President Bush is proposing a multibillion dollar arms sale to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Gulf States. The sales include JDAMs and other advanced weaponry that can seriously harm Israel’s current advantage against the Muslim world.
Other salves to Israel in light of the proposed deal include asking the Saudis to accept restrictions on the range, size and location of the satellite-guided bombs, the Times said. The Pentagon is also asking for a commitment not to store the weapons at air bases close to Israeli territory, it added.
There’s no way that these sophisticated weapons could possibly end up in the hands of people wishing Israel and America ill, is there?
Now Condoleeza Rice says really, it’s okay, it’s all in our best interests and to prevent Iran from taking over the Gulf.
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.
[…] 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.
Many members of Congress are not happy.
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.
[…] 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.
And Olmert is a fool.
Let’s take a look at another arms deal that was made to prop up Fatah over the years, and what happened to it in only the last couple of months.
When the Islamist group Hamas conquered the Gaza Strip in June it seized an intelligence-and-military infrastructure created with U.S. help by the security chiefs of the Palestinian territory’s former ruler.
According to current and former Israeli intelligence officials, former U.S. intelligence personnel and Palestinian officials, Hamas has increased its inventory of arms since the takeover of Gaza and picked up technical expertise — such as espionage techniques — that could assist the group in its fight against Israel or Washington’s Palestinian allies, the Fatah movement founded by Yasser Arafat.
Hamas leaders say they acquired thousands of paper files, computer records, videos, photographs and audio recordings containing valuable and potentially embarrassing intelligence information gathered by Fatah. For more than a decade, Fatah operated a vast intelligence network in Gaza established under the tutelage of the Central Intelligence Agency.
[…] But a number of former U.S. intelligence officials, including some who have worked closely with the Palestinians, said there was ample reason to worry that Hamas has acquired access to important spying technology as well as intelligence information that could be helpful to Hamas in countering Israeli and U.S. efforts against the group.
Close ties between Hamas and the governments of Iran and Syria also mean that intelligence-and-spying techniques could be shared with the main Middle East rivals of the Bush administration. As the White House prepares to lead an international effort to bolster Fatah’s security apparatus in the West Bank, the losses in Gaza stand as an example of how efforts to help Fatah can backfire.
[…] “The United States invested a lot of effort in setting up this system in Gaza — construction, equipment, training… filings, the logistics, the transportation. It was a big operation, and it’s now in the hands of the other side,” said Efraim Halevy, who formerly headed both the Mossad, which is Israel’s foreign-intelligence agency, and Israel’s National Security Council. Mr. Halevy said, however, that he didn’t want to overemphasize the value of Hamas’s potential intelligence gains.
And now let’s look at the sales of advanced equipment to the Saudis in another way: How close are the Islamists to the security services of the countries that will be receiving the JDAMs? How many members of the army are affiliated with al Qaeda and its network of terrorist groups, salivating over the chance to get the most sophisticated missiles available? What will JDAMs be used for in the hands of terrorists? Gee, let’s think.
There is simply no way this ends well. We are arming our enemies, and with our own weapons, no less.
1. The Saudi armed forces are so incompetent they cannot use such advanced weaponry effectively. We’ve been selling them high-tech stuff for years, and the result is that when they are threatened by some other power (remember Iraq in 1990) they still cannot defend themselves and need us to bail them out.
2. These weapons will be used against Israel eventually. They may even be used against us eventually.
3. The only way to safeguard against Iran is to overthrow the Pharaohs of Tehran. Anything short of that is futile.
4. No quid pro quo? Why the hell not? If we are going to sell stuff like this to Saudi, we should say “You drop all your support of terrorists, mosques, cultural centers, madrassas, and other sources of terrorist incitement and recruitment abroad, kill all the terrorists in Saudi, and get rid of their supporters there among your upper classes and armed forces. Stop everything you are doing that is inimical to the USA. Otherwise, no sale.” Do these Saudi clowns think they are doing us a favor by fighting those terrorists who want to destroy the Saudi government and replace the Princes with themselves?
4. No quid pro quo? Why the hell not?
Because we hold very little if any sway over the Fraudis. If they don’t buy JDAMs and warplanes from the US, they can buy them from the Russians, or French, or the Chinese.
If they DO buy American, at least the US will then have the keys to the magic maintenance programs that necessarily comes with the sophisticated weapons systems in the proposed deal. The idea is that if they don’t play nice, we let their expensive toys rot in the desert.
I keep hoping that the engineers at Boeing can come up with a JDAM GPS receiver that is hard-coded not to operate anywhere near Israel, rendering them essentially useless as smart weapons at any GPS coordinates in Israeli territory. For all we know they have already done this.
Arming the Saudis and the Egyptians hoping they will use these weapons to defend themselves from our common enemies is futile. They aren’t capable of fighting that well, however well we arm them, and they haven’t the will to do so anyway. All they are interested in is eventually harming Israel.
If we can’t persuade them to show any change in bad behavior before they receive the weapons, why would we think they would reform afterwards?
Let thewm buy the stuff form the others. Then we can bribe some Saudi officers (they’re Arabs after all) to give us the technical details and we will know as much about the things as the guys who made them. If we sell them stuff that’s what Russia, China and France will do, to the detriment of our security.
Our foreign policy is being run by the same people who advise Lindsay Lohan and Brittany Spears.
At least they’ve gone into rehab. For pity’s sake, send the CIA and Foggy Bottom into rehab.
There’s an old joke about the CIA, actually dating to its predecessor the OSS in WWII. The CIA is a very clever operation but our enemies are on to it: it’s a cover story for a real intelligence operation.
That joke has seemed less and less funny as the years go by.