A bipartisan pair of senators want to make American support for Saudi Arabia, a longstanding ally of the U.S. in the Middle East, more “conditional” on Saudi behavior.
“I would absolutely argue that we should be sending messages to the Saudis that our support for them is conditional,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said Monday at the Center for the National Interest. “I do think it’s time to question whether this alliance is as clear and as solid as many of us may have been told that it was.”
For Murphy, that starts with canceling the sale of military weapons to the Saudis. The weapons are being used to fight against the Houthis, a group in Yemen that overthrew the government and now has the backing of Iran, Saudi Arabia’s chief rival in the region. The idea of canceling aid has attracted support in each ideological wing of the Senate, due to frustration over the Saudis bombing civilians in Yemen and the monarchy’s broader financing of radical Muslim clerics.
“[T]he fact of the matter is that there is a directly proportional relationship between the amount of Saudi and Wahhabi money that goes into parts of the globe and the success of terrorist recruiters in finding people that will follow them into the fight in places like Afghanistan and Syria,” Murphy said. “I think we have largely turned the other way and allowed for the Saudis to create a version of Islam which has become the building blocks for the very groups which we are fighting today, and we have pleaded with them and we have asked them to stop and the evidence suggests that they have not.”
Saudi Arabia has been a critical ally for the United States for decades, working against the Soviets during the Cold War and helping more recently with counterintelligence against terrorists. But the Saudi regime also subscribes to Wahhabism, a variant of Islam that extols violent jihad and strict adherence to Muslim law. They have spent billions of dollars exporting those teachings to Muslims around the world.
Murphy and supporters of his plan are expected to try to pass a privileged resolution in the Senate on Wednesday recommending an end to arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Current law gives Congress the authority to block these sales by passing such a resolution.
The vote would come about two weeks after Congress passed legislation that would allow the families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to sue the Saudi Arabian government. President Obama is expected to veto that bill.
The cancellation of the arms sale would also present foreign policy complications, because the weaponry is widely viewed as a means of offsetting the weaponry that Iran will purchase with money obtained from President Obama’s nuclear agreement. That dynamic is expected to force the resolution from Murphy and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., to fail in the Senate — and if not the Senate, then the House.
“We are going to need the Saudis as operational and strategic partners in the Middle East to push back against the Iranians,” Kansas GOP Rep. Mike Pompeo, who sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told the Washington Examiner.
“To the extent that the United States takes action that the Saudis would view as hostile and threatening to their capacity to maintain their stability inside their own country and within the Gulf states of the Middle East, they would absolutely view that as abandonment by America of their efforts to push back Iranian hegemony in the majority of the Middle East,” he added.
But Sen. Paul, who is working with Murphy to force a vote this week on a privileged resolution to block the $1.15 billion sale of tanks to the Saudis, suggested that the cancellation might provide the U.S. with leverage over the Saudis.
“Even in our country, they have supported schools that preach hatred of our country; that needs to end,” Paul said. “I think that holding back the arms may give them a chance to show that they can do better.”
