Islam Times - Washington ‘obsessed’ with selling weapons: Ex-US diplomat

Islam Times - A former US diplomat who had served Saudi Arabia has said that the US administration is “obsessed” with selling weapons and that is the main reason behind a recent move by the secretary of state as regards to the blocking of the kingdom’s inclusion on a list of countries that recruit child soldiers.

J. Michael Springmann, who was the head of the US visa bureau in Jeddah from 1987 until 1989, made the remarks after Mike Pompeo had rejected the findings of the State Department’s anti-human trafficking office that the Saudi-led military coalition engaged in a military campaign on Yemen has been using under-age fighters from Sudan.

“What’s behind the report is the fact that the United States and Donald Trump and his officials in his administration are closely tied to Saudi Arabia because they see them as a source of great funds to buy American weapons of war to be used primarily against Yemen and hopefully in the future as they believe to be used against Iran,” Springmann said.

“The American government is obsessed with selling weapons because they think it means jobs for the boys, big dividends, payments to the shareholders and huge military–industrial complex companies and vast profits for the workers and their management,” he added.

The former US diplomat also described the case as a “win-win situation” for the administration in Washington and said, “They will not do anything to antagonize the Saudis even though they are one the most repressive governments in the world.”

“It’s a shame upon the United States, it shows that the United States is not a democracy and shows that the country is perpetually allying itself with a country that does not respect human rights,” he noted.

Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies launched a devastating campaign against Yemen in March 2015, with the goal of bringing the government of former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi back to power and crushing the Houthi Ansarullah movement.

The US-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a nonprofit conflict-research organization, estimates that the Saudi-led war has claimed the lives of over 60,000 Yemenis since January 2016.

The war has also taken a heavy toll on the country’s infrastructure, destroying hospitals, schools, and factories. The UN says over 24 million Yemenis are in dire need of humanitarian aid, including 10 million suffering from extreme levels of hunger.