Motion to Discharge

Floor Speech

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Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, I move to discharge S.J. Res. 31 from the Foreign Relations Committee.

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Mr. PAUL. Mr. President, the most common cause of famine and starvation is war. Saudi Arabia's air and naval blockade of Yemen has led to thousands and thousands of deaths in Yemen from lack of food and medicine. The United States should end all arms sales to the Saudis until they end their blockade of Yemen.

President Biden said he would change the Trump policy of supporting Saudi's war in Yemen, but it is not all that apparent that policy has changed.

Today, we challenge the Biden administration's sale of $650 million worth of arms, including air-to-air missiles in Yemen.

Just 2 months ago, the Biden administration approved $500 million worth of arms, including maintenance for attack helicopters that are used in Yemen.

Some want to differentiate offensive weapons from defensive weapons, but, really, even defensive weapons can be used to allow a country to absorb attacks in order to continue their offensive operations.

The real question is not an artificial designation of weapons as offensive or defensive but whether Congress is serious about using the leverage of arms sales or withholding arms sales to end the blockade in Yemen.

That the Biden administration continues to reward Saudi Arabia with weapons seems to indicate that President Biden is not really serious about withholding arms sale to end the war in Yemen.

Indeed, if this administration were serious about ending the Saudi blockade, they could do one thing, and this thing would end the war tomorrow, would end the blockade tomorrow. The Saudis, I think, would immediately stop the blockade if this administration would stop sending spare parts and stop fixing the planes.

Bruce Reidel of Brookings writes that ``the Saudi air force would be grounded in short order'' if we quit sending them spare parts, quit repairing their aircraft. We could stop this war if we really had the will to do it.

All America should be appalled at the humanitarian disaster caused by the Saudi blockade of Yemen. For years now, ships that would otherwise carry food, fuel, and medicine are turned away by the Saudi-led coalition, depriving the Yemeni people of the necessities to sustain civilization.

Yemen is one of the poorest countries on the planet. They have to import their food. The blockade is killing their children.

Saudi Arabia's intervention in the Yemeni civil war is a chilling example of the cruelty of warfare by starvation. According to the United Nations, in Yemen 5 million people are one step away from succumbing to famine and disease, and 10 million more are right behind them.

We can start the process of ending this crisis by enacting this resolution of disapproval.

The children of Yemen who survive Saudi's barbaric blockade will inevitably tell their sons and daughters of the horrors of their youth, and those sons and daughters will tell their sons and daughters. Through oral tradition, a thousand generation of Yemenis will know of the Crown Prince's ruthlessness, and they will also know that it was the Americans who sold the weapons to wage this murderous campaign.

The reports from Yemen are literally a nightmare. The Washington Post reported recently of a 3-year-old boy who cannot walk or speak, who weighs 10 pounds--a 3-year-old boy who weighs 10 pounds. The images are grotesque. His face is ``skeletal.'' His arms and legs are as ``thin as twigs.'' He weighs 10 pounds. His father says that he sometimes goes days without any food.

And we are complicit. We are arming the Saudis and allowing this to happen. Offensive, defensive--they shouldn't get any of our weapons. We should stop selling them any weapons until they stop starving the country of Yemen.

The New York Times tells the story of a mother who, after 3 days of failing to get a ride, carried her 8-month-old while walking 2 hours to reach medics to treat her child's acute malnutrition. But even after a week of treatment with enriched formula, the boy still lay motionless on his hospital bed.

Tens of thousands of children have already died from disease and malnutrition from this war, and we should not be complicit. We should not be aiding the Saudis.

International aid agencies, which also have to fight the Saudi blockade to provide assistance, put it this way:

The people of Yemen are not starving. They are being starved.

The Saudi's siege of Yemen is made possible because of American weaponry. The arsenal provided by the United States includes billions of dollars' worth of military aircraft and thousands of air-to-ground munitions.

Only weeks ago, the Biden administration approved a new $650 million sale of 280 advanced medium air-to-air missiles and 596 missile launchers. As painful as it is to admit, the United States is an accessory to this Saudi savagery.

President Biden says the latest sale is merely to help defend Saudi territorial integrity, but the Commander in Chief's words do not match Saudi actions. According to William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Program for the Center for International Policy, ``the air blockade is enforced by a threat to shoot down any aircraft, military or civilian, that enters Yemeni air space. . . . The provision of air- to-air missiles gives further credibility to this threat, dissuading any government or aid group from bringing in crucial medicines or flying patients in and out of Yemen.

These weapons are not purely defensive. They are used as a threat to any aircraft that brings aid into Yemen, and they are part of the blockade. They are part of the problem, and it is our leverage.

These weapons belong to the American people. They may be made by private companies, but they are owned by the American people because we commission these weapons, and we should not give them to countries that are starving children and committing, essentially, genocide in Yemen.

In other words, no weapon is exclusively defensive, and continuing arms sales means continued death and destruction in Yemen.

We must end America's complicity in Saudi Arabia's war on the Yemeni people. If you believe in humanitarianism, if you believe America is a force for good that serves as a model for other nations to emulate, if you believe that the crushing of the Yemeni people must be stopped, then you must vote for this resolution of disapproval.

We have a chance to tell the Crown Prince that American arms sales will end until he gives up his starvation campaign. We can end the Saudi blockade and bring relief to the long-suffering people of Yemen.

Should we fail to seize this opportunity, history will not let us forget that America, the last best hope for humanity, failed to protect defenseless civilians from the cruelty of a criminal regime.

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