In spite of repeated incidents of mass casualties, both countries have sought to press ahead with sales of their weaponry

This article is more than 11 months old

This article is more than 11 months old

Selling arms to Saudi Arabia has been a hard drug for western governments to give up.

Since entering the Yemen conflict in 2015 at the end of a coalition of Gulf monarchies, the kingdom has become the world’s biggest weapons importer. In 2018 alone it spent nearly $70bn on arms, almost 9% of its GDP.

The US is by far the biggest supplier, with about 70% of the market between 2014 and 2018, with the UK the second biggest, accounting for about a tenth of total Saudi purchases.

There has been no shortage of evidence that western-supplied weaponry has been used to inflict mass civilian casualties.

In a study of 27 attacks involving the deaths of Yemeni civilians published by Stanford Law School in March, 25 involved the use of a US weapon while UK weapons were used in five cases.

The weapon dropped on a school bus killing 40 children in August 2018 was a US-made precision-guided Paveway bomb.

In spite of repeated incidents of mass casualties, both countries have sought to press ahead with sales of their most sophisticated and expensive weaponry, while France has been trying to regain a market share.

In June, the UK court of appeal ruled such sales unlawful, saying government ministers, including the current prime minister, Boris Johnson, had signed off on arms exports to Saudi without properly assessing the risk to civilians.

Since then, the UK undertook to grant no further arms export licenses for Saudi sales, but had to apologise earlier this month for two breaches it said were “inadvertent”.

In April this year, Congress made a bid to limit US involvement in the Yemen war. The gruesome murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018 deepened the congressional unease over the civilian death toll, which showed no signs of abating, despite administration promises that constant improvements in targeting were being made with US help.

In April, a bipartisan bill was agreed by the House of Representatives and Senate to end US participation in the Yemen war, marking the first time Congress had invoked the 1973 War Powers Resolution to send a bill to the White House, calling on the president to take the US out of conflict. Trump vetoed the bill and its supporters failed to muster the two-thirds majority necessary to override it.