By law, Saudi Arabia and the UAE must both be charged for the refueling of their warplanes by American tanker aircraft, in part because to do otherwise is to put the United States in the position of directly funding a foreign war in which it is not engaged by a formal declaration of Congress. Most troubling in the report by the Atlantic is that it is not that the Trump administration has forgotten to charge the Saudis and Emiratis altogether, nominally the sort of gross error that might result from a bureaucratic snafu, but that Trump’s Department of Defense has in fact charged the Saudis and
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