Consideration of Senate Joint Resolution Nos. 27 Through 48 En Bloc--

Floor Speech

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Mr. PAUL. Madam President, the arms industry is a unique industry. It is not like making shoes or apparel. It is not like selling watches. You are selling things that, when used properly, kill other people. They are deadly weapons that we have. We have accumulated the technology by the taxpayer paying for this. We have helicopters, planes, guided missiles, and we are able to refuel planes.

It is not a jobs program, and it is not something that--we don't willy-nilly give weapons to everyone. We don't sell weapons to Russia and we don't sell weapons to China because we have disagreements, and we don't think it would be in our best interest to sell weapons to them.

We also don't sell weapons, typically, to people we think are untrustworthy. I think there is every evidence that Saudi Arabia can be put in that category. When you have direct evidence and when our own intelligence community has concluded that there is high confidence that the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia butchered a dissident with a bone saw in a consulate in a foreign country, you would think that would give us pause as to giving Saudi Arabia or selling Saudi Arabia more weapons.

But it is worse than that. We are not only selling Saudi Arabia offensive weapons, we are also talking about giving them nuclear technology. The nuclear technology, they say, is only for energy, but you have to wonder. A country that sits atop one of the largest oil reserves in the world is now saying ``Oh, we don't have enough fossil fuel. We need nuclear power''? There have been people who have gotten nuclear technology and then have moved on to nuclear weapons.

What could possibly be the worst thing to happen to the Middle East? It would be to have three powers there with nuclear weapons. We had Iran before. They now have the knowledge to enrich. They made an agreement not to enrich. They are still threatening to enrich uranium. What do you think will happen if Saudi Arabia gets nuclear technology and there is any rumor of their progressing on towards developing nuclear weapons? What will Iran do? Automatically, they will do the same thing.

It also happens in the conventional weapons arena. So every time we sell or give missiles to Saudi Arabia, what do you think Iran does? They have to either buy more or make more. It is an arms race. We are feeding both sides of an arms race.

But you will hear people in Washington say: But Iran--they are a malign influence. Well, yeah. So is Saudi Arabia. But what do we do when we have two powers that show tendencies toward evil and show tendencies toward acting in ways that are against our national interest? Do we just blindly give weapons to anybody who is opposed to Iran because Iran is a malign influence? Well, what about Saudi Arabia? They have spent $100 billion spreading this radical jihadism to other cultures; $100 billion around the world preaching hatred of Christians, hatred of Jews, hatred of Hindus. Yet we give them more weapons.

There is a madrasa supported by Saudi Arabia--that is a so-called religious school in Pakistan--and 80 percent of the boys who graduate from the school--because, of course, girls aren't allowed to go to school under this kind of religion--80 percent of the boys who graduate from the school fight in the Taliban against the United States. Why would we give weapons to a country that teaches hatred of our country and actually trains fighters to fight against our soldiers? What person in what insane world thinks it is a good idea to fund people who fundamentally don't like us? Why in the world do we keep doing this?

Last week, we voted on sending weapons to Qatar. Do you know who Qatar supplies weapons with? Hamas. I thought we were allies with Israel. But we fund Qatar, which sends missiles and weapons to Hamas, who then bombs Israel. Qatar also hosts fundraisers for ISIS. Remember ISIS--the ones chopping people's heads off? Why would we give weapons to countries that give weapons to our enemies?

In the Syrian civil war, we went in on the side of those who were opposed to Assad. Now, Assad is no saint, no Democrat, no Jeffersonian Democrat, no believer in freedom; yet the people on the other side-- most of them hate Israel. Most of them despise any rights for women. Most of them--many of them are allied with al-Qaida. Who is al-Qaida? The people who attacked us on 9/11. Al-Nusra, al-Qaida, ISIS--who do they get weapons from? Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

Even Hillary Clinton admitted this in one of the emails that were released. Hillary Clinton was talking to John Podesta by email, and she said: We have to do something about this. Saudi Arabia and Qatar are arming and providing logistical help to ISIS.

So why does it go on? Some would say: Because people make a big profit on this. This is a jobs program for the arms industry, and we have to make sure they make their profit.

I disagree. This is an industry that uniquely has to do with our national interests. It is uniquely paid for by the taxpayer. These weapons are owned by the taxpayer, and we should not sell them to people who are not our friends.

This is what the debate is about today. We will vote shortly on whether or not we should sell offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia.

What are they doing with the weapons? Well, they are bombing civilians in Yemen, for one. They are transferring some of the weapons in Yemen to al-Qaida. Al-Qaida and the larger umbrella group that attacked us on 9/11 are active. They are called AQAP in Yemen. There are news reports in the last week that Saudi Arabia is indiscriminantly giving arms to anybody who is opposed to the group they are fighting against, the Houthis.

Who supports the Houthis? The Iranians.

Is one side better than the other?

Are we so blind to the malign influence of Saudi Arabia that we give money and weapons to anybody regardless of what they do? You can chop up a dissident. You can cut a dissident up to pieces with a bone saw, and we will still give you weapons?

My goodness, I can't imagine. I do not think that people in this body who will continue to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia are listening to the people at home. I guarantee, if we asked the people at home, if we had a national poll and everybody got to give their opinion, how many people at home do you think are saying: Oh, well, they just chopped up a dissident--no big deal. Let's just keep sending them weapons. Oh, well, they are giving weapons to Hamas. Yes, you know, we don't really care. Or, well, they are bombing civilians.

The Saudis killed 150 people at a funeral procession--people marching at a funeral procession. They knew it was a funeral procession. This was no fog of war, no mistake. This was an intentional act to kill people at a funeral procession. There were 150 people killed and 450 wounded. About 1 year ago, they killed 40 schoolchildren on a schoolbus.

They are indiscriminately bombing civilians, and they are blockading Yemen, which is one of the poorest countries on the planet. Millions of people--some estimate between 14 and 17 million people--live on the edge of starvation because of this war. The Saudis are preventing food from coming in. They have blockaded Hodeida, which is one of the key ports where food needs to come in. Yemen imports 80 percent of their food. The Saudis are blockading them and people are starving, and we are allied with Saudis. We supply them with bombs that they drop on civilians and until the last few months we were refueling the very planes that were dropping the bombs.

People talk sometimes about, you know, a dream of peace in the Middle East. If you want to have a peace plan in the Middle East, people say: Well, it is Israel and Palestine who have to come to a peace agreement.

Do you know what the bigger problem is--an even bigger problem than that conundrum--which is a conundrum? It is figuring out how to have peace between Saudi Arabia and their allies and Iran. Everything around here is Iran, Iran, Iran, Iran. Do you know who spends the third-most amount of money on the military in the world? Saudi Arabia. First, it is the United States. We spend more than the next 10 countries combined. We spend more than all the rest of NATO combined, for that matter. Then, a distant second is China, and, then, there is Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia spends more on their military than Russia and more than most of our NATO allies. Yet people say: Oh, we have to give them more arms because Iran is a bad actor. What if they are both bad actors?

Currently, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikdoms around them spend 8 times more than Iran. I am not saying Iran is a great place or that the government is great. What I am saying is, when you have two bad actors, when you have two malign influences, do you think we always have to choose the lesser of two evils? Do we have to always look askance and say: Oh, whatever--you know, as long as we are doing something that is opposed to Iran.

One of our other so-called allies over there is Bahrain. We have a naval base there, and we say: It is important to have a naval base, and we have to look the other way. They have 4,000 political prisoners. Saudi Arabia actually imprisons people for political reasons, and they don't just kill them. They behead them and crucify them--I think, in that order. They put the bodies out for public display.

They executed a guy named Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, who was of a minority religion. The Saudis are Sunnis. This guy was a Shia religious person and spokesman. He was executed. His nephew is being held in prison and has been for several years now. He was 17 when he was arrested. His crime was sending a text message to encourage people to protest against the authoritarian regime of Saudi Arabia.

I think the problem is that some people come to the conclusion that arms are always good and we should never do anything to condition the sale of arms to behavior. Well, I am not for sending more arms there, period, because it is a cauldron always threatening to boil over.

Let's say you were someone who would say: Oh, no, we have to arm them. Perhaps we should condition arms on good behavior. Perhaps, if you are cutting up a dissident with a bone saw in a foreign country, maybe we should stop arms for a while to see if maybe you can get better people in the government or maybe to see if your ways will change.

Saudi Arabia said: Oh, we are doing it differently now. We are not going to fund radical jihadism around the world.

But they spent $100 billion infecting the world with the ideas of hatred of the West, hatred of Christians, hatred of Jews, and hatred of Hindus. There used to be a couple hundred of these schools in Pakistan. There is now said to be 20,000 schools in Pakistan. The Saudis support schools not just in Pakistan but throughout the world--in Indonesia and India and all over the Middle East. They support these schools that teach intolerance and hatred of the West. Yet we are one of their biggest arms suppliers. It makes utterly no sense, and it should be reconsidered.

We will have a chance to vote today, and the numbers are growing. When I first introduced a resolution to disapprove of arm sales to Saudi Arabia, I think I got 22 votes. We did it again a couple of months later, and I think we got in the forties. I think there is a chance today that we will get close to 60 votes.

We will have to get to 67 to overcome a Presidential veto. Look, I am a big fan of the President on many fronts, but on this someone has to stand up, even a Member of his own party and say: Arms sales are not jobs programs, and they should be conditioned on behavior, and we should not sell arms to countries that hate us.

As for these countries that burn our flag and chant ``Death to America,'' we shouldn't be arming them.

At one point in time, there were reports about ISIS. Remember the people who were beheading people in the desert over the last couple of years and spreading throughout the region? There were reports that they have $1 billion worth of Humvees. Some of them were captured, but some came because of indiscriminate arms. There are arms everywhere.

So when we had the Syrian civil war going on, all throughout the news media--public, private, everywhere--everyone was saying that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were giving arms to anybody, indiscriminantly giving arms to people. One of the groups that got arms and one of the groups that got anti-tank weapons--these are shoulder-launched missiles--said in a news report right after they got them: When we are done with Assad--they didn't talk about ISIS, and most of them didn't care about ISIS because they actually kind of agree with ISIS's religion--we are going after Israel next.

So we are arming people who are potential if not real enemies of Israel. We are arming people who are teaching hatred of the West, hatred of Christians, hatred of Hindus, and hatred of Jews. We are arming these people. Why are we doing that?

Let's say you don't agree with everything I have said, and you say: Well, maybe we should get them to behave better. Why don't you withhold arms for 6 months at the least?

Why don't we just stop for a while?

They have enough arms to blow up the Middle East 10 times over. Is there just no stopping? Is there no limitation to what we will do? Do we not believe that any of our arms sales should be conditioned on behavior?

This is a big deal and a big vote, and it is my hope that the American people will watch how people vote and decide: Is this who I want representing me? Do I want someone representing me who is selling arms to people who hate our country, who spend hundreds of billions of dollars on schools teaching hatred of our country? Do I want to have people representing me who continue to flood the Middle East with arms?

That is what this vote is about, and I hope the American public will pay attention to how people vote today and to which direction they want the country to go in.

We have had enough war. This is something I agree with the President on. We have had enough war. We have been at war too long in too many places.

We have been 19 years in Afghanistan, and to what end? I was for the initial purpose of getting those who attacked us on 9/11. I would have voted to go. But after 19 years, it is nation-building. We are spending $50 billion a year. We build roads, and they blow them up. We build schools, and they blow them up.

We have roads and schools crumbling in our country. We don't have an extra $50 billion to spend in Afghanistan. We are $1 trillion short this year. We are going to spend $4 trillion, and we are bringing in $1 trillion--not great economics, not great budget balancing on our part.

No. 1, we cannot afford to try to be everywhere all the time, and, No. 2, the money we are spending overseas is counterproductive.

We went into Iraq and toppled a dictator. What did we get? Chaos. In the chaos we get ISIS and other groups forming.

We went into Libya and toppled the dictator in Libya. What did we get? Chaos. It is so confusing in Libya that I am not even sure which side the U.S. Government is supporting. They were supporting the U.N.- sanctioned government and now they appear to be supporting military generals who are trying to overthrow that government.

One thing is for sure: The country of Qatar that we voted to send arms to last week is supporting the side opposite us. So we give arms to people who are directly involved in a civil war where we are involved on the other side of the civil war. To me, it seems utterly preposterous that we keep doing that. There is Qatar's support for the other side in Libya and their support for Hamas. They are letting ISIS and al-Qaida do fundraising in their country.

Maybe we need to take a break from the arms race in the Middle East.

I don't think that someone can make a practical or reasonable argument that there has been more peace since we sent more weapons over there. They have plenty of weapons to kill each other for another thousand years. They have been killing each other for 1,000 years. They have enough weapons to kill each other for another 1,000 years.

Maybe we don't need to be involved in every civil war in the world. Maybe we can't afford it, and maybe when we have gotten involved, we had the unintended consequences of actually making it worse.

People have this idea that when you topple a dictator, somehow the next person they elect is going to be Thomas Jefferson. Well, guess what. Every time we have toppled a dictator, the people they end up electing are not Thomas Jefferson. Sometimes in the elections we don't like whom they elected in the elections and people go back and topple them again.

So when Egypt actually had an election, they elected somebody from the Muslim Brotherhood. Many in the Middle East and many in our country didn't want him. So we helped to get rid of him, and now we have a military rule with no elections and with the idea that you can be detained without trial. People say: Well, it is stable. It is another military autocracy, but we are going to put up with it.

We need to rethink our approach to the Middle East. We need to rethink the approach that we need to arm one or both sides in every war. We need to think whether regime change is a good idea, and we need to look at the practical effects of our foreign policy and say: Are we safer somehow?

I think one universal truth is that we are usually poorer by the time we are done, because what we end up doing is spending good money after bad.

I will give you a couple of examples in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan we spent $90 million in a luxury hotel in downtown Kabul. You say: How does that $90 million hotel protect us? Well, it doesn't, but it is money. Money runs through all this. Somebody is getting rich, but not the American taxpayer.

The guy who built it, I think, was a Jordanian national, but he built a shell of a hotel. He took the $90 million. He got all the payment, and it was never built. It mostly doesn't have walls, and none of it was completed. It is now a danger because it sits up across from our embassy and snipers crawl up in the building.

So the thing is that we asked for $90 million, and we need more now because, apparently, we now need to tear it down because it is a danger to our embassy and our soldiers.

So if we could just get $200,000 more, they are going to spend another couple hundred thousand dollars tearing down a hotel that we asked you to build in the first place, which we had no business building whatsoever.

We built a gas station for them in Afghanistan, too. But because our purpose in the military is now sometimes to fight the enemy but also to fight climate change--you didn't know this, but part of the military's goal is climate change now--so we built them a gas station. But we want to reduce the carbon footprint. So we built a gas station that sells natural gas. Well, the problem was, No. 1, nobody in Afghanistan has a car. The average income is about $800. Almost nobody has a car, and no one has one that burns natural gas.

So what they did is that they had to give them credit cards and buy them cars that actually ran on natural gas.

We wanted to visit over there and the military said it was too dangerous to take us there. So we have no idea if it is even in operation at this point.

I say we need to rethink this, and I urge today a vote against selling more arms to Saudi Arabia.

Thank you.

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