By Mark Pocan
Donald Trump ran for president as the world’s greatest dealmaker. His first international destination as president, Saudi Arabia, is where he reportedly registered eight companies during his campaign. Yet by announcing one of the largest arms-sales deals in US history during this visit, Trump is revealing to the world a dark side to his boasts of creating jobs: He may be helping to create a famine as well.
Yes, as Saudi Arabia is reportedly “pulling out all the stops” to “dazzle and impress” the president – not to mention the chief executives of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Dow Chemical and Blackstone who have followed Trump to the country – the Saudi kingdom Is using US-made planes and bombs to enforce a blockade of food and aid on its neighbor, Yemen, the poorest country in the region.
Last month, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres implored the world to ensure “the rapid and unimpeded passage of humanitarian aid by air, sea and land” into the country to alleviate the suffering of 17 million food-insecure Yemenis caught in “the world’s largest Hunger crisis, “which is” man-made “and is starving and crippling” an entire generation.”
Yet Guterres’s plea appears to be falling on deaf ears in Saudi Arabia. As my Senate colleague Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) maintained this week, “The Saudis are secretly trying to create a famine inside Yemen in order to essentially starve the Yemenis to the negotiating table” – and “the United States is participating.”
In April, a bipartisan group of 54 of my House colleges and I expressed deep concern that incidents within the Trump administration are pushing for even deeper US military involvement and escalation in this destructive Saudi-led war, which has directly killed thousands of civilians in discrimination Airstrikes over the past two years. The Saudis’ seemingly deliberate bombarding of roads, bridges, ports and cranes contributes to the death of a Yemeni child every 10 minutes, every day, according to the U.N.
Trump has an opportunity to save millions of innocent lives – this may be the most consequential deal he has ever negotiated – and there’s every reason to worry that he’ll botch it by handing away billions of dollars in arms without extracting any concessions from the Saudis. That’s why the Constitution has granted Congress both the power of the purse and authority over war. Democrats and Republicans are increasingly alarming that in Yemen, the Saudis are using U.S. planes to drop US bombs, with U.S. pilots refueling them in midair and providing them with targeting assistance. This has become a U.S. war with no end in sight, a war that has never been publicly debated or congressionally authorized and that has nothing to do with fighting al-Qaeda – on the contrary, this war is strengthening al-Qaeda.
