Thread: Trump's indefensible defense of Saudi Arabia

When Americans build the products for our allies to use, it enables our allies to fight their own wars, to defend themselves, reduces the need for American lives to be spent defending them and employs American Workers at some of the best wages and benefits in our country to excel. There was a day when the United States was called upon to fight every frigging war around the world defending our allies, the more allies who can defend themselves using our good products is a win-win-win for every single American and if that bothers someone, then so be it, because one thing is for sure, Americans still do not know how to fight and actually win a war in the Middle East or even Asia for that matter.

The Military-Industrial Complex Is on Corporate Welfare

The Pentagon will get an extra $165 billion over the next two years—that’s even more than Donald Trump asked for.

By William D. Hartung

FEBRUARY 27, 2018




President Trump at Andrews Air Force Base on July 22, 2017. (AP Photo / Carolyn Kaster)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com.

Imagine for a moment a scheme in which American taxpayers were taken to the cleaners to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and there was barely a hint of criticism or outrage. Imagine as well that the White House and a majority of the politicians in Washington, no matter the party, acquiesced in the arrangement. In fact, the annual quest to boost Pentagon spending into the stratosphere regularly follows that very scenario, assisted by predictions of imminent doom from industry-funded hawks with a vested interest in increased military outlays.
Most Americans are probably aware that the Pentagon spends a lot of money, but it’s unlikely they grasp just how huge those sums really are. All too often, astonishingly lavish military budgets are treated as if they were part of the natural order, like death or taxes.

The figures contained in the recent budget deal that kept Congress open, as well as in President Trump’s budget proposal for 2019, are a case in point: $700 billion for the Pentagon and related programs in 2018 and $716 billion the following year. Remarkably, such numbers far exceeded even the Pentagon’s own expansive expectations. According to Donald Trump, admittedly not the most reliable source in all cases, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis reportedly said, “Wow, I can’t believe we got everything we wanted”—a rare admission from the head of an organization whose only response to virtually any budget proposal is to ask for more.

The public reaction to such staggering Pentagon budget hikes was muted, to put it mildly. Unlike last year’s tax giveaway to the rich, throwing near-record amounts of tax dollars at the Department of Defense generated no visible public outrage. Yet those tax cuts and Pentagon increases are closely related. The Trump administration’s pairing of the two mimics the failed approach of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s—only more so. It’s a phenomenon I’ve termed “Reaganomics on steroids.” Reagan’s approach yielded oceans of red ink and a severe weakening of the social safety net. It also provoked such a strong pushback that he later backtracked by raising taxes and set the stage for sharp reductions in nuclear weapons.

Donald Trump’s retrograde policies on immigration, women’s rights, racial justice, LGBT rights, and economic inequality have spawned an impressive and growing resistance. It remains to be seen whether his generous treatment of the Pentagon at the expense of basic human needs will spur a similar backlash.

Of course, it’s hard to even get a bead on what’s being lavished on the Pentagon when much of the media coverage failed to drive home just how enormous these sums actually are. A rare exception was an Associated Press story headlined “Congress, Trump Give the Pentagon a Budget the Likes of Which It Has Never Seen.” This was certainly far closer to the truth than claims like that of Mackenzie Eaglen of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, which over the years has housed such uber-hawks as Dick Cheney and John Bolton. She described the new budget as a “modest year-on-year increase.” If that’s the case, one shudders to think what an immodest increase might look like.

THE PENTAGON WINS BIG

So let’s look at the money.

CURRENT ISSUE


Though the Pentagon’s budget was already through the roof, it will get an extra $165 billion over the next two years, thanks to the congressional budget deal reached earlier this month. To put that figure in context, it was tens of billions of dollars more than Donald Trump had asked for last spring to “rebuild” the US military (as he put it). It even exceeded the figures, already higher than Trump’s, Congress had agreed to last December. It brings total spending on the Pentagon and related programs for nuclear weapons to levels higher than those reached during the Korean and Vietnam wars in the 1950s and 1960s, or even at the height of Ronald Reagan’s vaunted military buildup of the 1980s. Only in two years of Barack Obama’s presidency, when there were roughly 150,000 US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, or about seven times current levels of personnel deployed there, was spending higher.

Ben Freeman of the Center for International Policy put the new Pentagon budget numbers in perspective when he pointed out that just the approximately $80 billion annual increase in the department’s top line between 2017 and 2019 will be double the current budget of the State Department; higher than the gross domestic products of more than 100 countries; and larger than the entire military budget of any country in the world, except China’s.

Democrats signed on to that congressional budget as part of a deal to blunt some of the most egregious Trump administration cuts proposed last spring. The administration, for example, kept the State Department’s budget from being radically slashed and it reauthorized the imperiled Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) for another 10 years. In the process, however, the Democrats also threw millions of young immigrants under the bus by dropping an insistence that any new budget protect the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or “Dreamers,” program. Meanwhile, the majority of Republican fiscal conservatives were thrilled to sign off on a Pentagon increase that, combined with the Trump tax cut for the rich, funds ballooning deficits as far as the eye can see—a total of $7.7 trillion worth of them over the next decade.

While domestic spending fared better in the recent congressional budget deal than it would have if Trump’s draconian plan for 2018 had been enacted, it still lags far behind what Congress is investing in the Pentagon. And calculations by the National Priorities Project indicate that the Department of Defense is slated to be an even bigger winner in Trump’s 2019 budget blueprint. Its share of the discretionary budget, which includes virtually everything the government does other than programs like Medicare and Social Security, will mushroom to a once-unimaginable 61 cents on the dollar, a hefty boost from the already startling 54 cents on the dollar in the final year of the Obama administration.

The skewed priorities in Trump’s latest budget proposal are fueled in part by the administration’s decision to embrace the Pentagon increases Congress agreed to last month, while tossing that body’s latest decisions on non-military spending out the window. Although Congress is likely to rein in the administration’s most extreme proposals, the figures are stark indeed—a proposed cut of $120 billion in the domestic spending levels both parties agreed to. The biggest reductions include a 41% cut in funding for diplomacy and foreign aid; a 36% cut in funding for energy and the environment; and a 35% cut in housing and community development. And that’s just the beginning. The Trump administration is also preparing to launch full-scale assaults on food stamps, Medicaid, and Medicare. It’s war on everything except the US military.

CORPORATE WELFARE

The recent budget plans have brought joy to the hearts of one group of needy Americans: the top executives of major weapons contractors like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. They expect a bonanza from the skyrocketing Pentagon expenditures. Don’t be surprised if the CEOs of these five firms give themselves nice salary boosts, something to truly justify their work, rather than the paltry $96 million they drew as a group in 2016 (the most recent year for which full statistics are available).

And keep in mind that, like all other US-based corporations, those military-industrial behemoths will benefit richly from the Trump administration’s slashing of the corporate tax rate. According to one respected industry analyst, a good portion of this windfall will go towards bonuses and increased dividends for company shareholders rather than investments in new and better ways to defend the United States. In short, in the Trump era, Lockheed Martin and its cohorts are guaranteed to make money coming and going.

Items that snagged billions in new funding in Trump’s proposed 2019 budget included Lockheed Martin’s overpriced, underperforming F-35 aircraft, at $10.6 billion; Boeing’s F-18 “Super Hornet,” which was in the process of being phased out by the Obama administration but is now written in for $2.4 billion; Northrop Grumman’s B-21 nuclear bomber at $2.3 billion; General Dynamics’ Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine at $3.9 billion; and $12 billion for an array of missile-defense programs that will redound to the benefit of… you guessed it: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing, among other companies. These are just a few of the dozens of weapons programs that will be feeding the bottom lines of such companies in the next two years and beyond. For programs still in their early stages, like that new bomber and the new ballistic missile submarine, their banner budgetary years are yet to come.

In explaining the flood of funding that enables a company like Lockheed Martin to reap $35 billion per year in government dollars, defense analyst Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group noted that “diplomacy is out; air strikes are in… In this sort of environment, it’s tough to keep a lid on costs. If demand goes up, prices don’t generally come down. And, of course, it’s virtually impossible to kill stuff. You don’t have to make any kind of tough choices when there’s such a rising tide.”

PENTAGON PORK VERSUS HUMAN SECURITY

Loren Thompson is a consultant to many of those weapons contractors. His think tank, the Lexington Institute, also gets contributions from the arms industry. He caught the spirit of the moment when he praised the administration’s puffed-up Pentagon proposal for using the Defense Department budget as a jobs creator in key states, including the crucial swing state of Ohio, which helped propel Donald Trump to victory in 2016. Thompson was particularly pleased with a plan to ramp up General Dynamics’s production of M-1 tanks in Lima, Ohio, in a factory whose production line the Army had tried to put on hold just a few years ago because it was already drowning in tanks and had no conceivable use for more of them.

Thompson argues that the new tanks are needed to keep up with Russia’s production of armored vehicles, a dubious assertion with a decidedly Cold War flavor to it. His claim is backed up, of course, by the administration’s new National Security Strategy, which targets Russia and China as the most formidable threats to the United States. Never mind that the likely challenges posed by these two powers—cyberattacks in the Russian case and economic expansion in the Chinese one—have nothing to do with how many tanks the US Army possesses.
Trump wants to create jobs, jobs, jobs he can point to, and pumping up the military-industrial complex must seem like the path of least resistance to that end in present-day Washington. Under the circumstances, what does it matter that virtually any other form of spending would create more jobs and not saddle Americans with weaponry we don’t need?

If past performance offers any indication, none of the new money slated to pour into the Pentagon will make anyone safer. As Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies has noted, there is a danger that the Pentagon will just get “fatter not stronger” as its worst spending habits are reinforced by a new gusher of dollars that relieves its planners of making any reasonably hard choices at all.

The list of wasteful expenditures is already staggeringly long and early projections are that bureaucratic waste at the Pentagon will amount to $125 billion over the next five years. Among other things, the Defense Department already employs a shadow work force of more than 600,000 private contractors whose responsibilities overlap significantly with work already being done by government employees. Meanwhile, sloppy buying practices regularly result in stories like the recent ones on the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency losing track of how it spent $800 million and how two American commands were unable to account for $500 million meant for the war on drugs in the Greater Middle East and Africa.

Add to this the $1.5 trillion slated to be spent on F-35s that the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight has noted may never be ready for combat and the unnecessary “modernization” of the US nuclear arsenal, including a new generation of nuclear-armed bombers, submarines, and missiles at a minimum cost of $1.2 trillion over the next three decades. In other words, a large part of the Pentagon’s new funding will do much to fuel good times in the military-industrial complex but little to help the troops or defend the country.

Most important of all, this flood of new funding, which could crush a generation of Americans under a mountain of debt, will make it easier to sustain the seemingly endless seven wars that the United States is fighting in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. So call this one of the worst investments in history, ensuring as it does failed wars to the horizon.

It would be a welcome change in 21st-century America if the reckless decision to throw yet more unbelievable sums of money at a Pentagon already vastly overfunded sparked a serious discussion about America’s hyper-militarized foreign policy. A national debate about such matters in the run-up to the 2018 and 2020 elections could determine whether it continues to be business-as-usual at the Pentagon or whether the largest agency in the federal government is finally reined in and relegated to an appropriately defensive posture.

https://www.thenation.com/article/the-military-industrial-complex-is-on-corporate-welfare/

The US is Selling Weapons to Nearly Half the Countries in the World


By Samuel Oakford Feb 22, 2016

The global trade in arms continued to grow over the last half decade, buoyed by an appetite for weapons in the Middle East and a near doubling of exports from China.

Figures released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, a monitoring group, showed that even as the total trade in weapons grew by 14 percent between 2011 and 2015, the two largest exporters, Russia and the US, managed to capture even greater portions of the pie. American exports made up a full third of the global trade, up from 29 percent between 2006 and 2010. According to a congressional report, US arms sales increased by more than a third in 2014 alone, to $36.2 billion from 26.7 the year prior. SIPRI reported that over the last five years, the US sold "major" weapons to at least 96 countries — just a hair under half the total number of UN member states.

Russia meanwhile captured a quarter of all exports in SIPRI's most recent assessment, up from 22 percent in the previous reporting period.

In line with longstanding security alliances in the Gulf, the US sent nearly 10 percent of its total exports between 2011 and 2015 to Saudi Arabia, and a further 9.1 percent to the United Arab Emirates. Both countries are members of the coalition that has intervened militarily in Yemen for nearly a year, largely with American-supplied aircraft and munitions. According to the Congressional Research Service, the US sold them more than $90 billion in armaments and weapons systems since 2010.

Related: The Islamic State Is Using Weapons From the US — And More Than 24 Other Countries


Overall, imports to the Middle East rose by 61 percent; Saudi Arabia and the UAE were the second and fourth-biggest global importers between 2011 and 2015. Elsewhere in the region, Qatar's imports grew by 279 percent, while Egypt's increased by 37. Weapons purchases by Iraq, which is battling Islamic State militants, rose 83 percent more during the past five years than between 2006 and 2011, continuing a steady flow that began following the US-led invasion of the country in 2003.


Watch the VICE News documentary Rebranding the AK-47: A Weapon of Peace:

"Despite low oil prices, large deliveries of arms to the Middle East are scheduled to continue as part of contracts signed in the past five years," said Pieter Wezeman, Senior Researcher at SIPRI, in a statement.

Russia sent nearly 40 percent of all its exports to India, followed by sales to China and Vietnam. The latter increased its spending on foreign arms by a whopping 699 percent, catapulting their rank among importers from 43rd to eighth over the past five years. Nearly all of the weapons delivered to Vietnam came from Russia, including 8 combat aircraft, 4 submarines and 4 "fast attack craft." SIPRI assessed that Vietnam's stepped-up purchasing reflected fears of Beijing's growing power in Asia and territorial claims in the South China Sea that overlap with its own.


While China still only accounts for 5.9 percent of global arms exports, its share is growing faster that practically any other state. Between 2006 and 2015, it's share of exports rose 88 percent. Most were destined for other Asian countries, including Pakistan. SIPRI noted that Beijing "is increasingly capable of producing its own advanced weapons and has become less dependent on arms imports," which fell 25 percent in the recent reporting period. But China, wrote researchers, "remains partly dependent on imports for some key weapons and components, including large transport aircraft and helicopters, and engines for aircraft, vehicles and ships."

For the first time, China's weapons exports exceeded those of France, long one of Europe's top arms sellers. From 7.1 percent of global exports between 2011 and 2015, France captured 5.6 percent in the last five years. Germany's share fell even further, from 11 percent to 4.7. The UK's share increased marginally, from 4.1 percent to 4.5 percent. Arms imports to Europe, meanwhile, fell by 41 percent.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/...s-in-the-world

The Islamic State Is Using Weapons From the US — And More Than 24 Other Countries

By Samuel Oakford Dec 10, 2015



The Islamic State (IS) has used weapons from more than 25 different countries — including the US — to commit atrocities in Iraq and Syria, according to new research released this week.

In a report that itemizes the expansive military resources that have found their way into the hands of IS fighters, Amnesty International called on the government in Baghdad, as well as supplier states, to "implement far stricter control" on the transfer and deployment of weapons in order to prevent the militant group from seizing troves of arms and continuing the cycle of violence.

One of the largest such arms seizures took place in June 2014, when IS took control of Mosul, Iraq's second largest city. As Iraqi soldiers fled the city, they left behind "a windfall of internationally manufactured arms," including American-produced weapons and military vehicles, which were subsequently employed to capture other areas.

Amnesty determined that the bulk of conventional weapons — pistols, small arms, machine guns, artillery, mortar shells and anti-tank weapons — deployed by IS are at least 20 years old, with many dating to the 1970s, and '80s during Iraq's disastrous war with Iran. "This was a seminal moment in the development of the modern arms market," wrote Amnesty. "At least 34 different countries supplied Iraq with weapons — 28 of those same states were also simultaneously supplying arms to Iran."

Systemic corruption and lawlessness in the aftermath of the US invasion of the country in 2003 further spread arms into the hands of countless groups that cropped up to fight American forces and, eventually, each other. Although the UN implemented an arms embargo following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the government in Baghdad began importing weapons after the defeat of Saddam Hussein. Much of those imports were never properly secured, while others simply vanished.

'A significant portion come from what the US sold Iraq or enabled Iraq to buy from other parties.'

In the decade since, arms kept flowing, often in the form of American shipments destined for the weak government in Baghdad. The US sold billions of dollars worth of tanks, aircraft, and missile units to Iraq. By 2014, the country had received more than $500 million in small arms and ammunition alone from the US since its invasion.

Between 2003 and 2007, the US and its coalition partners sent more than 1 million "infantry weapons and pistols with millions of rounds of ammunition to the Iraqi armed forces," wrote Amnesty's researchers. "Hundreds of thousands of those weapons went missing and are still unaccounted for."

"All of this led Iraq and the surrounding areas just being flooded with weapons," said Sunjeev Bery, Amnesty's Middle East and North Africa advocacy director. "We can safely say that a significant portion of the weapons [controlled by IS] were drawn from prior to the US invasion, but a significant portion come from what the US sold Iraq or enabled Iraq to buy from other parties."

In addition to the sheer volume of weapons that flowed into Iraq after the US invasion, Amnesty also cited the American-led coalition's choice to disband Iraq's 400,000-strong army, meaning "tens of thousands of individuals returned home or went into hiding with their weapons."

Watch the VICE News documentary Rebranding the AK-47: A Weapon of Peace:

Amnesty researchers, working with the arms monitoring group Conflict Armament Research, carried out interviews and reviewed thousands of videos and pictures depicting IS' weapons, along with using other open source resources.

According to the report, IS fighters are currently equipped with numerous rifle models, predominantly Kalashnikovs, but also Chinese, German, and Belgian guns, as well as US military-issued M16 rifles. They have Austrian and Russian sniper rifles, as well as Russian, Chinese, and Belgian machine guns. The group's more advanced weaponry includes anti-tank missiles of Russian, Chinese, and European provenance, as well as Chinese surface-to-air missiles.


"The quantity and range of IS stocks of arms and ammunition ultimately reflect decades of irresponsible arms transfers to Iraq and multiple failures by the US-led occupation administration to manage arms deliveries and stocks securely, as well as endemic corruption in Iraq itself," said the report.

Bery said amid the current climate, in which members of the US-led anti-IS coalition are changing even their own domestic laws to combat the group, there is fear that the cycle of arms infusions into Iraq will only drag on for years to come, with little oversight. Already this year, in neighboring Syria, al Qaeda-linked militants have seized the stockpiles of American trained forces meant to be battling IS.

"There will be a risk of simply repeating the very scenario that enabled the Islamic State to get ahold of all the guns that it acquired," said Bery. "There is a risk of a never-ending cycle."

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/...ther-countries

Originally Posted by MW

The Military-Industrial Complex Is on Corporate Welfare

The Pentagon will get an extra $165 billion over the next two years—that’s even more than Donald Trump asked for.

The figures contained in the recent budget deal that kept Congress open, as well as in President Trump’s budget proposal for 2019, are a case in point: $700 billion for the Pentagon and related programs in 2018 and $716 billion the following year. Remarkably, such numbers far exceeded even the Pentagon’s own expansive expectations. According to Donald Trump, admittedly not the most reliable source in all cases, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis reportedly said, “Wow, I can’t believe we got everything we wanted”—a rare admission from the head of an organization whose only response to virtually any budget proposal is to ask for more.

All that and we can't have a Wall to deter the invaders, and Mattis shows his disdain at sending troops to the border.

Saudis Want a U.S. Nuclear Deal. Can They Be Trusted Not to Build a Bomb?

November 23, 2018 theadamschronicler Featured, Global News, Middle East, National Security,North America, U.S. News
Source: Vox

Post Views: 15

Before Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was implicated by the C.I.A. in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, American intelligence agencies were trying to solve a separate mystery: Was the prince laying the groundwork for building an atomic bomb?
The 33-year-old heir to the Saudi throne had been overseeing a negotiation with the Energy Department and the State Department to get the United States to sell designs for nuclear power plants to the kingdom. The deal was worth upward of $80 billion, depending on how many plants Saudi Arabia decided to build.

But there is a hitch: Saudi Arabia insists on producing its own nuclear fuel, even though it could buy it more cheaply abroad, according to American and Saudi officials familiar with the negotiations. That raised concerns in Washington that the Saudis could divert their fuel into a covert weapons project — exactly what the United States and its allies feared Iran was doing before it reached the 2015 nuclear accord, which President Trump has since abandoned.

Prince Mohammed set off alarms when he declared earlier this year, in the midst of the negotiation, that if Iran, Saudi Arabia’s fiercest rival, “developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.” His negotiators stirred more worries by telling the Trump administration that Saudi Arabia would refuse to sign an agreement that would allow United Nations inspectors to look anywhere in the country for signs that the Saudis might be working on a bomb, American officials said.

Asked in Congress last March about his secret negotiations with the Saudis, Energy Secretary Rick Perry dodged a question about whether the Trump administration would insist that the kingdom be banned from producing nuclear fuel.

Eight months later, the administration will not say where the negotiations stand. Now lurking behind the transaction is the question of whether a Saudi government that assassinated Mr. Khashoggi and repeatedly changed its story about the murder can be trusted with nuclear fuel and technology. Such fuel can be used for benign or military purposes: If uranium is enriched to 4 percent purity, it can fuel a power plant; at 90 percent it can be used for a bomb.

Privately, administration officials argue that if the United States does not sell the nuclear equipment to Saudi Arabia someone else will — maybe Russia, China or South Korea.
They stress that assuring that the Saudis use a reactor designed by Westinghouse, the only American competitor for the deal, fits with Mr. Trump’s insistence that jobs, oil and the strategic relationship between Riyadh and Washington are all far more important than the death of a Saudi dissident who was living, and writing newspaper columns, in the United States.

Under the rules that govern nuclear accords of this kind, Congress would have the opportunity to reject any agreement with Saudi Arabia, though the House and Senate would each need a veto-proof majority to stop Mr. Trump’s plans.

“It is one thing to sell them planes, but another to sell them nukes, or the capacity to build them,’’ said Representative Brad Sherman, Democrat of California and a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Following Mr. Khashoggi’s death, Mr. Sherman has led the charge to change the law and make it harder for the Trump administration to reach a nuclear agreement with Saudi Arabia. He described it as one of the most effective ways to punish Prince Mohammed.
“A country that can’t be trusted with a bone saw shouldn’t be trusted with nuclear weapons,” Mr. Sherman said, referring to Mr. Khashoggi’s brutal killing in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul last month.

Nuclear experts said Prince Mohammed should have been disqualified from receiving nuclear help as soon as he raised the prospect of acquiring atomic weapons to counter Iran.

“We have never before contemplated, let alone concluded, a nuclear cooperation agreement with a country that was threatening to leave the nonproliferation treaty, even provisionally,” said William Tobey, a senior official in the Energy Department during the Bush administration who has testified about the risks of the agreement with Saudi Arabia.

He was referring to the crown prince’s threat to match any Iranian nuclear weapon — a step that would require the Saudis to either publicly abandon their commitments under the nonproliferation treaty or secretly race for the bomb.

The Trump administration declined to provide an update on the negotiations, which were intense enough that Mr. Perry went to Riyadh in late 2017. Within the last several months, a senior State Department official engaged in further discussions over the deal in Europe.

The Saudi energy ministry said in a statement: “The Saudi government has repeatedly confirmed that every component of the Saudi atomic energy program is strictly for civil and peaceful uses. The Saudi government has decided to move with this project not only to diversify energy sources but also to contribute to our economy. Saudi Arabia has repeatedly called for a Middle East free from all forms of nuclear weapons.”

Saudi Arabia has long displayed interest in acquiring, or helping allies acquire, the building blocks of a program that could make nuclear weapons and protect the kingdom from potential threats from its neighbors — first Israel, then Iraq and Iran.

The Saudi government provided the financing for Pakistan to secretly build its own nuclear arms, the first “Sunni bomb,” as the Pakistani creators of the program called it. That financial link has long left American intelligence officials wondering if there was a quid pro quo: that if Saudi Arabia ever needed its own small arsenal, Pakistan could provide it — perhaps by moving Pakistani troops to Saudi territory.

The Saudis were also thinking of delivery systems. In 1988, the kingdom bought medium-range missiles from China that were designed to be fitted with nuclear, chemical or biological warheads, drawing protests from American officials.

Riyadh’s worries spiked in 2003 when it was revealed that Tehran had secretly built a vast underground plant for enriching uranium — a fuel for nuclear arms and reactors.
Back then, the Iranians made the same argument that the Saudis are currently making: that they needed to possess all of the production facilities necessary for fueling nuclear power plants. (The Iranians in 2011 opened one such plant, a nuclear reactor at Bushehr, built by the Russians.)

That insistence is what set off the Iranian nuclear crisis. Over the years, several nations have demonstrated that it is possible to turn ostensibly civilian programs into sources of bomb fuel, and thus atomic warheads and military power. Israel recently released an archive of material, stolen from Tehran in January, to prove that the Iranian government deceived the world for years.

The Saudis, meanwhile, had no equivalent facilities. They promised to get them.
“Whatever the Iranians build, we will also build,” Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former Saudi intelligence chief, warned as the Obama administration sought to negotiate what became the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran.

Under that pact, Iran is currently spinning a small number of nuclear centrifuges, though it had to ship 97 percent of its nuclear fuel out of the country. The Saudis believe they need to be positioned to match Iran’s every move, though experts say it would take a while. “No one thinks the Saudis would be able to do this anytime soon,” said Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “They couldn’t plausibly build a weapon without outside help.”

The core challenge for the Trump administration is that it has declared that Iran can never be trusted with any weapons-making technology. Now, it must decide whether to draw the same line for the Saudis.

The United States’ own actions may be helping to drive the Saudis’ nuclear thinking. Now that the Iran agreement, brokered with world powers, is on the edge of collapse after Mr. Trump withdrew the United States, analysts are worried that the Saudis may be positioning themselves to create their own nuclear program in response.

The kingdom has extensive uranium deposits and five nuclear research centers. Analysts said Saudi Arabia’s atomic work force was steadily growing in size and sophistication — even without producing nuclear fuel.

Saudi leaders saw a political opening when Mr. Trump was elected.

In its early days, the administration spent considerable time discussing ways that Saudi Arabia and other Arab states could acquire nuclear reactors. Michael T. Flynn, who briefly served as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, backed a plan that would have let Moscow and Washington cooperate on a deal to supply Riyadh with reactors — but not the ability to make its own atomic fuel.

As a precondition, American economic sanctions against Russia would have been dropped to allow Moscow to join the effort. Mr. Flynn was fired in early 2017 as questions swirled around his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, including about ending the trade restrictions.

In late 2017, Mr. Perry, the energy secretary, picked up the nuclear cooperation issue. Excluding Russia, he began negotiating with Riyadh over the terms. Whether the Saudis would be banned from fuel production quickly became a flash point in Congress.

At his Senate confirmation hearing in November 2017, Christopher A. Ford, the assistant secretary of state for international security and nonproliferation, called the safeguards a “desired outcome.” But he equivocated on whether the United States would insist on them.

Senator Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, described the administration’s approach as “a recipe for disaster.”
In February, Mr. Perry led a delegation to London to discuss a pact that would ban fuel production, known as a 1-2-3 agreement, for at least 10 to 15 years. (As it happens, the time frame is about how long the Iranians are banned from fuel production under the Obama-era nuclear agreement, which Mr. Trump has called “a disaster.”)

The Saudi delegation was led by the energy minister, Khalid al-Falih, who resisted the proposal.

Nuclear experts said the kingdom wanted to build as many as 16 nuclear power plants over the next 20 to 25 years at a cost of more than $80 billion. Recently, it scaled back its initial plan to the construction of just two reactors. Westinghouse, based in Pennsylvania, would provide the technology, but probably under a license to South Korean manufacturers.

The crown prince made headlines in March by shifting the public discussion over Riyadh’s intentions from reactors to atomic bombs. In a CBS News interview, he said that if Iran acquired nuclear arms, Saudi Arabia would quickly follow suit.

“Saudi Arabia does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb,” Prince Mohammed told “60 Minutes.” “But without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.”

A few days later, Mr. Falih, the energy minister, raised concerns about the outcome of negotiations with Washington by insisting publicly that Riyadh would make its own atomic fuel.

He said in an interview with Reuters that he was hopeful for a deal.
“It will be natural,” he said, “for the United States to be with us and to provide us not only with technology, but to help us with the fuel cycle and the monitoring, and make sure we do it to the highest standard.”

But Mr. Falih emphasized that the kingdom had its own uranium deposits and wanted to develop them rather than relying on an overseas supplier.

“It’s not natural,” he said, “for us to bring enriched uranium from a foreign country.”

Source :The New York Times

https://theadamschronicler.com/saudi...-build-a-bomb/

No nukes, no more weapons.

They need to work towards peace and prosperity...not more war!

Saudi Arabia needs weapons to defend themselves. They are our ally, long-standing and very reliable ally, too. So there's nothing wrong at all with selling our weapons to them. They've purchased our weapons for decades. These planes are now out of date, the F-16 primarily, and I don't think we're even producing replacement parts for these planes any more, so Saudi needs to upgrade their air force to our newer systems.

Saudi Arabia should not have nuclear weapons, no different than any other country who doesn't already have them. The US and most of the world wants to end nuclear arms proliferation and instead limit, restrict, reduce and hopefully one day eliminate them all from our planet, and rightly so. There is no victory to be had now from nuclear weapons. We kill ourselves and the world in the process of this type of "defense", and I'm positive there is no plan at all by the United States to ever allow Saudi to have nuclear weapons, any more than we would allow Iran or any other country to have them at this point.

So, this is all just a big ta-do to try to discredit Trump and isn't even about Saudi Arabia to begin with.

Trump was at 51% approval on Rasmussen on Wednesday, so none of these anti-Trump tactics are working.

The Saudi Arabia Arms Deal: What Weapons Did Trump Sell & Which Scumbags Profit From It?

MAY 23, 2017JOHN LAURITS


During his vacation to the Arabian Peninsula, Donald Trump announced he was signing a $350 billion-dollar arms deal with the brutal dictators who rule the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. When all of the transactions are complete, it will be the single largest weapons deal in all of US history — in fact, 350 billion is such an absurdly high number that it’s basically meaningless to most people, at first. This is because human brains can only recognize about 5 objects or so before we need to start counting. So, if you want to understand what 350 billion is, think about this — if you live for the average number of 71 years, you would need to spend $13.5 million dollars every single day for your entire life, from birth to death, to spend $350 billion. Let that sink in.Now that we have some idea about how much money this weapons deal is worth, let’s take a closer look at what is actually happening, here…

Trump’s Saudi Arabia Arms Deal:
What Exactly Did the US Just Sell?

“We pray that this special gathering may someday be remembered as the beginning of peace in the middle east — and maybe even all over the world”
–Donald Trump,

May 21st address to the “Muslim world,” hours after selling $350B in weapons to Saudi Arabia

According to Al Masdar News, the weapons deal includes “tanks, artillery, helicopters, light close air support, intelligence-gathering aircraft, […] Patriot [missile batteries] and [Terminal High Altitude Area Defense] THAAD.” Reuters reports that a $6 billion pledge by Saudi Arabia to buy & assemble 150 Lockheed Martin Blackhawk helicopters is also a part of the deal. Citing nameless White House officials, the Associated Press adds “some $750 million” in training for Saudi Air Force pilots, “Abrams tanks, combat ships, […] radar, and communications and cyber security technology” to the list of items included in Trump’s deal.



As of this writing, these are all the items listed by the shallow reports of US news-outlets in the first few pages of search results. Because CNN & their friends want Americans to focus on Kardashians & make-believe Russian conspiracies, we must turn elsewhere for the details — and the only US media you can almost trustto report accurately is the financial media…Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, & Boeing:
US Weapons Giants (& Incidentally, Campaign-Finance Giants, Too)

Lockheed-Martin announced Saudi Arabia wants to buy over $28 billion in integrated air/missile defense, combat ships, tactical aircraft, & rotary wing technologies & programs. Raytheon — the company that makes Tomahawk cruise missiles & Patriot anti-aircraft systems — is opening a new branch, Raytheon Arabia, that will focus on increasing Saudi Arabia’s weapons capabilities. Chinook helicopters, guided-weapons systems, & P-8 reconnaissance planes are among the instruments of death that Boeing is proudly contributing to Trump’s deal and General Electric says it will provide $15 billion in digital technology to Aramco, the Saudi’s massive state-run oil company.
The average returns for the peddlers of death over the course of 36 Saudi-US weapons dealsDemocrats Silent on Saudi Arabia Weapons Deal

Why are democrats so quiet about the massive arms deal between the US & the financiers of 9/11? Aren’t they supposed to be the Resistance™?

Lockheed-Martin spent $13.6 million to lobby public officials & $4.9 million to elect US representatives & Senators, while Raytheon spent $4.6 million & $3 million on the same & Boeing spent $17 million & $3.7 million. The leader of the democratic Senate, Chuck Schumer, took $123,950 from Lockheed-Martin and the leader of the house, Nancy Pelosi, took $39,800 from defense contractors, including $20,385 from Boeing & Lockheed-Martin.

That’s why.
In solidarity,
John Laurits

P.S. I’ve got the comments section to work again, I think ( ’twas broken for a few days ), so feel free to comment away again 🙂 Also, here’s an info-meme that you can tweet, share, steal, print, use, modify, or whatever:

https://www.johnlaurits.com/2017/sau...apons-profits/

What America’s new arms deal with Saudi Arabia says about the Trump administration

It puts human rights aside to make a buck.

By Alex Ward@AlexWardVoxalex.ward@vox.com May 20, 2017, 4:20pm EDT




U.S. President Donald Trump (R) meets with Mohammed bin Salman, Deputy Crown Prince and Minister of Defense of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in the Oval Office at the White House, March 14, 2017 in Washington, DC. Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

President Trump has just announced the sale of a whopping $110 billion to Saudi Arabia which includes “tanks and helicopters for border security, ships for coastal security, intelligence-gathering aircraft, a missile-defense radar system, and cybersecurity tools,” reports ABC News. It forms part of a 10-year, $350 billion agreement in a “strategic vision” between the two countries, reports the Washington Post.

The deal had been in the works for some time, but the White House evidently pushed hard to finalize the deal in time to announce it during the president’s trip to Saudi Arabia. It was meant to send a clear message: Trump isn’t going to do things the way his predecessor did.

Back in September, the Obama administration approved a more than $115 billion arms deal with the Saudis. But as the death toll and reports of human rights violations in the Saudi-led war on Yemen began to rise dramatically, the Obama administration nixed the sale of the precision-guided munitions it had originally agreed to put in the deal to try to coerce the Saudis into curbing those atrocities.

Now those munitions are back in the Trump arms package — which speaks volumes about this administration.

In fact, the entire deal paints a vivid picture of the Trump administration — an administration that is willing to bend over backwards to make deals with important friends, that doesn’t let human rights concerns get in the way of doing business, and where personal relationships with those closest to the president can prove highly lucrative.

Jared Kushner had a personal hand in closing the deal

Jared Kushner, the president’s senior adviser and son-in-law, seems to have played a pivotal role in the deal, swooping in to personally help push the Saudis to finish the deal in time for Trump’s Saudi trip.

As the New York Times reports, most of the agreement was already in place when Kushner got involved. But during a final meeting, a US official brought up the possibility of adding a “sophisticated radar system designed to shoot down ballistic missiles” to the Saudis’ shopping list. Iran, Saudi Arabia’s main adversary, has an excellent missile program, so the Saudis were naturally interested in that kind of system.

There was just one problem: the price tag. This is where Kushner comes in. Kushner evidently picked up the phone right there in the middle of the meeting and called Marillyn Hewson, the CEO of Lockheed Martin (the company that makes the system), and straight-up asked her if she could give the Saudis a discount, the Times notes. Hewson apparently said she “would look into it,” according to the Times.

There are a few things to note from this vignette. First, it shows to what lengths this administration will go to make a deal when it really matters. And Saudi Arabia really, really matters. Trump wants (and needs) the country’s help to fight ISIS and the extremist ideology driving it.

But there’s another reason pleasing Saudi Arabia matters to Trump: Bloomberg reports that the kingdom is considering investing around $40 billion in US infrastructure. Trump wants to spend $1 trillion on improving American infrastructure, and the Saudi money would certainly help achieve that goal.

Second, the more libertarian-leaning members of the Republican party who have complained that many of Trump’s policy inclinations go against traditional conservative free-marketprinciples now have yet another data point to make their case. After all, this is a clear example of the government directly interfering in the free market by trying to get a company to change its price on an item.

Even worse, one of the president’s senior advisers purposefully fought to make a US company less money in order to help another country out. I very much doubt that’s what most Trump voters expected his “America First” policy to look like.

Finally, the fact that Kushner himself was at the center of the whole thing is especially notable. Whereas foreign military sales in the past would be negotiated through multiple US government bureaucracies, countries can now apparently skip all that red tape and go right to the source as long as they forge a relationship with Kushner.
And you better believe that other countries are paying attention to that.

Obama offered a big deal to the Saudis — but Trump gave the Saudis what they really wanted

Trump hailed the deal as a victory, saying it “was a great day” because of “tremendous investments in the United States . . . and jobs, jobs, jobs,” reports the Washington Post. He couldn’t be prouder of this.

And it is a big deal — but the Obama administration approved an ever bigger, $115 billion arms sale to the Saudis back in September that included “weapons, other military equipment, and training,” according to Reuters.

And though relations between the two countries were strained during the Obama years due in large part to the administration’s overtures to Iran, it was still the biggest deal ever offered in the history of the US-Saudi alliance.

But it came with another price.

The Saudis, with support of the US and several other regional allies, have led a two-year campaign against the Houthis, an Iranian-backed armed group that is trying to dislodge the Saudi-backed Yemeni government. The war has been brutal and has produced a humanitarian catastrophe on a staggering scale: at least 10,000 people have been killed and over 3 million displacedsince the war began in March 2015. Millions more are currently at risk of famine.

Saudi warplanes have targeted hospitals, schools, roads, bridges, farms, livestock, and other civilian targets with zero regard for either the laws prohibiting such tactics in wartime or the horrendous suffering they’re inflicting on innocent civilians.

The Obama administration increasingly tried (although not hard enough to make any noticeable difference) to use its leverage over the Saudis — in particular, US military support and arms sales — to compel the Saudis to stop these sorts of flagrant human rights violations.

Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t prioritize human rights or values in his foreign policy. He claims his foreign policy is solely based on the national interest. As he stated during the campaign, the United States will “finally have a coherent foreign policy based upon American interests and the shared interests of our allies” should he become president.

Trump seems more than willing to cast aside the growing evidence of the kingdom’s brutal actions in Yemen in order to pass an arms deal — especially if he thinks he can get something out of it in return.

And that’s precisely why Saudi Arabia — and numerous other countries who have been lectured about human rights by the Obama administration for the past eight years — are so happy to have Trump in the Oval Office now. It’s much easier to commit massive human rights abuses when the people selling you weapons don’t particularly care how you use them, as long as you pay up.

https://www.vox.com/2017/5/20/156266...abia-arms-deal