Sen. Murphy: ‘Absolutely Disastrous’ To Sell Arms to Saudi Arabia

RUSH EXCERPT:

MURPHY: "Yeah. So I think there are two additional ways to explain it. You hinted at one, first the president views every foreign relationship as transactional and as long as you’re buying things from the United States, he doesn’t see any reason why your human rights record or the other things you do to contradict American national security should stand in the way of us selling you things. We all know that there has to be a moral line that a country can cross so that we get out of business with them. You wouldn’t sell your neighbor a gun if you knew that they were going to use that gun to kill someone in their household. That’s what we’re doing with the Saudis. We’re selling them weapons we know they’re going to turn around and kill civilians inside Yemen. He also went to Saudi Arabia first because he, you know, just wanted to signal to the world that he was going to do everything different than Obama. Obama had tried to build a relationship with Iran to disabuse them of a nuclear weapons program that made the Saudis angry and that’s why President Trump went first to Saudi Arabia. The problem is the president’s committing nuclear nonproliferation malpractice because he’s pulled out of the Iran agreement and by selling the Saudis nuclear technology, it makes it much more likely that Iranian are going to restart their nuclear program because they see the Saudis have a head start. This is absolutely disastrous and there’s no real way to explain it through traditional national security lenses."