More arms to the Saudis - is this really a good idea?

Kolonial-Krieger Spende (Saving for the Colonial Fighters): German poster from the First World War

I certainly understand that foreign policy can be a real tangle. Only rarely are issues clear-cut in international disputes. And their resolution involves some sort of compromises.

I posted yesterday about Gary Sick's analysis of the complicated arms deals involving Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt (plus five other Arab countries). As tangled as that round of deals is, Sick finds hope in it that it can help avoid war with Iran during the Cheney-Bush administration's remaining months in office.

William Arkin, who's always on the lookout for a chance to be contrarian, has posted about this on his Early Warning blog, in A New Mideast Military Alliance? 07/31/07 and Middle East Alliance 2.0 02/01/07. He thinks it looks a lot like an attempt to set up Iran as a common enemy for everyone involved. But that it could more likely wind up being a way to ignore "the roots of instability that exist in countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia".

Arkin speculates that the Cheney-Bush administration sees the new semi-official alliance of which these deals are a part as serving two purposes: making it more difficult for the next President to extract the US from the Iraq War and legitimizing war with Iran.

He describes the line-up:

The new military alliance even has a temporary name: GCC+2. Yesterday, [Secretary of State Condozeeza] Rice and [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates met with the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council of six nations: Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates - plus Egypt and Jordan.

Arkin thinks the administration envisions this as a kind of Middle East NATO.

This is one more development that Congress should really be on top of, and should be surfacing the issues involved. Is it worth even saying that it would be desirable for our "press corps" to pay more attention to it? I didn't think so.

Meanwhile, Robert Scheer at his Truthdig.com Web site, is taking a dimmer view of the project in Bush Keeps Israel Close, Saudi Arabia Closer 07/31/07. It's refreshing to see someone use the descriptive phrase, "war profiteers". Because yes, Virginia, there are such things. He writes:

Go figure: From the White House comes the news that self-styled anti-terrorism crusader George Bush wants to sell $20 billion in high-tech military equipment to Saudi Arabia, the source of most of the financing, and 15 of the 19 hijackers, for the Sept. 11th terrorist attacks on the United States. The justification can’t be that this is yet another boondoggle for the military-industrial complex—the big winner in the war on terror—so we are told instead that the Sunni-dominated Saudi kingdom needs this weaponry to withstand a future challenge from those dastardly Shiite fellows in Iran.

Yes, the very same extremists whose surrogates are now, as a consequence of the U.S. invasion, pretending to be the indigenous government of Iraq. Recall that the Shiite militants who rule Tehran, along with the Sunni nuts around Osama bin Laden, were both the sworn enemy of Saddam Hussein. Now both of those forces are the main players, according to the Bush administration, vying for power in "liberated" Iraq, and our president is in the inane position of playing one group of fanatics against the other in the name of securing Iraq as a democratic haven.

That's a pretty good definition of how screwy the arrangement looks on its face. And I agree with his conclusion:

What a deal! The Saudis pony up billions in cash, American taxpayers come up with an amount more than twice as high to keep the Israelis and Egyptians happy, and U.S. war profiteers, Bush’s most reliable core constituency group, make out like bandits. Hey, it’s only money, and the only real cost might be to folks who get caught in the line of fire of those weapons in wars to come for generations. But not to worry, most of them don’t vote in U.S. elections anyway. (my emphasis)

I have another issue with this, which Scheer's article touches on but doesn't address directly. We know that Saudi Arabia is aiding Sunni rebels fighting the pro-American and pro-Iranian government which we support in Baghdad. Some of the "foreign fighters" that the administration now prefers to call just "Al Qa'ida" are apparently infiltrating from Saudi Arabia. At any rate, as Scheer observes, "half of the foreign suicide bombers [in Iraq] have been Saudi nationals".

Even if "half" is a bit of an uncertain estimate, it brings up an important point. Scheer puts it in terms of the arms sales rewarding Saudi refusal to cooperate with the US adequately on anti-terrorism issues.

But apart from the uncertain application of diplomatic incentives involved, isn't there something wrong with supplying additional weapons, and more high-tech weapons, to a country that is directly aiding groups fighting Americans in Iraq? Are there any structred quid pro quo requirements placed on this with the Saudis? Will they be required to achieve any "benchmarks"? Will those benchmarks be taken more seriously than the one the Iraqi government is failing to meet?

I'm not getting a warm and fuzzy feeling about this whole thing.

(If anyone is wondering what the illustration at the top has to do exactly with the topic of this post, well, it's not very exact. It's mainly because I just stumbled onto the Library of Congress' online collection of German First World War posters. The connection, though, is the money for colonial wars part, in this case a potential war against Iran.)

Tags: iraq war, saudi arabia