The New York Times reports on the Trump administration’s ridiculous excuses for the bogus arms sale “emergency”:

A senior State Department official on Wednesday defended the Trump administration’s use of an emergency declaration to push through arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, telling a hostile House committee that holding back the weapons would have offered an opening to commercial rivals in China and Russia.

The Trump administration has trotted out this lame excuse for continuing to arm Saudi Arabia and the UAE as they wreck and starve Yemen, but it is not credible. Supposing that Saudi Arabia and the UAE wanted to start buying more of their weapons and weapons systems from Russia and China, it would take many years to switch from the U.S.-made hardware that they have been buying for decades. There is no danger that an interruption in the supply of U.S. arms to the Saudis and Emiratis would lead them to radically overhaul their militaries in the foreseeable future. There is absolutely no reason why these arms sales need to be rushed through without Congressional review, and the administration officials sent to Congress to repeat this nonsense have to know that.

Everyone can see that the administration just wants to evade Congressional scrutiny so that it can send more weapons to be used by the Saudi and Emirati governments in slaughtering Yemenis from the air. The threat that supposedly justifies the phony “emergency” has been grossly exaggerated, and the weapons included in these sales would be of no use in countering that threat in any case:

“The administration has presented us no evidence that the gulf countries face any substantially new threat from Iran that would justify declaring an emergency, or that these weapons, which the Saudis need to keep bombing Yemen, would even be useful if such a threat arose,” said Representative Tom Malinowski, Democrat of New Jersey and a former assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor.

“If we allow these arms sales, the effect will be to prolong a war that does not serve U.S. interests, while signaling to the Saudis that they can get away with anything,” he continued.

As Oxfam’s Scott Paul wrote recently, there is an emergency in the Arabian Peninsula, but it is not one that threatens Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The real emergency is the humanitarian crisis affected tens of millions of Yemenis:

The real emergency is the millions of Yemenis who are still suffering from hunger and a broken economy. Over four years of war have left too many families struggling to survive. Disease continues to spread rapidly, with the world’s largest recorded cholera outbreak devastating families throughout the country.

If Trump gets away with his bogus arms sales “emergency,” the real emergency in Yemen will only get worse and more innocent Yemenis will die in attacks using U.S.-made weapons while many more starve and perish from preventable disease in a crisis that our government has enabled for more than four years.