Tuesday 31 July 2007


U.S. Arms Plan for Mideast Aims to Counter Iranian Power
By MARK MAZZETTI and HELENE COOPERPublished: July 31, 2007WASHINGTON, July 30

The Bush administration said Monday that its plan to provide billions of dollars in advanced weapons to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Israel over the next 10 years was intended in part to serve as a bulwark against Iran’s growing influence in the Middle East.
U.S. Set to Offer Huge Arms Deal to Saudi Arabia (July 28, 2007) The White House plan must overcome opposition from lawmakers who are skeptical that the weapons will have any effect in blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and who worry that a flood of new weapons could ignite a tinderbox in the region.
In closed briefings last week on Capitol Hill, participants in the sessions said, some lawmakers had asked pointed questions about why the White House was using the Iranian threat to justify the arms sales. They expressed doubt that the new weaponry, which includes satellite-guided bombs, missiles and new naval vessels, could deter Iran from proceeding with its nuclear program.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced the plans on Monday before she left for the Middle East to meet with officials from Egypt, Jordan and the Persian Gulf states, though details of the planned weapons sales were first reported over the weekend. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates also left Monday for a visit to the region.
The final package will be formally presented for Congressional approval in September, and for now many influential lawmakers appear to have adopted a wait-and-see approach. Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, and Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California, who lead the Congressional committees that will consider the proposal, indicated Monday that they would reserve judgment on the merits of the plan until September.
But signaling a possible battle between the White House and Congress, Mr. Lantos said lawmakers wanted assurances that the weapons package “include only defensive systems,” not weaponry that could be used by Arab states to attack Israel’s military.
Ms. Rice took pains to dispute the notion that the Bush administration was trying to buy Saudi cooperation on American policy initiatives in Iraq and Israel in exchange for the military package. Three times during a briefing with reporters aboard her plane en route to the Middle East, she said no quid pro quo was involved in the arms sale.
“We are working with these states to give a chance to the forces of moderation and reform,” she said on an overnight flight before a refueling stop in Shannon, Ireland.
Ms. Rice’s deputies and other administration officials have voiced complaints that Saudi Arabia is financing opponents of the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, and that the Saudis have been rejecting American pleas to be friendlier to the Maliki government. But Ms. Rice chose to strike a positive note in advance of her scheduled meeting on Tuesday night with King Abdullah in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, instead blaming Iran and Syria for trouble in Iraq.
“It’s very interesting that the Saudis, on the border issue with Iraq, have been very active on the entry of terrorists trying to cross into Iraq from Saudi Arabia,” she said. That was one reason, she said, that militants often entered through Syria.
Mr. Gates told reporters traveling with him that the trip with Ms. Rice was meant to convey “the importance we attach to reassuring our friends out here of our staying power.”
A senior Defense Department official on Mr. Gates’s plane said Mr. Gates also planned to encourage Saudi Arabia to enforce international sanctions meant to punish Iran for its nuclear activities.
R. Nicholas Burns, under secretary of state for political affairs, said Monday that a majority of the weapons systems intended for the Gulf states were defensive.
But some defense experts said any battle between Congress and the White House over the definition of “defensive” versus “offensive” weapons systems might be futile because the terms can be malleable.
“There is no bright-line distinction,” said John Pike, a weapons expert at GlobalSecurity.org, a research group. “They would be talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.”
The Bush administration plan already appears to have the blessing of Israel’s government, which has historically opposed American weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. On Sunday, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said at a cabinet meeting that Israelis “understand the need of the United States to support the Arab moderate states, and there is a need for a united front between the U.S. and us regarding Iran.”
Administration officials said that the nations receiving weapons under the plan had all voiced growing concern about Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon and its financial support for terrorism, and that the new weaponry would counterbalance Iran’s regional ambitions.
Mr. Burns said that under the plan American military aid for Israel would increase to $3 billion annually over 10 years, from $2.4 billion now. Mr. Burns said Egypt, another crucial Sunni Arab country under pressure from Washington to embrace Iraq’s Shiite-led government, would receive a total of $13 billion.
But Mr. Burns declined to provide specifics about the packages intended for Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations, saying those details were still being hammered out.
In the past, Israel has successfully lobbied the United States against selling AIM-9X missiles, used on jet fighters for aerial combat, to countries like Egypt out of fear that they could shift the military balance in the Middle East. A Congressional aide familiar with details of the Bush administration plans said AIM-9X missiles were part of the package planned for Egypt.
Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, and Helene Cooper from Washington and Shannon, Ireland.
=======US arms for Arab authoritarians - againBy Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - Just 25 months after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounced 60 years of US support for authoritarian governments in Arab world, she and Pentagon chief Robert Gates are on their way to the Middle East bearing arms and an uncannily familiar strategic vision to the same regimes.
Under the late president Ronald Reagan, it was called "strategic consensus" - the notion that you could coax the so-called "moderate" Arab states into a de facto coalition with Israel against
the region's perceived Soviet clients and a revolutionary Iran by plying them with sophisticated weaponry and renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.
Under President George W Bush, the strategic vision has still not been given a specific name but, apart from the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the basic elements appear to be eerily similar, if not identical.
Heralding her trip and the proposed transfer of some US$43 billion in new weaponry for Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Arab states on the Persian Gulf, Rice asserted on Monday, "This effort will bolster forces of moderation and support a broader strategy to counter the negative influences of al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.
"Further modernizing the Egyptian and Saudi Arabia armed forces and increasing interoperability will bolster our partners' resolve in confronting the threat of radicalism and cement their respective roles as regional leaders in the quest for Middle East peace and in ensuring Lebanon's freedom and independence," she said.
The trip follows last week's announcement by Bush that Rice will chair a regional conference some time this autumn as part of a new diplomatic push for an eventual "two-state solution" of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It will take both Gates and Rice to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the latter a particularly critical destination given the growing estrangement between Washington and Riyadh with respect to both Iraq and US efforts to break up a Palestinian unity government forged by King Abdullah.
Later, Rice will travel to Jerusalem and Ramallah to "continue discussions on the development of a political horizon with Israeli and Palestinian officials", while Gates heads for the smaller Gulf states, with which he reportedly intends to seek new access rights to military bases and extend older ones, as well as pursue new arms-sales agreements.
Under the arms-for-allies plan, the US would provide $13 billion in aid over 10 years - roughly the same amount that it has been getting for most of the past decade. While precise figures have not been released, State Department officials said Saudi Arabia and its allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council will be encouraged to buy some $20 billion in new arms, including satellite-guided bombs, missile defenses, and upgrades for their US-made fighter jets over the same period.
To dampen concerns by Israel and its supporters in Washington, the Bush administration is also proposing a 10-year, $30 billion package to preserve the Jewish state's military superiority - or "qualitative edge" - over its Arab neighbors. That would amount to a 25% increase in US military assistance to Israel over current levels.
While several lawmakers close to the so-called "Israel lobby" said this weekend they will try to block the proposed sale to Saudi Arabia, or at least condition it on a number of changes in Saudi policy, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert signaled his approval, noting in particular the importance of an Arab-Israeli coalition against Tehran.
"We understand the need of the United States to support the Arab moderates, and there is a need for a united front between the US and us regarding Iran," he said.
The proposed arms sales and aid to the "moderate" Arab states mark yet another step toward a renewed embrace of the Sunni Arab authoritarian regimes that the Bush administration and its neo-conservative backers had tried to distance themselves from in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and particularly after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
"For 60 years, my country - the United States - pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East," Rice declared in June 2005 at the American University in Cairo, in a widely noted speech that encouraged democracy activists across the region. "And we achieved neither. Now, we are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all people."
But since the election victory of Hamas in parliamentary elections in the Palestinian territories seven months later, and particularly since last year's Israel-Hezbollah war, which the US administration saw as evidence of Iran's expanding power, Washington has all but abandoned its democracy-promotion rhetoric - at least insofar as it applied to its regional allies - in essence returning to its 60-year-old preference for stability over democracy.
That it should now return to using large arms transfers as major means of ensuring stability highlights the degree to which the administration has abandoned its pro-democracy stance, according to critics.
"These exorbitant arms sales should be read as a last-ditch effort by the Bush administration to keep matters stable for the tyrannies of the region and to reward those who stood with him in his unending wars," said As'ad Abukhalil, an expert on Saudi Arabia based at California State University at Stanislaus.
What the administration wants from its Sunni allies, in exchange for these deals, according to Chris Toensing, editor of the Middle East Report, "is to build an anti-Iranian alliance [resembling] the early Reagan administration's attempt to find an anti-Soviet 'strategic consensus' among US allied Arab states and Israel. Then, as now, the Arab states' price is some semblance of pressure on Israel to make a comprehensive peace.
"The Bush administration is betting that the Arab states' fear of Iran is greater than their sensitivities on the Palestine and Iraq questions combined," he said. "Indeed, the Bush administration, with all its talk of transforming the Middle East, is reverting to usual US form: a patchwork policy of constant crisis management, all in the name of the 'stability' the neo-conservatives professed to hate.
"The major difference going ahead is that, thanks to the Bush administration, there are now two 'intractable' Middle East conflicts to manage instead of one," Toensing said.
Indeed, that Washington is now trying to forge a new strategic alliance against Iran in the face of Tehran's emergence as a major regional threat to US interests - largely because of the Bush administration's own miscalculations in Iraq - struck analyst Gary Sick as a "marvelous example of political jiu jitsu".
"Having inadvertently created a set of circumstances that ensured an increase in Iranian strength and bargaining power, that seriously frightened the US's erstwhile Sunni allies in the region, and that undermined US strength and credibility," said Sick, a Columbia University professor who was president Jimmy Carter's top Iran aide, "the US now proposes a new and improved regional political relationship to deal with the problem, and, incidentally, to distract attention from America's plight in Iraq while reviving America's position as the ultimate power in the region."
The major flaw in this strategy, according to Sick, however, may be the government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, who is supported by the US but is seen by Iraq's Sunni neighbors, particularly Saudi Arabia, as a pawn of Tehran.

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