europeans if the Saudis were overthrown, but there's not much daylight between Al-Qaeda and the Saudi government. They have been proxies for them for years.

[Trumpisourlastchance]

There is no threat to the United States from Iran. That’s a stupid joke.

And billions more in weapons to the Saudi Barbarians is a disgrace.

[Trumpisourlastchance]

All vomit-inducing and disgraceful.

[Zhang Fei]

[The Saudis did radicalize their subjects. They drove out the Hashemites when they conquered Mecca and imposed Wahabbism. And they have spent billions of dollars promoting Wahabbism across the globe.The Sauds were the original patrons of Al-Wahhab himself. I’m not suggesting Arabs would be like Europeans if the Saudis were overthrown, but there’s not much daylight between Al-Qaeda and the Saudi government. They have been proxies for them for years. ]

---

The Saudi royals exported their nutjobs to minister to foreign lands rather than rebel against them. They didn’t impose Wahhabism on their subjects - they allied with the Wahhabis who made up those subjects. The Hashemites lost despite British support because they were insufficiently devout. And, frankly, the Hashemites in the Arabian peninsula seem to be just unfit to rule. Iraq’s King Faisal II was overthrown and put up against a wall. Jordan’s King Hussein would have been overthrown without American backing during Black September. Bottom line being that the al-Sauds are probably the primary reason that Saudi Arabia did not become a Soviet client state like Egypt, Iraq and Syria during the Cold War.

[IndispensableDestiny]

I don’t know why he would go this route other than to piss off Congress. To date, no sale has been successfully blocked by Congress, only partially. For Congress to disapprove, it has to pass a Joint Resolution and then override a Presidential veto. Not likely to happen. The “partial” block was when the Reagan administration wanted to sell EWACS, Sidewinder missiles, and Stinger missles to the Saudis. Reagan compromised and did not sell the Stingers.

[Zhang Fei]

[I don’t know why he would go this route other than to piss off Congress.]

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Because the Saudis really need this weaponry? The 80’s sale was during a time of peace. Obama handed tens of billions of dollars to the Iranians, money they’re using to fund the Yemeni rebels and pay for the ballistic missiles they’re sending towards Saudi cities. For reasons of internal security, the Saudis can’t have overly competent commanders, so they waste/lose a lot of equipment. But the alternative is to risk the fate of Iraq’s Faisal II & family, so it’s a small price to pay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faisal_II_of_Iraq