Trump to resume precision munitions deliveries to Saudis: officials

[inanna]

Source: Reuters

Tue Jun 13, 2017 | 1:55pm EDT

The Trump administration notified Congress last week that it soon plans to begin delivering precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia under a 2015 weapons deal, congressional officials said on Tuesday.

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote Tuesday on a resolution to block portions of a new, separate arms sale to Saudi Arabia, agreed during a visit there by President Donald Trump in May.

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Republican Trump's predecessor Barack Obama, a Democrat, suspended the planned sale of precision-guided munitions in December because of concerns over civilian casualties in Yemen, where the civil war pits Iran-allied Houthi rebels against the government backed by a Saudi-led Arab coalition.

Trump, however, has said he wants to encourage weapons sales as a way to create jobs in the United States.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-saudi-arms-congress-idUSKBN1942GG?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews

[Eliot Rosewater]

1. Is getting a bribe, billions.

[Igel]

2. But Yemen's a tough call.

Both sides are losers; I can't really support either on their merits. In the chaos, a third side, AQ, has established some territory, so chaos is bad. While I can't support either of the two primary sides, I have a dispreference for AQ.

At the same time, the rebels are backed by Iran, in turn backed by Russia--notice how "we" think the fake news about Qatar was planted by Russia, which immediately had Russia and two quasi-allies, Turkey and Iran, jump to Qatar's rescue. If the rebels win, Russia wins.

If nobody wins, the population loses. Shipping into and out of the country is a problem. Ports have been damaged, sometimes intentionally so: Yes, they're used for importing food and medicine, but they're also used for importing weapons. So they're often fought over and if one side can't have a port it might damage it. Yemen's been a net importer of food for a long, long time. Ideally, a country should be able to feed its population. Yemen can't--too many people, not enough production from the arable land it has. It lacks water. The war's not had so much of an effect on production as on the import of the roughly 80% of the food necessary for the population's survival.

Now, an Iranian ally in Yemen would mean that Iran could shut down the Persian Gulf and Yemen could shut down the Red Sea. Both are important for the shipment of Arabian oil. If there's uncertainty about that, it means the world would be more reliant on Russian oil.

If there's less demand for Arab oil, those countries are going to become unstable. There's this nice bit of romanticism that their population's would immediately rise up and demand a liberal democracy, but they'd wind up with a lot of instability, repression, and civil war. And if the population rose up, well, consider what happened in Egypt, Libya, Syria. The current situation not so good, but with instability there's a very large chance for things to get worse and a very small chance for them to get better.