Alwaght– US President Donald Trump rejected on Saturday halting arms sales to Saudi Arabia over alleged murders of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the kingdom’s consulate in Turkey’s Istanbul.
Responding to calls for blocking military sales to Saudi regime, Trump reporters at the White House “I actually think we’d be punishing ourselves if we did that.”
“There are other things we can do that are very, very powerful, very strong and we’ll do them,” he added, without saying what those measures might be.
Khashoggi, a prominent critic of Riyadh and a US resident, disappeared on Oct. 2 after visiting the Saudi consulate. Turkey’s government believes he was deliberately killed inside the building and his body removed.
The American businessman-turned-president, who has forged closer ties with the oil-rich Saudi kingdom, is under international and domestic pressure to help determine what happened to Khashoggi and punish Saudi Arabia if investigations show the Riyadh regime had assassinated the journalist.
However it is unlikely that US administration take a serious action against its wealthy ally as Washington was already under mounting pressures to stop selling arms to Riyadh over civilian deaths caused by a Saudi-led military coalition in Yemen’s civil.
Saudi Arabia and its allies launched a brutal war against Yemen in March 2015 in an attempt to reinstall the former Riyadh-allied regime.
The aggression initially consisted of a bombing campaign but was later coupled with a naval blockade and the deployment of ground forces to Yemen. Some 15,000 Yemenis have so far been killed and thousands more injured.
The Saudi-led war has also taken a heavy toll on the country’s infrastructure, destroying hospitals, schools, and factories. The United Nations (UN) has said that a record 22.2 million Yemenis are in dire need of food, including 8.4 million threatened by severe hunger.
A number of Western countries, the United States and Britain in particular, are also accused of being complicit in the ongoing aggression as they supply the Riyadh regime with advanced weapons and military equipment as well as logistical and intelligence assistance.
In one of the most heinous crimes committed by Saudi Arabia, the regime’s fighter jets hit a school bus in Yemen’s Saada province on 9 August, killing 51 civilians including 40 children.
According to American news network CNN, the bomb used to hit the school bus was a 500-pound (227 kilogram) laser-guided MK 82 bomb made by Lockheed Martin, one of the top US defense contractors.
The bomb was very similar to the one that wreaked devastation in an attack on a funeral hall in Yemen in October 2016 in which 155 people were killed and hundreds more wounded. The Saudi coalition blamed “incorrect information” for that strike, admitted it was a mistake and took responsibility.
In March of that year, a strike on a Yemeni market — this time reportedly by a US-supplied precision-guided MK 84 bomb — killed 97 people.
In the aftermath of the funeral hall attack, former US President Barack Obama banned the sale of precision-guided military technology to Saudi Arabia over “human rights concerns.”
Under US law, major foreign military sales can be blocked by Congress. An informal review process lets key lawmakers use a practice known as a “hold” to stall deals if they have concerns such as whether the weapons being supplied would be used to kill civilians.
The ban was overturned by the Trump administration’s then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in March 2017.
Major US arms contractors, including Lockheed Martin Corp (LMT.N) and Raytheon Co (RTN.N), are among the beneficiaries of Washington’s close ties to Riyadh and would be hurt by the halting of major arms deals.
Trump said on Saturday his administration won a $110 billion military order from Saudi Arabia and that the deal, combined with Saudi commitments to invest heavily in the United States, was worth hundreds of thousands of U.S. jobs.
“If they don’t buy it from us, they’re going to buy it from Russia or they’re going to buy it from China,” he said. “Think of that, $110 billion. All they’re going to do is give it to other countries, and I think that would be very foolish.”
It was unclear what specific measures, if any, Trump is considering against Saudi Arabia, which is the world’s largest oil exporter, and one of his top allies
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