Biden OKs More Weapons for War Criminals

When it comes to arming war criminals in the Middle East, Biden is indistinguishable from Trump.

Matthew Petti reports on a string of recent Biden administration decisions to provide even more weapons to Middle Eastern clients:

It's been a good week for the weapons industry. President Joe Biden signed off on order after order allowing American weapons to flow to Middle Eastern regimes. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Biden administration will sell shipments of bombs worth $750 million to Saudi Arabia, breaking its ban on selling "offensive weapons" to the kingdom.

On the same day, the State Department announced over $20 billion in new arms sales to Israel, including fighter jets, armored vehicles, and ammunition. And the Friday before, the administration removed several major barriers to arming the Israeli military. It released $3.5 billion in U.S. taxpayer money for the Israeli military, unfroze a $262 million munition shipment that had been held up since May, and decided not to restrict U.S. aid to an Israeli army unit accused of beating an American to death.

The Biden administration has dropped any pretense that it cares how U.S.-made weapons are used. It will instead reward governments run by war criminals by providing them with as many weapons as they want. That doesn’t come as a surprise after watching the U.S. aid and abet Israel’s atrocities in Gaza for the last ten months, but it underscores the moral bankruptcy of the administration’s foreign policy and confirms that the president has nothing but contempt for our own laws. When it comes to arming war criminals in the Middle East, Biden is indistinguishable from Trump.

If the president were following the law, he would be halting all arms transfers to Israel and his administration would not be approving future sales. If he took his own past policy statements seriously, he would not be lifting any bans on sending weapons to the Saudis when their government has an extensive record of using U.S.-made weapons to commit war crimes. No one believes for a moment that the Saudi military will be more careful in its targeting in the future or that it will use these weapons for defensive purposes. The ban isn’t being lifted because the Saudi government has changed in the slightest, but rather because the Biden administration no longer feels the need to pretend that it cares what the Saudis do with these weapons. Approving the sale of more bombs has everything to do with trying to promote the president’s terrible normalization scheme, and it is another reminder of why a U.S.-Saudi pact would be so awful.

The president likes to talk about the U.S. being the “arsenal of democracy,” but in practice it is often the arms dealer for authoritarianism and oppression. We know that Mohammed bin Salman and Benjamin Netanyahu (or someone else in his position) will use these weapons to kill civilians and attack neighboring countries. We also know that our government will pretend that these attacks are “self-defense” no matter where they take place or who the victims are. The president is signing off on future U.S. complicity in crimes not yet committed by those governments against poor and defenseless people in Yemen, Palestine, and elsewhere in the region.

There is no legitimate excuse for selling weapons to oppressive and abusive governments. The U.S. is not safer when it does this. If anything, U.S. enabling of its clients’ crimes makes more people around the world hate us and creates new enemies. The U.S. should no longer send any weapons to governments that have so frequently used them to slaughter and maim innocent people. Arming war criminals is one of the worst parts of our rotten foreign policy, and it must be eliminated entirely.