The article on Trump’s dysfunctional National Security Council also contained this disturbing report:

Two people with direct access to the White House leadership said Mr. Flynn was surprised to learn that the State Department and Congress play a pivotal role in foreign arms sales and technology transfers [bold mine-DL]. So it was a rude discovery that Mr. Trump could not simply order the Pentagon to send more weapons to Saudi Arabia — which is clamoring to have an Obama administration ban on the sale of cluster bombs and precision-guided weapons lifted — or to deliver bigger weapons packages to the United Arab Emirates.

I don’t know how Flynn could have reached his current position without knowing basic facts about U.S. arms sales, but if he really didn’t know how the process worked that underscores how unready he is to do the job he has. The more disturbing part of this report is the new administration’s eagerness to shower the Gulf states in even more weapons than they are already receiving. There are few client states less deserving of more U.S. support than the Saudis and their Gulf allies, so of course they are the ones being given priority under Trump. The Obama administration imposed some belated, grudging limitations on arming the despotic client states destroying Yemen, but it seems that even these limits are too much for the new administration.

The U.S. was already deeply complicit in the wrecking of Yemen under Obama, and the Trump administration is looking for ways to be responsible for aiding and abetting even more coalition war crimes. A return to selling cluster bombs would be especially horrible, since these weapons are inherently indiscriminate and the coalition has dropped them in heavily populated areas before during the current bombing campaign. It is bad enough that the U.S. sells such weapons, but to sell them to a military that we know will use them in civilian areas is completely indefensible.