So why wasn't there an embargo placed on them too?

That's a complicated question to some extent, but also a very simple one.

Sam Perlow Freeman of the Campaign Against Arms Trade in the UK has done some research that shows that one of the best predictors of whether a country will continue getting weapons at a time of conflict is whether there's a previously established arms supply relationship with the suppliers.

And Obviously, that's something that we are seeing to an absolutely extreme degree with Israel today.

But it's something that we were seeing at the time with Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

So countries actually... were at various points trying to push forward restrictions on weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.

But the key suppliers, those with the most entrenched relationships, were really standing in the way of that.

Ruth, can you start by helping us imagine what would need to change to prevent weapons from flowing to perpetrators of atrocities?

and we're going to talk a lot more about yemen and gaza in subsequent episodes But Ruth, can you give us a preview of what happens when we look at the conflict in Yemen through the lens of the arms trade? What do we see that's different?

Yeah, so I should point out that this is a book not about Yemen in particular.

It's a book about Western foreign policy.

And I think your question is phrased in the exact right way in the sense of, yes, we are learning something about Western foreign policy by looking at their actions towards Yemen rather than learning something necessarily about Yemen.

So the version of the arms trade that we're analyzing when we are looking at Yemen and also when we're looking at Palestine to some extent is really a problem of capitalism and a problem of imperialism at the end of the day.

These systems really structure whose lives are valued, whose interests are being protected and who is marked at the end of the day as disposable.

And I think One of the things that we show in the book is how relationships with these so-called allies that the West has made in the Middle East, that center, arms, oil, money, intelligence, actually prevent us from... preventing our own complicity in really grave crimes or even our own commission of really grave crimes.

It's gone the opposite way.