President Trump’s made some more controversial comments this week, this time in a statement downplaying the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which the intelligence community said likely came at the behest of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Instead, he emphasized that the United States would maintain its business relationship with Saudi Arabia, including the importance of KSA’s oil supply and their desire to purchase weapons from the United States.

President Trump’s made some more controversial comments this week, this time in a statement downplaying the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which the intelligence community said likely came at the behest of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Instead, he emphasized that the United States would maintain its business relationship with Saudi Arabia, including the importance of KSA’s oil supply and their desire to purchase weapons from the United States.

I’ve seen a lot of public criticism of these comments, and rightfully so, but they seemed to focus primarily on Trump’s willingness to overlook the ability of a head of state to order a murder of a single person. However, I wanted to focus on a bigger problem, which is the cold calculation of the desire to profit from the sale of weapons and military equipment. He wrote:  

After my heavily negotiated trip to Saudi Arabia last year, the Kingdom agreed to spend and invest $450 billion in the United States. This is a record amount of money. It will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, tremendous economic development, and much additional wealth for the United States. Of the $450 billion, $110 billion will be spent on the purchase of military equipment from Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and many other great U.S. defense contractors. If we foolishly cancel these contracts, Russia and China would be the enormous beneficiaries – and very happy to acquire all of this newfound business. It would be a wonderful gift to them directly from the United States!

I’m not that naive. I understand that the sale of military equipment is a business. In this case however, the crass prioritization of profit is happening at the very same time that civilians of Yemen are dying by the droves, to a large extent from weapons sold by the U.S. to Saudi Arabia. An estimated 85,000 Yemeni children may have starved to death as a result of the war (so far), with the wider population on the brink of famine. It is a pattern of war that civilians consistently bear the brunt of it all, dying at a higher rate than combatants.

It seems to me that the celebration of military contracts worth billions of dollars while the very source of that profit inflicts incalculable suffering on actual lives is extremely callous and obscene. The emphasis on the injustice of letting people get away with Khashoggi’s murder is well-placed. But I think there could be much more emphasis in our public discourse that American companies are profiting by inflicting pain and death on innocent people. It is dirty money.