Why bombs made in America have been killing civilians in Yemen

Year after year, the bombs fell — on wedding tents, funeral halls, fishing boats and a school bus, killing thousands of civilians and helping turn Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Weapons supplied by American companies, approved by US officials, allowed Saudi Arabia to pursue the reckless campaign. But in June 2017, an influential Republican senator decided to cut them off, by withholding approval for new sales. It was a moment that might have stopped the slaughter.

Not under President Donald Trump.

With billions at stake, one of the president’s favoured aides, combative trade adviser Peter Navarro, made it his mission to reverse the senator. Navarro, after consulting with American arms makers, wrote a memo to Jared Kushner and other top White House officials calling for an intervention, possibly by Trump himself. He titled it “Trump Mideast arms sales deal in extreme jeopardy, job losses imminent.”

Within weeks, the Saudis were once again free to buy American weapons.

The intervention, which has not been previously reported, underscores a fundamental change in American foreign policy under Trump that often elevates economic considerations over other ones. Where foreign arms sales in the past were mostly offered and withheld to achieve diplomatic goals, the Trump administration pursues them mainly for the profits they generate and the jobs they create, with little regard for how the weapons are used.

Trump has tapped Navarro, a California economist best known for polemics against China, to be a conduit between the Oval Office and defence firms. His administration has also rewritten the rules for arms exports, speeding weapon sales to foreign militaries. The State Department, responsible for licensing arms deals, now is charged with more aggressively promoting them.

“This White House has been more open to defence industry executives than any other in living memory,” said Loren B Thompson, a longtime analyst who consults for major arms manufacturers.

No foreign entanglement has revealed the trade-offs of this policy more than the war in Yemen. There, Trump’s embrace of arms sales has helped prolong a conflict that has killed more than 100,000 people in the Arab world’s poorest nation, further destabilizing an already volatile region, according to a review of thousands of pages of records and interviews with more than 50 people with knowledge of the policy or who participated in the decision-making.

American arms makers who sell to the Saudis say they are accountable to shareholders and are doing nothing wrong. And because weapon sales to foreign militaries must be approved by the State Department, the companies say they don’t make policy, only follow it.

But as the situation in Yemen worsened, at least one firm, Raytheon Co, did more than wait for decisions by US officials. It went to great lengths to influence them, even after members of Congress tried to upend sales to Saudi Arabia on humanitarian grounds.

Raytheon, a major supplier of weapons to the Saudis, including some implicated by human rights groups in the deaths of Yemeni civilians, has long viewed the kingdom as one of its most important foreign customers.

After the Yemen war began in 2015 and the Obama administration made a hasty decision to back the Saudis, Raytheon booked more than $3 billion in new bomb sales, according to an analysis of available US government records.

Intent on pushing the deals through, Raytheon followed the industry playbook: It took advantage of federal loopholes by sending former State Department officials, who were not required to be registered as lobbyists, to press their former colleagues to approve the sales.

And though the company was already embedded in Washington — its chief lobbyist, Mark Esper, would become Army secretary and then defence secretary under Trump — Raytheon executives sought even closer ties.

They assiduously courted Navarro, who intervened with White House officials on Raytheon’s behalf and successfully pressured the State Department to process the most contentious deals.

They also enlisted the help of David J Urban, a lobbyist whose close ties to Esper and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo go back to the 1980s, when all three men were at West Point.

Approached a half-dozen times, Raytheon representatives declined to speak with reporters about foreign sales. “We believe further dialogue regarding foreign military sales is best directed to officials in the US government,” Corinne Kovalsky, then a company spokeswoman, said in December.

Records show that foreign military sales, facilitated by the US government, rose sharply after Trump became president. They averaged about $51 billion a year during Trump’s first three years, compared with $36 billion a year during the final term of President Barack Obama, who also oversaw a big increase.

Getting the President’s Ear

Trump won the presidency partly on promises to resuscitate American manufacturing.

But as the initial glow of victory faded, reality set in. Trump’s aides realized there were not many ways the executive branch, on its own, could affect manufacturing and trade, three former Trump administration officials said.

One campaign adviser, Navarro, a Harvard-educated economist, thought he had a solution. He made the case to members of Trump’s transition team that invoking national security and promoting the defense industry were ways to impose tariffs, create manufacturing jobs and shrink the trade deficit.

In December 2016, the president-elect named Navarro head of the newly created National Trade Council, an ill-defined position. And though the organization apparently existed only on paper, the title afforded him access to Cabinet-level meetings, where he would forcefully argue his points.

Trump gave him responsibility for stoking American defense manufacturing by growing foreign arms sales, among other things. Defense companies took notice.

After Trump’s inauguration, representatives of Raytheon and other firms streamed in to see Navarro, finding him ready to listen. Navarro’s hard-line stance toward China was well known, and they played it to their advantage, said Thompson, the analyst and consultant, who soon arranged a lunch meeting between Navarro and industry leaders, including Thomas A. Kennedy, then Raytheon’s chief executive and now its executive chairman.

Trump’s aggressive arms sale policies were met with alarm by some in the State Department, in part because the administration did not seem concerned with human rights issues, according to several current and former State Department officials, who like others interviewed for this article were not authorized to speak publicly. Though past administrations had sometimes shown a willingness to achieve narrow goals by arming rough regimes, Trump seemed to view weapon sales as ends in themselves.

Worse, they said, were signs of how little the administration grasped the basics of arms deals, which can have profound foreign policy and national security consequences.

A $5 Billion Turnaround

As war broke out five years ago in Yemen, Raytheon was a company on the rebound. The company, the third-largest defense firm in the US, had been battered by flagging profits and federal budget cuts, and Kennedy, the chief executive, was determined to turn things around, starting with international sales.

Raytheon earned more of its revenue from sales to foreign governments than Lockheed Martin and other American defense giants, and few foreign customers were more important than Saudi Arabia. Since the Yemen war began, Raytheon has booked at least a dozen major sales to the kingdom and its partners worth more than $5 billion.

Some of the deals, for defensive items, sailed through the government approval process. But sales of offensive weapons, including more than 120,000 precision bombs and bomb parts that the Saudis were using in Yemen, faced major hurdles. Those deals were among the most lucrative ones, worth more than $3 billion, government records show.

Trouble for the company started on Oct 8, 2016, when Saudi coalition planes repeatedly targeted a funeral hall in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, where some 1,500 men, women and children had gathered to mourn the father of a government official.

The strike in Sanaa unsettled the Obama administration, which had agreed to support the Saudis but was becoming increasingly concerned about the war. “By that time it was clear that the war had gone in a direction we had not anticipated,” said Andrew Miller, a Middle East expert on Obama’s National Security Council.

In December, the administration halted delivery of bomb parts that had been sold but not yet shipped, a decision that angered the Saudis and Raytheon. Kennedy placed a personal call to Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice. But the administration would not budge.

The firm would have to wait until Obama left office — and then try to forge ties with the Trump administration as quickly as possible.

‘Raytheon, Congratulations’

Just seven months into the new administration, Kennedy was standing by Trump’s side in the White House, watching as the president dashed his signature across a presidential memorandum on trade with China.

When he was finished, Trump held up the pen. “Where’s Raytheon?” he asked. Kennedy leaned in to accept the gift.

FILE — President Donald Trump discusses weapon sales with the Saudi crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, at the White House on March 20, 2018. Thousands of civilians have died in Yemen, and American-made bombs sold to the Saudis have played a key role as the White House has sought to boost the arms industry. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

“Raytheon,” Trump said, “congratulations.”

It was August 2017, and the Trump administration was in the grip of a crisis. Business leaders were abandoning the president over his comments about racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, just when he needed executives to show support for a new crackdown on China.

Kennedy was there to help Trump, even though his company had virtually no relationship with China. He did not get there by accident.

During the early months of the new presidency, Raytheon executives tried to get close to the administration by arranging for Kennedy to meet with Trump on a handful of occasions, including during the president’s trip to Saudi Arabia that May, former employees said.

Soon after the trip, the Trump administration waved through the delivery of bomb parts to the Saudis that Obama had delayed. But the company wanted more.

So it turned to Navarro, whose office helped Raytheon orchestrate Kennedy’s appearance at the August signing ceremony, according to a person with direct knowledge of the arrangement.

It was a face-saving moment for the president, and a turning point in the company’s relationship with the White House. In the months that followed, Navarro pushed hard for Raytheon and its deals with Saudi Arabia.

A Trap ‘Like Flypaper’

As Trump gears up for reelection, the administration has framed arms sales to the Saudis as a win, signalling no regrets. “The relationship has been very good, and they buy hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of merchandise from us,” Trump told reporters in October. “It’s millions of jobs.”

But for those who first pledged American support to the Saudis, the past five years have been replete with second-guessing and misgivings.

Officials in the Obama White House, recalling how the Saudis had sought American backing, know it as the “five minutes to midnight” call. It was late March 2015, and the Saudis wanted to know immediately whether the US would support its imminent invasion of Yemen to suppress the Iranian-aligned rebels who had overthrown the Saudi-friendly government there.

“It happened so quickly,” Ben Rhodes, one of Obama’s foreign policy advisers, said in an interview. “Obama typically had a very rigorous process around certainly the application of US military force, and this felt very different.”

With few options, none of them appealing, the advisers recommended a high-risk plan to support a country with billions of dollars in American weapons.

Obama agreed despite misgivings. Not wanting to get embroiled in another war, he offered primarily defensive support without defining in clear terms what that meant. The arms industry would later seize on the ambiguity to sell the Saudis billions of dollars in both offensive and defensive weapons.

“People make miscalculations all the time,” Steve Pomper, a former senior official on Obama’s National Security Council, said in an interview. “But it was striking to me as I reflected on my time in the Obama administration that it wasn’t just that we embarked on this escapade — it’s that we didn’t pull ourselves out of it.”

Pomper defended the government officials who oversaw Saudi policy, calling them serious, humane people. “And yet we found ourselves locked into this terrible situation, unable to wrap it up, and handing it off to an administration that was going to handle it even worse than we did.”

The result was a lengthy report published under the auspices of the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit organisation devoted to conflict resolution. It said American arms sales acted “like flypaper in trapping the US in Yemen.”

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