Bill Hartung on the U.S.-Saudi Corporate Connection

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Transcript:

October 14, 2019

BILL HARTUNG: Bombs produced by General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon have been found at many of the sites of these civilian strikes. There's a moral component in backing this kind of civilian slaughter. And then the question is what could possibly justify this?

***

MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above. I'm Mark Hanna of the Eurasia Group Foundation. President Trump recently ratcheted up sanctions on Iran after they apparently attacked oil facilities in Saudi Arabia. His cabinet is now threatening all-out war. Today, we're joined by Bill Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy here in New York. Bill is the foremost expert on arms sales by the United States. Nobody quite gets into the weeds of the defense budget more than he, but have no fear. We're not going to get into that nitty gritty. Were more excited about a report Bill recently published entitled “U.S. Arms Sales to Saudi Arabia: The Corporate Connection.”

Before we get into the arms trade bill, can you tell us a little bit about the history of the U.S.-Saudi relationship and why America seems to always be at the beck and call of this Middle Eastern country?

HARTUNG: Well, initially it was built around oil, and the notion was: keep the oil flowing, and we'll protect you. It was almost like a protection racket, a quid pro quo. And over time, the Saudis used their funds in support of U.S. foreign policy. In many cases, things we shouldn't have been doing, like arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan, who somehow became the base of al-Qaeda, shipping money to the Contras. And then, of course, they were viewed as kind of a moderate force in the Middle East, particularly compared to Iran after the Khomeini regime. There was this notion that they also provided intelligence, but of course, there was also funding from Saudi entities that were supporting violent extremists.

So, then the net didn't work out so well in terms of whether that was a good balance of the relationship. But anyway, a lot of those things, I think, have changed dramatically. But it's almost like—for some people at least—the policy is on autopilot.

HANNAH: Yeah. And before we keep going down this road, let's just establish here right from the outset that Saudi Arabia is not exactly a democracy. They're famous for their repressive tactics in suppressing human rights. And yet they're still our ally, despite our stated mission of promoting human rights and democracy around the world.

HARTUNG: Yeah, it's almost like the policy is sold as a necessary evil. There's no prospect of the current regime democratizing. And there's long histories of human rights abuses, torture, beheadings, and throwing independent journalists and other activists in jail.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: What motivated you to write this report, or what was the impetus?

HARTUNG: Well, I was partly curious about how much of the U.S. arms trade with Saudi Arabia, which has been well in excess of one-hundred billion dollars over the last ten years, went to the big companies. And so I looked at Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Boeing, which are the top four U.S. defense contractors in terms of sales to the Pentagon, and also major arms exporters. And it turns out they were involved, in one way or another, in ninety percent of those deals. You know, President Trump always talks about how great this is for our economy. And he almost puts that above all other issues. Even after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, he said, “Well, we don't want to give up these deals for our wonderful companies.” But in fact, the benefits are pretty narrowly concentrated. And that was one thing I wanted to look at. Of course, these companies also lobby to try to make it easier to keep selling these things, not having human rights restrictions that will stand in their way of making profit.

HANNAH: You mentioned this figure: 138 billion dollars in arms sales to Saudi Arabia. That's an eye-popping figure. But it's actually a small fraction of these companies' sales around the world.

HARTUNG: I think further, the ones that are most dependent—I think Raytheon has said about five percent of their sales are related to Saudi Arabia. So if you consider, you know, a company like Lockheed Martin gets forty to fifty billion dollars per year straight from the Pentagon, even before they do foreign sales. Mostly, other companies make ten, twenty billion or more. They've already got a pretty substantial business base even before they start pushing arms out the door to foreign clients.

HANNAH: So there's a proxy war going on in Yemen between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: And the Saudis are being sort of de facto supported in this by American arms dealers. Can you talk a little bit about what's at stake morally and geopolitically in our continued support for Saudi Arabia and its war in Yemen?

HARTUNG: Well, initially the war was initiated by Mohammed bin Salman, who is now the crown prince back in 2015. And I guess the theory was they were going to bomb the Houthi rebels who had taken over large parts of the country into submission. More than four years later, that has not happened. But what has happened is thousands of people, civilians, have been killed in airstrikes carried out by the Saudi-led coalition using U.S. and U.K. aircraft. They've done things like bomb funerals, weddings, marketplaces, civilian infrastructure like water treatment plants, a school bus. What some people have said is basically there are war crimes. And the United States has continued to supply the planes just to maintain them, supply the bombs that are being used. Bombs produced by General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon have been found at many of the sites of these civilian strikes. There's a moral component in backing this kind of civilian slaughter. And then the question is what could possibly justify this? And so the things being argued either are: Saudi Arabia is a counterweight against Iran, the Houthis are an Iranian ally, the oil question, or we're making big money and getting jobs from these arms sales. None of these, in my mind really tipped the moral scale against that huge humanitarian catastrophe that's been caused by our Saudi allies.

HANNAH: And can you talk a little bit more about what that does to American goodwill or prestige in that part of the world? Because it seems to me these American companies are being enriched at the expense of, frankly, American national security interests.

HARTUNG: Well, I think that's right. You know, Senator Chris Murphy, who's been a big opponent of sales to Saudi Arabia since the beginning of the Yemen war, basically has said a lot of people in Yemen don't view this as a Saudi war. They view this as a U.S. war because they see the fragments of the weapons. There's even a sort of outdoor museum in a part of Yemen where there's fragments of all the U.S.-related bombs that have been used in strikes. It's very well-known there that these are U.S.-backed efforts.

HANNAH: And they see the Saudi government as a puppet of the U.S. to some extent. As inaccurate as that is, they probably presume MPs and the Saudi government aren't going to take any action which the U.S. doesn't sanction or support.

HARTUNG: I think that's right. And so I think a couple of things happened. I think it damages the U.S. position in general in the region. It's very hard to point at Russian and Syrian crimes in Syria and that war and then turn around and support this disastrous situation in Yemen. So the moral and political position is weakened. But also, you know, it's become almost a recruiting tool for extremist groups because they're basically saying, “The United States is your enemy. They're killing your relatives. They're devastating your villages. You need to strike back in some way.”

Even the State Department at some point said, “You know, this is becoming a recruiting tool for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.”

HANNAH: Can you tell us a little bit about the influence of defense companies on arm sales, but also on American policy more broadly? How did these companies exert their influence?

HARTUNG: Well, they have a lot of different levers of influence. They have campaign contributions, which, of course, all industries do. But they spend ten, twenty million dollars per election cycle, and they focus it on the people in Congress who make the decisions in armed services and foreign relations, defense appropriations. They're picking the people who can help them, and they're pouring money into them. Also, there's the revolving door between government and industry. So in the Trump administration, for example, every Secretary of Defense has had a connection to a weapons contractor. James Mattis came from the board of General Dynamics. The Interim Secretary of Defense, Patrick Shanahan, was a longtime executive at Boeing. And then Mark Esper, the current Secretary Defense, was the chief government relations person for Raytheon, essentially their chief lobbyist. You had a Raytheon person in the State Department Legal Affairs Bureau who lobbied to give a green light to Saudi Arabia. Even when Congress said, “You should scrutinize whether they're taking care not to hit civilians,” he lobbied internally. He said, “We've got to give them clearance because otherwise it will stand in the way of Raytheon arms sales.”

HANNAH: So he left that explicitly?

HARTUNG: Yeah, and he eventually left under a cloud because he also argued for Trump to try to do an end run around Congress on a more recent set of sales and declare an emergency and try to put Congress on the sidelines so these deals can be made. He actually left government partly because of that. So you've got that. And then you also have people going from government into industry, and then they can work their former colleagues on behalf of the companies. And so there's a little convergence of interests there. And some of the people in government are looking ahead and saying, “Well, if I want a plum job with Lockheed Martin or Boeing, I'm in government now. I had better give them a lot of leeway because I want to be their friend. Because this is where I'm going to cash in.”

HANNAH: Why does this persist, though? If America's reputation is being harmed or undermined, if America's national interests are being harmed or undermined, if it's prompting corruption in Washington, how is it allowed to continue? And do you find any hope for these rotating door policies being brought to a close?

HARTUNG: Well, I think what would be needed is there’d have to be sort of a cooling off period after you leave government. He can't go to work for industry for, say, five years. So at least the contacts wouldn't be quite as warm, and it would be harder for you to leverage them into benefits for your company. Also, there should be more transparency. The project on government oversight had to do a lot of digging to come up with these figures, but it was a fraction of what's really going on. And there's supposed to be reporting, which is not done very scrupulously, but at least people should know where these folks are coming from so that there can be a little more public scrutiny and scrutiny by the media and so forth. There's a congressionally mandated commission called the National Defense Strategy Commission, which was supposed to critique the Pentagon's national defense strategy. And a majority of the members had ties to the defense industry. In fact, the co-chair was on the board of Northrop Grumman, one of the top five contractors.

So they actually said, amazingly enough, even though the Pentagon’s spending near record levels, the Pentagon is not spending enough. They said that we need to spend the three to five percent adjusted for inflation for at least the next five years, if not longer, which would push the budget for the Pentagon—just the Pentagon—from about 750 billion, well over a trillion dollars in five years or so. So, you know, even in the policy recommendations, the industry insinuates itself into the process. So even in things that are portrayed as an objective threat assessment, there's self-interest involved in coming up with those judgments.

HANNAH: What were the most surprising findings from your report that—or the most notable or urgent findings from your report?

HARTUNG: It's interesting. You know, if they're pushed, the companies will say, “Well, we just do what the government allows. We're just following U.S. government policy.” And I said this even after the Khashoggi murder when some of these deals were going forward. “We’re aligned with U.S. government policy. Saudi is a longtime ally, and so forth.” So I think there’s almost a brazen character of it, the unwillingness of the companies to take any responsibility for the way their weapons are used. And in fact, Amnesty International did a recent report where they reached out to the companies and said, “Yeah, do you have a vetting process to make sure your weapons aren't used in serious human rights abuses and killing of civilians and so forth?” Most of the companies didn't answer, and the ones who did usually had some variation on, “The government made us do it, or the government let us do it,” pretty much absolving themselves of any responsibility for how their products are used.

HANNAH: And that's pretty horrific when you consider. I'm reading a report here that a Lockheed Martin laser-guided bomb was utilized in August 2018 to attack a school bus that killed fifty-one people, including forty children. A General Dynamics, two-thousand-pound bomb with a Boeing JDAM guidance system was used in a strike a couple of years ago in a marketplace that killed ninety-seven civilians, including twenty-five children. How do you respond to that?

HARTUNG: This is sort of the most damning evidence that the global arms trade is not creating some sort of strategic balance. This is sort of the cutting edge of the consequences of these things that have nothing to do with security and everything to do with profits. And the negative consequences, thanks to the work of groups like Amnesty International and Murtana for Human Rights in Yemen, and some journalists advancing into the country, this is known. We can't pretend it's not happening.

HANNAH: But do you think it is? No. I mean, it's known by people at Amnesty, and it's known by its available information for policymakers. But do you think the public is paying enough attention?

HARTUNG: Well, on the one hand, certainly since the beginning of the Yemen war, the amount of press coverage has been up dramatically, and particularly since the Khashoggi murder. And the action in Congress has been much more dramatic. Congress has probably been more active on its arms sales to Saudi Arabia than almost any other sort of arms sales in living memory. There are groups—there's a network of humanitarian aid groups, human rights groups, peace groups, that's had an effective strategy to push Congress to try to stop these sales.

But there's a gap between that and the average person. I think most people don't know much about Saudi Arabia, don't know much about Yemen, don't know what's happening there. If they did, I think they'd be very much against this. Chicago Council of Foreign Affairs had a poll in which a substantial majority of Americans said arms sales make us less safe.

HANNAH: Are we going to stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia anytime soon?

HARTUNG: I think the main obstacle now is Donald Trump, because Congress has moved to block sales, and he's vetoed those moves. The majority of Democratic presidential candidates have said they will stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia because of the Yemen issue. There may be some debate about whether that’s all sales. Is that just combat aircraft and bombs? But the general notion of stopping your support for the Yemen war is kind of a consensus position among the leading Democratic politicians at this point.

HANNAH: But the Senate and the House Armed Services Committee—I mean, you were just talking about how Congress has this undue influence upon it by the defense contractors. Are you confident Congress would back this up?

HARTUNG: I think this is such an egregious case that Congress will buck that influence machine. That may not be the case on some other issues, important issues. You know, it'd be much harder, for example, to lower the Pentagon budget and get a consensus in Congress about that. But I think for this kind of blatant human rights abuse, humanitarian catastrophe, which has relatively narrow benefits for the country as a whole, Congress can hold firm. And what they haven’t been able to do is get enough Republican support in the Senate to override a veto. And Trump has vetoed a number of these actions. But there have been some Republican senators who have taken stands against this, which is where, in this climate, you would get any kind of bipartisan effort.

HANNAH: Do you think this could become a big issue in the 2020 presidential campaign?

HARTUNG: Well, I don't know if arms to Saudi Arabia will be front and center, like a question every debate. But I think the fact that the Democratic candidates have felt compelled to take a position that they would stop these sales is a good sign.

HANNAH: Let's talk about defense spending a little. How much money do the American taxpayers spend on defense each year?

HARTUNG: Well, there was just a new deal cut to cover the next two years. And for the two years combined, the Pentagon will get over 1.4 trillion dollars, 738 billion this year, and 750 billion the following year. That's one of the highest levels since World War II. There was a period in 2010 where the U.S. had well over one hundred thousand troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. I think the peak was 180 thousand. And so, of course, that was taking up a lot of money. Now we're at twenty thousand or so. And yet the budget has gone down just a tiny fraction. So, you know, this is a huge amount of money, and it's not clear that it's being well used.

Interlude featuring archival audio

HANNAH: Can you explain overseas contingency operations and why we need to cut back on that spending?

HARTUNG: The overseas contingency operations account was essentially the war budget used to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So it was a separate account, separate from the regular Pentagon budget, subject to less scrutiny. And it had a special role because of the Budget Control Act of 2011—when the Republicans tried to shut down the government—and the agreement was, “OK, we're going to cut a trillion dollars from projected spending on the domestic spending side and on the Pentagon side over the next ten years.” So the Pentagon's regular budget was subject to caps, but they didn't want to give up a lot of things they wanted to buy. So the overseas contingency operations account was exempted from those caps so they could put as much money in there as they wanted. It was supposed to be for the wars, but in fact, tens of billions of dollars went for pet projects of the Pentagon that had nothing to do with fighting the war. It was used as a kind of a slush fund for the Pentagon to evade these caps that had been written into law. You know, at this late date, you'll see budgets for the overseas contingency operations account at 150, 160 billion dollars. Congress, to a larger degree, has gone along with it because a lot of the money flows to the states and districts. And these companies have a lot of clout. And of course, there's hawks in Congress who always want to spend more. And this pool arrangement works fine for them, and of course for the Pentagon. The NDAA, or the National Defense Authorization Act, is sort of the policy bill for defense that passes every year. This year, there's some important things to be determined. For example, there's some amendments related to Yemen that would either stop bomb sales to Yemen or stop U.S. support and maintenance spare parts, which would make it much harder for the Saudi Air Force to do its indiscriminate bombing campaign. There's an amendment that says we can't go to war with Iran without approval of Congress. So there's some very important things there. And the question will be what happens when the House and Senate are ironing out the differences? You know, I think the more pressure Congress gets to do the right thing, the more likely there will be some improvements that will make people's lives better and safer.

HANNAH: I get the sense you think this is an irresponsible amount of money to spend. The Pentagon budget is unnecessary given the threats we face as a country. Is that generally accurate?

HARTUNG: Yeah, I think the Pentagon budget is well in excess of what we would need to deal with our actual security challenges. We had a task force called the Sustainable Defense Task Force, and we came up with a sort of a plan that would save 1.2 trillion dollars over the next ten years from the Pentagon's projections, which is actually a fairly conservative estimate, because you could certainly cut deeper if you weren't involved in large-scale counterinsurgency and nation-building and this huge nuclear weapons buildup in excess of what we need, and if you went after some of the obvious waste and redundancies in the Pentagon. So we took kind of a conservative view in the sense of, “You could certainly cut deeper.”

HANNAH: And what kind of response did that get? I mean, I assumed you brought it around to different lawmakers and people in appropriations and other advocacy organizations. What kind of response did that proposal get?

HARTUNG: Well, we've gotten some good media responses, and we've gotten some kind of pressure on candidates. There's been some briefings of the Pentagon candidates by a group called Put People Over the Pentagon, which has briefed about a half dozen of the candidates. And our proposals are one of the things on the table. There's some that go deeper, and some do a little less. But this whole notion that we could protect the country and spend less has been on the table in those conversations. You know, it's an important part of the debate, especially as a counterweight to things like this National Defense Strategy Commission, which is saying, “The higher, the better, forevermore.” So I think it's rare that you'll do a report where every single element is adopted. But I think it's helped create some space in the debate.

HANNAH: Do you think this amount of money is contributing to endless wars, or do you think the so-called endless wars—forever wars—that we're fighting right now are contributing to this amount of money?

HARTUNG: I think the ease of getting the money makes the wars more likely and more frequent. But the wars are also grounded in this kind of strategy of global military dominance which precedes anything like this Overseas Contingency Operations Fund. But they kind of go hand-in-hand. If the public was aware of what these wars were going to cost, if they realized how much of our resources are going to them relative to the consequences of the wars—which, like in the case of Iraq, have been disastrous. You know, there's the “Cost of War” project at Brown University, which costed out the post-9/11 wars, both the immediate costs and also things like the costs of taking care of veterans of the wars, which will go on for decades, and they have the current price tag at 5.9 trillion dollars spent or obligated. And when we were going into Iraq, the people—the Bush Administration—were saying, “Well, you know, maybe 50 billion,” a tiny, tiny multiple of what was actually spent. And I think as we have this kind of back and forth in the Trump administration on whether they can take military action against Iran, we should bear this kind of thing in mind, that these wars can escalate. They can have huge costs, not only in terms of the deaths of people in those countries and our own troops, but also this huge bill that will be paid, you know, for generations.

HANNAH: Well, Bill Hartung is of the Center for International Policy. Thank you for joining today.

HARTUNG: Glad to be here.

HANNAH: And this is Mark Hannah with the Eurasia Group Foundation for None of the Above. If you liked what you heard, and you want to listen some more, you can find us online at noneoftheabovepodcast.org, at Apple podcasts as well as Google Play, Spotify, and anywhere you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time.

(END.)

More Episodes