WASHINGTON - This week, coinciding with
President George W Bush's two-day trip to Saudi
Arabia, the Bush administration is expected to
notify Congress about an arms package for Saudi
Arabia.
The sale is part of an overall
package that was announced at the end of July
2007; a series of arms deals worth at least US$20
billion to Saudi Arabia and five other Persian
Gulf states, as well as new 10-year military and
economic aid packages to Israel and
Egypt.
Speaking to
the press aboard Air Force One on Monday, while en
route to Saudi Arabia, National Security Advisor
Steve Hadley said, "These are not new
announcements. This is the implementation of the
announcement that was made months ago. Pretty big
package, a lot of pieces. As these pieces get
readied and worked out between the two parties,
they can then get notified on the Hill."
Later that day, the US State Department
announced it had initiated the formal 30-day
congressional notification process for the
proposed sale of 900 Joint Direct Attack Munitions
(JDAM) to Saudi Arabia. According to State
Department spokesman Sean McCormack, the best
estimate of the cost for those is about $120
million.
This was the sixth formally
announced sale of the overall Gulf Security
Dialogue package. The others are two proposed
sales to the United Arab Emirates - a Patriot
missile system and an E2C airborne early warning
system support; one to Kuwait for Patriot Missile
System upgrades; and two others to Saudi Arabia
for some targeting pods and Airborne Warning and
Control System upgrades. Together, the value of
these sales is about $11.5 billion.
Last
month, the State Department said it would delay
the notification until after Congress comes back
into session. Thus, the announcement comes a day
before the House of Representatives returns to
work and more than a week before senators return
to Washington.
The official announcement
will kick off a 30-day review period during which
lawmakers could move to block the sale. Although
the new House session does not officially begin
until January 15 and senators do not return until
January 22, Senate Democrats have been briefly
opening and closing the body each day during its
holiday break, meaning the Upper House remains
technically at work; so in actuality, the Senate
would have only about three weeks to review the
proposed sale.
Congress can block major
arms sales if both chambers pass a joint
resolution of disapproval. The measure would then
require the president's signature, effectively
meaning that Congress would need two-thirds of
both the House and Senate to override a
presidential veto. At best, such a resolution may
pressure the administration to reduce the size of
the package. In 1986, for example, such a threat
figured in persuading the Ronald Reagan
administration to cut back an arms package to
Saudi Arabia. But the sale ultimately went
through, despite heavy opposition from Israel and
its allies in Congress.
When the overall
package was announced last summer, it was widely
seen as a move to shore up allies in the Middle
East and counter Iran's rising influence, and to
provide justification for increased military
assistance to Israel. Since then the announcement
has initiated a process and debate that has been
long, but not that controversial.
Even by
the standard of past arms sales to the Middle East
and Persian Gulf, traditionally one of the world's
largest arms-buying regions, these are major arms
transfers with the potential to significantly
affect the regional strategic balance.
One
of the more notable aspects is that the Bush
administration plans to sell advanced
satellite-guided bombs, such as the JDAM, which
the United States has never before sold to Saudi
Arabia, fighter aircraft upgrades, and new naval
vessels to six Gulf Cooperation Council countries,
including Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar,
Bahrain and Oman.
Reportedly, the Pentagon
asked the Saudis to accept restrictions on the
range, size and location of the satellite-guided
bombs, including a commitment not to store the
weapons at air bases located near Israeli
territory
In what some observers view as a
leak designed to embarrass the United States, on
Sunday senior Israeli security officials announced
that the smart bombs the Saudis will be getting
aren't as smart as the ones the Israelis will
receive.
According to the JDAM
manufacturer, Boeing Co, recent enhancements to
the kits include laser navigators and glide wings
that allow jets to drop the munitions from a
distance of more than 64 kilometers from the
target.
Israel has had JDAMs since 1990
and used them extensively in its 2006 war against
Iranian-backed Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon.
Saudi Arabia, of course, is not lacking
for weaponry. Although its status as a weapons
buyer in the Persian Gulf is not at the
extraordinarily high levels of the late 1980s and
early 1990s, it remains, in the most recent
four-year period, the largest importer of defense
technology in the Near East. For the period
2002-2005, Saudi Arabia's total arms agreements
were $8.9 billion in current dollars, making it
the leading Near East arms purchaser.
But
while Saudi Arabia has been a huge buyer of
weapons over the years its ability to integrate
them into its military has been problematic. A
report by the Washington-based Center for
Strategic and International Studies found:
Like most Gulf countries, it often
focused on buying the most effective or advanced
system, and paid little attention to the
practical problems of integrating weapons from
different suppliers into overall force
structures that minimized the problems in
operating systems designed by different
countries, the maintenance problems involved,
and the difficulties in supplying and sustaining
systems with different maintenance and
ammunition needs in combat.
It is far
from clear that Saudi Arabia has overcome those
problems. William Arkin, a well-known military
affairs analyst, previously wrote:
The Saudi military is even less
dangerous than the gang who couldn't shoot
straight. After gazillions in arms sales during
the heyday of oil, when Iraq invaded Kuwait in
1990, Saudi Arabia demonstrated that it was not
capable, even with its advanced
American-supplied military, of defending its
country. When Desert Storm unfolded in 1991, the
Saudi military was well shielded behind the
American armed forces: Saudi ground forces were
given a sector to operate in where they wouldn't
get in the way. Through terrorist attacks in the
mid-1990s and the rise of terrorism, the Saudi
"military" proved unable to protect itself, let
alone the country.
But Arkin noted
one danger from the deal:
What comes with the deal, though, is
far more subtle trouble: Saudi Arabia has
demonstrated over decades that it has no
interest in building up its own high-tech arms
capabilities. American contractors will train,
maintain and even operate the new Saudi
equipment. American military personnel will
follow. We will buy nothing in terms of
security, and we will just put our own people in
danger. But most important, we will once again
renew the cycle of American penetration into the
heart of Islam, one of Osama bin Laden's
original and most compelling rallying points.
That's why the Saudi deal is so dangerous.
The proposed sale to Saudi Arabia,
and other Persian Gulf states, is noteworthy on a
number of counts.
The sale to Saudi Arabia is being backed by
the Israeli government and its supporters in
Washington, who have traditionally opposed major
weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.
Despite the fact that Saudi Arabia and the
other Gulf states to which the US administration
will sell arms are said to not pose a military
threat to Israel, the US has promised Israel $30.4
billion in military aid over the next decade, a
significant increase over the approximately $23
billion Israel has received in the past 10 years.
The deal is being sold on the basis that it is
needed to counter the threat of Iran, though the
exact nature of that threat or how these US
weapons transfers will counter it is never spelled
out. Moreover, at the same time, the US is seeking
Iran's help in bringing stability to Iraq. As
William Hartung of the New America Foundation's
Arms and Security Project wrote:
Threatening Iran with military
strikes and arms sales to potential adversaries
is more likely to spur Tehran to add to its own
arsenal while being less open to talks on its
nuclear program. If the Bush administration is
looking for a new designated enemy to stand in
for the late Saddam Hussein, this approach will
work just fine. But if it wants to solve the
security problems of the region, it would be
hard to come up with a more counterproductive
policy.
The US administration's initiative will not be
an easy sell within the region at a time when many
Arab leaders view the US's stated goals of both
supporting Iraq and deterring Tehran as being at
odds with one another.
Arguably the biggest irony of all,
approximately two-and-a-half years after Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice denounced 60 years of US
support for authoritarian governments in the Arab
world, the US is reverting to type in the Near
East by peddling arms and a familiar strategic
vision to the same regimes.
One might view
this as the triumph of hope over reality; given
that the US has had little success in the past in
using arms sales to buy leverage in the region.
And unlike some past sales, no conditions are
attached. In fact, when Rice visited the Middle
East last July, she insisted that the Bush
administration had not imposed demands on its
allies in exchange for the arms and aid deals.
"This isn't an issue of quid pro quo," Rice
told reporters. "We are working with these states
to fight back extremism."
And with no
strings attached to the assistance - no democratic
reforms, human-rights conditions or peace-making
obligations - the arms sales do nothing to change
the behavior of the authoritarian regimes in the
region.
David Isenberg is an
analyst in national and international security
affairs, sento@earthlink.net. He is also a member
of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy,
an adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute,
contributor to the Straus Military Reform Project,
a research fellow at the Independent Institute,
and a US Navy veteran. The views expressed are his
own.
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